Ingredient

Beef

Nearly every beef disaster is a cut used for the wrong method. Beef divides cleanly into muscles that worked hard and muscles that did not, and the two want opposite things from heat — one wants minutes, the other wants hours, and neither tolerates the other's treatment.

Hard-working muscle and lazy muscle

A muscle that did a lot of work — shoulder, leg, neck, belly — is bound with collagen, the connective tissue that holds it together. Collagen is tough, and short cooking makes it tougher as it contracts. But held at a simmer for long enough in the presence of moisture it converts to gelatine, which is soft, rich and slippery. That conversion is the whole point of braising, and it is why a cheap cut cooked for three hours beats an expensive one cooked for one.

A muscle that did little work — the loin, along the back — has little collagen and is tender already. It needs nothing done to it except browning and heating through, and long cooking simply dries it out. There is no benefit waiting at the end of two hours; there is only a grey, tight piece of meat.

Applying the wrong treatment fails in both directions: a braising cut cooked like a steak is chewy, and a steak cooked like a braise is dry. See dry braised beef and tough steak.

The cuts, and what they want

Fillet

The least worked muscle. Very tender, mild, lean. Fast, hot, and brief. Expensive and easy to overcook.

Sirloin, ribeye, rump

Tender with more fat and more flavour. Steaks. Hot pan or grill, then rest.

Bavette, skirt, onglet, flank

Worked but thin, with a pronounced grain. Cook fast and hot, then slice thinly across the grain — this is not optional, it is what makes them tender.

Chuck and shin

Heavily worked, full of collagen. Braise for hours. The best stewing beef there is.

Brisket

Collagen and fat. Long, slow, wet or smoked. See tough brisket.

Mince

Whatever it was, ground. Fat content is what matters — around 15 to 20% for burgers, leaner for a bolognese where the fat is rendered out anyway.

Steak, briefly

• Dry the surface. Water on the outside has to boil off before browning can start, and that time is time the inside is cooking.
• Salt well ahead or immediately before. Both work. Salting ten minutes before is the one time that does not, because the salt has drawn water to the surface and not yet been reabsorbed.
• Get the pan genuinely hot and do not crowd it.
• Turn it more often than tradition says. Frequent turning cooks more evenly and browns just as well.
• Rest it for several minutes. The muscle fibres relax and hold on to juice that would otherwise run out onto the board.
• Slice across the grain, especially for the thin, grainy cuts.

What searing does, and does not, do

Searing creates flavour. High surface heat drives browning reactions between the proteins and sugars in the meat, generating hundreds of aromatic compounds that were not there before. That is a large part of why cooked meat smells like cooked meat.

What it does not do is seal in juices. That idea has been tested and it is simply wrong — a seared steak loses about as much moisture as an unseared one, sometimes slightly more. Sear because it tastes better, not because it seals. See the Maillard reaction.

Safety

FoodHQ does not publish cooking temperatures or keeping times for raw meat, poultry, fish or eggs. Those are safety guidance and need qualified review this site does not have. In the UK the Food Standards Agency publishes them.

The one thing worth flagging as a cook is that whole cuts and minced meat are different cases, because mincing distributes anything on the surface throughout the meat. That is why a rare steak and a rare burger are not the same proposition. The authority above covers it.

Common questions