How to Pan-Sear Steak

Searing a steak indoors is the method most of us actually use most of the time. It is also the one where a small mistake shows up immediately, because there is nowhere for the moisture to go.

The answer in one line: dry the steak, get the pan properly hot, and then do not touch it.

Why the surface has to be dry first

“Get the moisture off the surface.”

Gray Shipley

That is Gray Shipley's whole answer to what matters most, and it applies more in a pan than on a grill. A grill lets steam escape past the grates. A pan traps it under the steak, so a wet steak sits in its own liquid and steams instead of browning.

“Let it dry before you, you know, put it on the skillet or put it on the grill so that you get the sear on the outside. You keep that moisture and juiciness on the inside.”

Gray Shipley

The method

1. Thaw completely in the refrigerator. A part-frozen steak keeps releasing water as it finishes.
2. Dry both faces and the edges. Paper towel, pressed, not wiped.
3. Salt now or forty minutes ago. Not five minutes ago, which is the wettest the surface will ever be.
4. Heat the pan until it is genuinely hot. A drop of water should skitter and vanish, not sit and bubble.
5. Add a fat that can take the heat. Tallow, ghee or a neutral oil. Butter alone will burn before the steak browns.
6. Lay the steak down and leave it. Two to three minutes on a steak around an inch thick. It will release from the pan when the crust has formed.
7. Turn once. Another two to three minutes.
8. Add butter at the end, not the start. Tilt the pan and spoon it over for the last thirty seconds.
9. Rest it. Eight to ten minutes on a warm plate.

What goes wrong

• The pan was not hot enough. The steak turns gray and sticks.
• Two steaks in a one-steak pan. They steam each other. Cook in batches.
• Moving it too early. Crust forms where meat stays against hot metal.
• Butter in at the beginning. It browns, then burns, and the steak tastes of it.

Cast iron or something else

“I, to me, that's a question of weather more than anything else.”

Gray Shipley

Gray's point is that the choice is situational rather than a matter of quality. Indoors, cast iron holds heat better than thin stainless, which matters because a cold pan is the most common cause of a gray steak.

Which steak to use

If you want the physics behind the crust in more detail, we go into it here. For a worked recipe on a looser-grained cut, try our pan-seared hanger steak, and keep the temperature chart within reach.

Dry surface, hot pan, hands off. Everything else on that list is a refinement.