Find Out What’s Going on Inside Your Steak With This Meat Calculator
For some, meat is mysterious. Unless you have a lot of cooking practice, it can be difficult to know how long you have to fry, toast, dry, or otherwise heat a food to make it safe and tasty. Getting a digital thermometer helps, butthis tool from MIT might give you a little guidance as well.
An instrument called “Cook My Meat” has a rather aggressive name, but it is a lot of fun to play with. First, you enter your variables such as thickness, initial meat temperature, and pan temperature. (You will need an infrared thermometer for accurate measurement, but this guide can help you estimate.) You then select one of the pre-made programs or set the parameters yourself. For example, if you plan to cook a steak for four minutes on each side, you must enter 302 ℉ for the first side and regardless of your kitchen temperature for the second side, as one side will be in contact with the hot pan and the others will be exposed to air.
Once you’ve filled in all the information, hit Cook and watch a fun little graph pop up. You will see how heat diffusion affects meat over time, including when protein denaturation and browning reactions occur. You can also switch the graph to “Temperature” if you want to see this information as well.
This tool, of course, has some limitations. There are only three types of meats to choose from – steak, tuna and turkey – and none of them are chicken, which seems odd, and doesn’t account for the variables you might run into depending on the pan material, but it gives you an interesting understanding of what happens to meat at different stages of the cooking process, and a deeper knowledge almost always leads to better food. (Plus, it’s just fun to tinker with, especially if you love a good schedule.)