There’s a lot of truisms around cooking that when poked and prodded by science aren’t actually that true. No, salt doesn’t help water boil faster, and, no, searing meat doesn’t seal in the juices. But some techniques that chefs swear by and home cooks have adopted may deserve some more scrutiny. And one of them is basting a steak in the pan—essentially splashing big spoonfuls of hot butter, usually flavored with herbs and garlic, over your beef at the end of cooking. Basting a steak is supposed to make meat cook more evenly, cook faster, remain juicier, and impart more flavor. It’s a method chefs like Chris Young have employed for a long time. But Young is also a chef willing to see if accepted kitchen wisdom was all that wise in the first place. He used to be the head development chef Heston Blumenthal’s wildly inventive Michelin three-star Fat Duck in the U.K. before coauthoring..
