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Comment by flaminHotSpeedo | Hacker News Reader

The article categorically refutes the idea that resting is important for juiciness but that's not the same as saying resting will not improve juice retention. Proof that a relationship once though to be causal is not is a pretty big deal, and the conventional wisdom is wrong.

As a counterexample: let's say the only things I care about are juiciness of the center of the cut of meat and the time it takes me to make it. By the conventional wisdom I'd have to rest the meat, adding time, but now we know that I could simply keep cooking the meat for longer, since that will raise the center temp faster, and then cut it immediately after cooking.

Or another scenario: if I know the precise internal temperature for my preferred level of juiciness, I know exactly what temperature to set a sous vide to.

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Someone that only cares about juiciness at the center, and doesn't care how much is lost from the rest of the meat, sounds pretty unrealistic to me. If you keep pouring in heat until the last moment everything outside the center will be much hotter and lose much more juice.

That depends on the heat applied. Which brings up another good counterexample: knowing this, someone could cook longer at a lower temp to get a juicer edge for the same juiciness center.

I'm talking about the method in that example, which was cooking as fast as possible.

Yes, my example is unrealistic when you apply your own unrealistic constraints on top of it.

But when you remove your unrealistic constraints, it is absolutely realistic. There is a wide temperature band where a cut of meat will reach a given center temp faster than carryover cooking with a difference to edge temperature that is trivial enough that someone is unlikely to notice.

It was your example, I was just trying to stick within it. I'm not intentionally adding constraints "on top". I'm just saying that "cook longer" is outside the scope of my response.

I disagree that the edge temperature difference would be trivial. The difference between the last 20 degrees in the middle coming out of the edges while they also lose heat to their surroundings versus making the edges even hotter as you continue cooking is quite a lot.

"cook longer" at the same temperature is my original example (though admittedly I was thinking that cook temp would be another variable, but I didn't write that):

> now we know that I could simply keep cooking the meat for longer

Cooking longer at the same temperature is also pretty much exactly what the experiment in the article was, which found no statistically significant correlation between testing and juiciness.

The experimental group pork chops took less time from when they were put on the skillet to when they were cut (and when they would have been consumed if they were cooked by someone making a meal for themselves).

You're welcome to disagree, but the facts disagree with your stance.

I worded that badly.

I meant cooking significantly longer is outside the scope, since that implies different temperature (or a rubber brick).

Yes, cooking different times at the same temperature is exactly what I was responding to. The outside will be a lot hotter if you do that.

If the juice loss is the same, there's a missing factor here, why does only the middle temperature matter and not the edge temperature?

So like, resting?

There are many ways to cook a steak, and what you say doesn’t hold true for the way I cook it, which is a reverse sear, and in fact the Serious Eats article even mentions that a rest is unnecessary: https://www.seriouseats.com/reverse-seared-steak-recipe

Sous vide steak, as mentioned by your parent post, is similar.

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