Cooking to Temperature

Appears in
Mission Street Food
Mission Street Food

By Anthony Myint and Karen Leibowitz

Published 2011

  • About
The process of cooking meats to a specific internal temperature isn’t complicated or novel, but it’s worth outlining the steps that elevate it from amateur to professional results: salting, tempering, cooking, and resting.

Salting: Buy meat at least one day in advance. Red meat is typically flavorful enough that salting is preferable to brining or marinating. Premium steakhouses build flavor by aging beef for a month or more in controlled environments, then trimming off a lot of the exterior meat, which will have acquired an inedible moldy layer.