You Should Know

We call that the dryducken method

You can and should actually salt your steak several hours before cooking, leaving them uncovered in the fridge. Water will be drawn out, and then reabsorbed along with the salt. Dry the surface and salt again if desired right before cooking.

Putting any piece of meat on the grill at 700° is going to leave good marks.

Come on, we all know milk steak is superior to water steak.

Empirical evidence suggests that it takes many hours for the center of the steak, the part that matters for doneness, to rise any appreciable amount.

Drying the outside of your steak is good advice because your can see the results. The same with brining because you can taste it.

If your technique is otherwise good whether that's low/slow or hot/fast then "letting it warm up" is just bunk advice.

Another note is that if your cooking set up can't crank up high enough to get a good sear fast then you may benefit from the center being cold to start with to give you more time to develop the crust.

Letting it reach room temp contributes little to nothing, in comparison with patting it dry, because of a few details:

• Maillard reaction happens around ~150°C, so above the boiling point of water (100°C)
• If there's liquid water, it'll snip all available heat from the surroundings, when boiling, before the temperature rises up again. This means no Maillard until the water is gone.
• It takes 1cal to raise the temperature of 1g of water by 1°C. It's a relatively small amount of heat, even for something like 25°C room temp vs. 5°C fridge temp.
• It takes 540cal to transform 1g of 100°C liquid water into 1g of 100°C steam. It's a lot.

So if you don't wait until your beef reaches room temperature before cooking it, you're losing, like, 20cal per gram of beef to unnecessarily raise its temperature. However if you don't pat your beef dry, each gram of water soaking there will be stealing 75cal to rise its own temperature to 100°C, plus 540cal to steam off. And since browning is a surface reaction and the offending water is mostly on the outside the difference is fairly big, as you aren't comparing the whole chunk of beef with the outside water - you're only comparing the surface beef with the water.

(I hope that this is clear, I'm damn convoluted to explain stuff.)

Ever since I learned this tip I've been cooking perfect steaks. Makes a huge difference.

To a degree yes. Moisture in general will limit browning. Fresh ground beef is usually dry enough. Frozen and defrosted ground beefwill have ice/water. Patting it dry with a paper towel takes care of this.

Ground turkey in particular is super wet all the way through so paper towels won't really be able to get it all. To brown ground turkey, you put a big patty on the grill and don't break it up, then wait for several minutes. This allows the surface to evaporate the water and then begin browning. If you break it open it will release the water inside the big ball of meat and it'll take forever to evaporate enough for browning to start. You break it open later on after you've browned top and bottom.

Sort of. If you're doing burgers, you don't usually need to pat it dry, but you also don't salt it until just before you put it on the pan/grill. Salt still draws out moisture and changes the protein structure especially in ground beef.

No Hamburger is a special kind of beef.

I really need to get a kitchen torch huh

Dear God

They can't stop you from ordering a steak and a glass of water!