Cooking Steaks Right: Thick vs Thin and Thermal Mass

Thermodynamics for carnivores

If you want to cook a steak correctly, a lot of things have to go right. If you want to cook a steak incorrectly, you only need one thing to go very wrong. And when it comes to steak cookery, the thing that often goes wrong is carryover cooking, especially in regards to searing.

There are so many factors at play, that we decided to do some testing to show how some of the variables affect the results. In particular, we were concerned with steak thickness and its effect on steak doneness. Thickness is correlated with thermal mass.

Thermal mass is, in essence, mass. But more than that, it’s mass plus geometry, which is to say that both the size and the shape of a piece of food affect how it will react to heat. A two-pound ribeye that is three inches thick will respond to heat much differently than two pounds of thin skirt steak, about a half-inch thick, laid out on a grill.

But how does that thermal mass influence how the steaks cook? It does a lot. We reverse seared a few steaks (and more off-screen that we used to experiment on) to find out how thermal mass works both against us and for us in our search for perfect steaks. Using RFX MEAT^® and RFX GATEWAY^® was key to the success of this cook because it allowed us to go from the low heat of the initial cook right onto the grill, where the flare-ups were no problem for the end of the probe.

Watch the video and learn more about how thermal mass and carryover cooking work so that you can take better control of your steak doneness from now on!