7 Old Wives' Tales About Cooking Steak That Need To Go Away

The Food Lab at Serious Eats looks at things you've been told about the proper way to cook a steak. Some of what you've heard is correct, but some are just myths, like "Only flip your steak once!"

The reality is that multiple flipping will not only get your steak to cook faster—up to 30% faster!—but will actually cause it to cook more evenly, as well. This is because—as food scientist and writer Harold McGee has explained—by flipping frequently, the meat on any given side will neither heat up nor cool down significantly with each turn. If you imagine that you can flip your steak infinitely fast,* then you can see that what ends up happening is that you approximate cooking the steak simultaneously from both sides, but at a gentler pace. Gentler cooking = more even cooking.

That's just one of seven myths about steak debunked, with the science behind each. Warning: reading this will make you hungry. Link

(Image credit: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt)