There is nothing as delicious as a perfectly cooked, juicy steak. After you select it, prepare it, season it, and grill it, you need to rest it before you serve it. You may be ready to serve the steak, but your dinner guest is late or something else got in the way.
Whatever the case is, you need to keep a steak warm properly or all your hard work could be for naught.
How Steak Cooks
It is important to understand how a steak cooks so that you understand what you can and cannot do to keep it warm. When you place your steak on the grill or in the oven, it heats from the outside to the inside.
As areas of the steak are heated, juices are released, and they travel to the center where it is cooler. If you eat the steak as soon as it is cooked, the juices won’t have time to make their way back through the entire steak. For this reason, it is important to rest the steak.
How to Rest the Steak
After your steak is finished cooking, it is important to let it rest between five and seven minutes. You can rest it on a wire rack, on a cutting board with foil tented over it, or on a plate, but do not wrap it up. When you wrap a cooked steak, the heat inside will cause it to continue to cook, which could result in overcooked steak that loses all of its juiciness.
You are resting the steak to allow it to become cool enough that the juices flow back through the steak to the outer edges so that every bite is juicy and tender. This means that once your steak is cooked, you have five to seven minutes available before you need to worry about keeping it warm.
How to Keep the Steak Warm
If you have rested the steak and still aren’t ready to eat it, you will need to keep it warm. The first thing you can do is use a warm plate. This will keep the steak warm without cooking it further. You can take aluminum foil and tent the steak to prevent it from cooling. Make sure that you do not wrap the steak in foil as it will cook and dry out.
If you have a plate cover, you can place it over the warm plate. This will also keep your steak warm without cooking it. If you are not able to warm your plate, you can place the steak on a rack in the oven and keep the heat very low.
However, this will cook the steak, so you won’t want to leave it there very long. If you choose this method, you should undercook the steaks a little bit before you let them sit on the rack.
Steak gets its delicious flavor from its juices, and the key to cooking it is to heat it evenly for just the right amount of time. When the steak is heated, the juices travel to the center, and they need to cool before they can travel back throughout the steak.
If you want to keep your steak warm, the best way is to use a warmed plate with a tented piece of foil, but you want to serve steak as soon as it is rested and ready.
Ben has a bachelor’s degree in construction engineering. When not constructing or remodeling X-Ray Rooms, Cardiovascular Labs, and Pharmacies, you can find him at home with wife and two daughters. Outside of family, He loves grilling and barbequing on his Big Green Egg and Blackstone Griddle, as well as working on projects around the house.
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