Mastering the art of steak cookery is a vital culinary skill everyone should know. Whilst it’s hardly the most complex dish to prepare, several mistakes can catch you out along the way.
Incorrect temperatures, poor timing, and unsuitable ingredients can transform what should be a mouth-watering feast into a tough, unpleasant disaster. So if you’re keen to hone your steak-cooking skills, the perfect technique has at last been unveiled – and it’s rooted in science. Experts claim that one of Albert Einstein’s mathematical equations can help you cook the perfect steak every time.
Professor Rob Appleby, a physicist from the University of Manchester who also boasts chef training, saysthat the formula L2 = 4Dt can determine optimal steak preparation methods.
Whilst it may seem complicatied, the concept is very simple to grasp.
L represnts the steak’s thickness, T represents the cooking duration, whilst D refers to the diffusion coefficient, which is essentially the rate at which heat travels through the meat.
This equation, originally developed to describe particle movement, can now predict precisely how long heat requires to cook a steak flawlessly.
How to cook the perfect steak
Steak science is surprisingly precise,” said Rob. “It’s not the weight of the steak that matters, but its thickness. Heat takes longer to travel through thicker meat, and Einstein’s formula helps us understand exactly how long it takes.”
According to Rob, the time it takes to cook a steak increases with the square of its thickness. That means doubling the thickness of a steak doesn’t just double the cooking time – it can quadruple it.
This insight busts one of the biggest BBQ myths: that a steak twice as big takes twice as long to cook. Instead, it’s all about how deep the heat needs to travel – something you can calculate using physics.
Armed with this knowledge, along with a straightforward formula and a basic temperature probe, aspiring chefs can say goodbye to overdone, underdone, or unevenly cooked steaks.
How to make steak more flavourful
You can cook your steak for the right amount of time, but if it tastes bland, it’s never an enjoyable experience. Thankfully there are plenty of ways to add a boost of flavour as you fry it.
Top chef Jamie Oliver has advised budding cooks to ditch butter or olive oil when preparing steak, instead cutting off the fat from the meat itself and using this.
It will ‘melt in your mouth’ if cooked this way, and all you need to do is dice up the fat into small pieces and cook in a pan with a few cloves of garlic for a couple of minutes until it has broken down, then add the steak and cook as normal.