Most people cook a steak the same way: sear it hard first over direct heat, then let it finish cooking through, if it needs more time, off to the side. J. Kenji López-Alt, Managing Culinary Director of Serious Eats and author of the James Beard Award-nominated column The Food Lab, built a strong case for doing the opposite. The reverse sear — slow-cooking a steak to temperature first, then searing it hard right at the end — produces a different, and for most cuts better, result, and it translates directly to a charcoal or gas grill.
What the Technique Actually Involves
The reverse sear reverses the usual order of operations: instead of searing first and roasting afterward, you slowly bring the steak up to temperature first — in a low oven, or on the cool, indirect side of a grill — and then sear it hard right before serving, for crust and flavour. On a grill specifically, that means starting the steak on the side away from direct heat, letting it cook gently until it is close to your target internal temperature, then moving it over to the hot side for a fast, hard sear on each side, about 45 seconds per side, pressing down to maximise contact and holding it with tongs to sear the edges too.
Why It Produces a Different Result
López-Alt has written in Serious Eats that if the goal is a steak that is medium-rare from edge to edge, with a crisp crust, the reverse sear is, in his assessment, the better technique available. The reasoning comes down to how heat travels through meat. Searing a cold or room-temperature steak hard first, then finishing it with more heat, creates a wide band of overcooked, greyish meat just beneath the crust before you reach the pink centre. Bringing the steak up to temperature slowly and gently first means the internal temperature rises far more evenly across the whole cut, so when you finally hit it with high heat for the sear, that sear only affects the very outer surface rather than pushing a wide grey band inward. The claimed result: almost no overcooked meat between the crust and the properly cooked centre, and a juicier finished steak.
How to Apply It on a Grill
Doing this on a live-fire grill rather than an oven-to-stovetop setup requires a proper two-zone fire — coals or burners concentrated on one side, leaving the other side clear for indirect cooking:
- Set up two zones. Bank charcoal on one side of the kettle, or leave one or more burners off on a gas grill, so you have a genuinely cool zone and a genuinely hot zone, not just a slightly cooler middle of the same heat source.
- Start on the cool side. Place the steak on the indirect side, lid down, and let it cook slowly until it is roughly 10–15°F below your target final temperature, checking with an instant-read thermometer rather than guessing by time, since thickness and starting temperature both affect how long this stage takes.
- Finish on the hot side. Move the steak directly over the coals or lit burners and sear hard, about 45 seconds per side, until a deep brown crust forms, using tongs to press the steak flat against the grate and to hold it on its edges briefly for edge searing.
- Rest briefly. Because the interior was brought up gradually rather than shocked with high heat throughout, the reverse-seared steak generally needs less resting time than a traditionally seared one, though a short rest still helps juices redistribute.
Where It Matters Most
The technique makes the biggest difference on thicker steaks — roughly 1.5 inches and up — where the gap between a well-seared exterior and an undercooked or overcooked interior is largest. On thin steaks, there is less internal distance for the technique to correct, so a traditional direct sear is less likely to produce the wide grey band that the reverse sear is specifically solving for.
Sources
- López-Alt, J. Kenji. “The Food Lab: The Reverse Sear.” Serious Eats, cited and discussed in: The Nosey Chef, “Reverse Seared Steak.” noseychef.com