I hate meat thermometers. It makes no sense to me to puncture a beautiful steak while it is cooking and let the juices run out. A meat thermometer is the tool preferred by frigtard recipe writers. The minute I see a recipe that says cook steak until meat thermometer registers 125ยบ, I know the recipe was written by an idiot and chances are the writer has never prepared the recipe at all. Any doofus can tell you what temperature to cook a steak to. An accomplished cook will give you the precise time of cooking.
When I see instructions in the recipe that are given by cooking time, I know the author has actually prepared the dish they are writing about. It also allows the reader to exactly replicate what the author did. Because now you can use a clock, timer or stopwatch to precisely execute the recipe.
Every time I cook, I map out the steps by time. That way I can make sure that all of the individual pieces will come together at precisely the right time to be presented as a complete meal. And one of the trickiest things to cook by time is steak. If steaks were uniform, it would be a breeze. But they are not. Every time the thickness of the steak changes by one-quarter inch or more, it changes the cooking time.
I've been grilling for a long time and am pretty good at eyeballing when a steak is close to being done. But I am not perfect, so that's why I prefer to cook by time. Cooking by time gives me perfect results every single grilling session. And if you are cooking for a crowd, where some want it rare and others well done, you need the clock.
Perhaps the best guide to cooking steaks that I have found comes from Omaha Steaks. Their chart is broken down into two sections: one for grilling and one for broiling. If you can read and are able to use a ruler to measure the thickness of a steak, you can now make perfect steaks every single time. My sincere thanks to Omaha Steaks for this wonderful guide (click on the chart to see it full size):
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