Reverse sear: a better and easier way to roast beef

Forerib cooked by the reverse sear method.
Notice the cutting board: no leaking juices. With this method, the juices stay in the meat.
This was a 4kg joint - our 2014 Christmas meal - that took 9 hours at 60°C and then 10 minutes at 260°C.

I and most other people who eat at the restaurant like their beef roasted to a medium rare: pink but not 'bloody' (it's not blood but that's for another post). I used to follow the old, tested method: sear the meat in a hot pan and then transfer to a hot oven to roast. No longer. And I urge you to change. Your family and friends will love you for it. You will love the fact that you never again overcook the Sunday joint.

That's not a bad looking piece of beef above BUT I wanted medium pink and at least a third is a well done grey. There is a way to cook meat that ensures all the meat done the same. It's called the reverse sear method.

If you think about how we cook meat, it hasn't really changed since we discovered fire. We place flesh close to heat. Nothing wrong with this, the result can be a delicious brown joint with a flavoursome, charred crust and melting meat. The major issue with fire was temperature. There was just one: burny hot. The only way of controlling the temperature was to put some distance between foodstuff and fire. Leave it too close to the fire, or for too long and voila: briquette.

What's happened in the intervening years between Prometheus and me is the development of temperature control. The internal of medium roast beef should only be about 55 - 60°C so why put it in a 180°C oven? Why not use the lower temperature technologies? The answer is: tradition and time. Let's take these in order.

Tradition. It's how we've always done it! Cooking is prone to the this-is-how-granny-did-it syndrome. There are many, many kitchen myths still knocking about, despite the best efforts of Harold McGee and more recently Heston Blumenthal. Of course few want to take the time and expense to experiment - people cook to eat - so bad and/or unnecessary practices are perpetuated. McGee's book was one of the first to challenge kitchen lore and he found many of the orthodoxies wanting.

There's a wonderful, erudite website called Serious Eats that regularly test cooking methods and presumptions. These are the people who poach eggs in one degree increments and discern two different types of egg white. They have my heart! You might think little of this level of food pedantry but their major concern is with the eating of it. They love simple food and their results speak for themselves.

www.seriouseats.com

Time. Yes, hands up, this way takes longer, perhaps two or three times as much. But oven time doesn't really matter does it? When do you ever do a rush roast? And the major problem with the sear/hot roast method is that timing becomes critical. Five minutes too many and you have overdone meat. Most joints aren't perfectly cylindrical or symmetrical so in a hot oven the thinner end will cook faster. A high temp also means the meat contracts fast and forces out moisture. Who wants dry meat?

Actually, my mother wanted dry meat. She would sometimes send an 'underdone' steak or a piece of lamb back TWICE to the kitchen where the chef would presumably wipe the tears from their eyes as they watched a piece of animal transform to ash, no doubt wondering why anyone would worry about the quality of the meat if they only wanted to burn it. My father would have eaten it raw. I know you think I'm exaggerating but I remember pan fried burgers where I had to cut the grey meat out of a deep charcoal embrace. My mother crunched through the lot telling me how much she liked 'burnt bits'. 

Also, searing meat is a right faff. It's tricky to get a high enough heat and wrestling with a large piece of meat in hot oil is never a good idea. You should see my scarred arms! 

With reverse sear, you cook the meat in a very cool oven. And I mean COOL; so low you can happily handle the baking tray with naked hands. Then take it out and rest it. Then replace in a ferociously hot oven for ten minutes to brown and crisp the outside. The major advantage with this is it's pretty much impossible to overcook your expensive joint. If the oven is 60°C, the meat can get no hotter. You can leave it in for an extra hour without an issue. No rushing back to save the dinner - even the Christmas turkey! This method applies to all. 

The one piece of kit you will need is a meat/temperature probe. But these are inexpensive and readily available.

I took this 1.3kg piece of topside (from F. Normans in Oakwood, N. London) and roasted it for 3 hours at 55°C. My Neff oven is fairly new and capable of very accurate setting. Yours may not be, so just use an oven thermometer. There's much debate about meat temperatures - if you're so inclined to look - with most tending too high in my opinion. This is my own table for beef.

Beef

Rare: 50°C

Medium Rare: 55°C

Medium: 60° 

Well Done: 70°C 

As my mother liked it: 95°C

EDIT: there was a lot of interest in this post over Christmas 2015. I received much positive feedback too. One thing that was sorely lacking though was a chart of roasting times. These will vary as much due to the shape of the meat as well as the efficiency of your oven.  This is why I've put two columns for the shape of the joint: basically cylindrical (like a topside or fillet) and essentially square (like a forerib) If in doubt, add half an hour. The actual temperature of the oven doesn't seem to matter much. I suppose it's only a few degrees difference isn't it.

Cooking times for different weights and shapes of beef.

Af the end of the roast the meat looked like this. Not especially attractive - a little flabby because the fat hasn't been rendered. The meat doesn't have to rest for long because it's been slow cooked. Ten minutes is enough. Now, whack your oven to maximum, probably 260 - 280°C (obviously don't use any pyrolytic cleaning settings!) and return the meat for 5-10 minutes. It's already dry so it takes much less time to sear.

This is the result. Perfectly pink throughout with a deep seared crust. Almost impossible to get wrong and no nagging, roasting worries. Why wouldn't you do it?

This beef fillet was cooked to 55°C and then blasted at 230. Looks good doesn't it?

Further recipes and reading: Roast Potatoes.   Beef Rib.  Yorkshire Puddings.