Nifty Cook My Meat Tool Helps You Cook the Perfect Steak Through Science
If you’ve ever cooked a steak and would like to see what the meat actually looks like on the inside before you slice it open, Cook My Meat might suggest you take a look.
Created by MIT students Keith Rowe, Laura Breiman, and Marissa Stevens, Cook My Meat is not entirely new. It was developed back in 2013, but recently a nifty new tool has emerged, much to the delight of steak connoisseurs all over the world. Here’s how it works: you enter a few juicy parameters, select a few temperatures for the slices, and then show you a rough idea of what your meat will be like when all is said and done. You will see familiar colors like red, pink, and overcooked.
The tool does this by calculating the heat diffusion in meat at each time step using the Crank-Nicholson method , using Food and Cooking: Kitchen Science and Knowledge as the rubric for protein denaturation temperatures. You can even compare the two cooking methods to see which one is better for that expensive piece of beef you bought from the butcher.
But even with such a high-tech tool, cooking the perfect steak is still up to you. Cook My Heat cannot take into account the characteristics of the stove and grill, different types of pans and different consistencies of meat. It is best to think of this tool as a fun way to do steak cooking research.