“Meat science tells you about the perfect steak all the way up until it hits the pan. They're cooking on George Foreman grills in meat science labs because they just want consistency. Like they're not going for what we're going for.”
My Food Job Rocks! · Alternative Proteins · October 2026
Pryles, a cookbook author who writes about beef, was asked whether the rule about flipping a steak only once holds up, and why chefs are so stubborn about their methods. She says there is a wide gap between the scientists, who care about repeatable results, and the cooks, who care about how it eats.
Transcript
Oh, good. Good. Get out there. Give it a shot.
…I guess this is a good question too. There's a difference between like how I work with chefs versus like how I work with food scientists. And one of the things he knows about chefs, and it's something we kind of complain about, to be frank, is that they can be stubborn in their ways. 100%.
And there's a giant trough between, like I say to people, they're like, how to cook? What does meat science tell you about the perfect steak? I'm like, meat science tells you about the perfect steak all the way up until it hits the pan. They're cooking on George Foreman grills in meat science labs because they just want consistency. Like they're not going for what we're going for. And that's that difference between food science, meat science, and just culinary, where it is really interesting that there's just sort of a disconnect. And sometimes chefs swear by like, this just works for me. And, you know, the biggest variable, because it's so important, variables in science are everything. And there's so many, every time you tweak one, you can get a different result, right?
Yes.
And so one of the things that you learn early on, especially with the big mystery of cooking the perfect steak, is that our stoves, our domestic stoves are nowhere near as hot as restaurant stoves. And not only that, I know, like for myself, for example, I don't want to set the smoke detector off…
Love that. I don't
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