Contrary to common belief, resting meat isn’t really about retaining juices, but that doesn’t mean it’s pointless. Instead, it’s best understood as a temperature-control method for managing carryover cooking. To use it effectively, though, you have to completely rethink how the technique works and how to apply it.
Is dark matter real? How do consciousness and memory actually work? And is it really necessary to rest your meat after cooking? These are the big, unresolved questions that keep scientists up at night. I'm not qualified to weigh in on the first two, and to be honest, I'm not even sure I have a definitive answer to the third. But I do have a much clearer idea about it than I used to, and that alone feels like progress.
Resting meat is something chefs and experienced cooks have recommended for ages, and it's something we at Serious Eats have long supported as well. But over the years, a growing number of voices have questioned the logic behind it, and the tide has slowly started to shift. As more evidence against resting meat has piled up, the once bedrock rule is looking a lot less certain.
This question has been gnawing at me for a long time, so I finally set out to dig into all the various arguments and run some tests of my own. As I wrote in the "In a Nutshell" summary above, I think there's a case for resting meat, but not for the reasons most people assume. And if you want it to work, you have to follow a completely different set of meat-resting rules.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
The Classic Case for Resting Meat
Most proponents of resting meat will tell you something like this:
After cooking a steak, chop, or roast, it's important to let the meat rest. This gives the muscle fibers time to relax and reabsorb juices that were pushed toward the center during cooking. Without resting, those juices are more likely to spill out onto the cutting board as soon as the meat is sliced, resulting in drier, less flavorful meat.
It's an explanation that seems credible and supported by our everyday cooking experience: Cut into a piece of meat soon after removing it from the pan or oven, and liquid pours out, but wait a while—say a good five to fifteen minutes for steaks and chops, longer for larger roasts—and far less liquid is lost upon carving or slicing.
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