Cooking the perfect steak at home can feel like a culinary minefield. Undercook it, and you’re faced with a cold, chewy centre, overdo it, and you’re left with a dry, leathery slab lacking the juiciness steak-lovers crave.
For many home cooks, getting that ideal level of doneness, whether rare, medium, or well done, often means slicing into the meat, losing precious juices, or relying on unreliable guesswork. But now, Dame Prue Leith has shared a foolproof and surprisingly simple method to take the stress out of steak night. The celebrated chef and Great British Bake Off judge revealed the clever hack on her website, offering an easy, equipment-free way to tell if your steak is cooked exactly the way you like it, just by using your hand.
Prue writes: “Checking how the steak is cooked can be done by bringing the tip of your thumb together with the tip of each finger.
“By prodding the fatty part of your palm at the base of your thumb, you can feel how firm your steak should feel depending on how you like it cooked.”
This method works by mimicking the muscle tension in your hand when you touch your fingers to your thumb. When you touch your index finger to your thumb and press the base of your thumb, it feels soft, just like a rare steak should.
Touching your middle finger creates a firmer sensation, similar to a medium-cooked steak, and the ring finger gives a noticeably firmer feel, echoing the texture of a well-done steak.
The beauty of this technique is its simplicity. It removes the need for meat thermometers, timers, or guesswork. Instead, it gives you an intuitive way to get it right every time, whether you’re pan-frying, grilling, or barbecuing.
Steak can be intimidating to cook because there’s such a fine line between perfectly pink and overcooked. But with Leith’s tactile tip, home cooks can develop a better sense of touch and timing, turning what was once a gamble into a guaranteed success.
And the best part? No need to cut into your steak and lose those mouth-watering juices in the process.
With this trick in hand, you’ll be serving up restaurant-quality steaks from your kitchen in no time.