Let it rest. Flip it a lot. Flip it once. Whack it with a mallet.
The internet is chock full of tips to guarantee the juiciest, most perfect steak. Nathan Myhrvold, founder of Modernist Cuisine and former Microsoft CTO, has just one: punch holes in it.
To do this, Myhrvold says to use the Jaccard tenderizer, a handheld tool with a bunch of blades bound for your steak’s muscle fiber. In his experiments for Modernist Cuisine’s award-winning cookbooks, he learned that the chief cause of pork and beef drying up after cooking was their very structure.
When heated quickly, the muscle fibers that hold red meat together seize and contract, effectively wringing the moisture inside like a wet towel. The Jaccard tenderizer’s tiny blades remedy this by cutting the fibers entirely, disallowing them from squeezing your meat dry while it sears in a cast-iron skillet.
During Prime Day, the humble Jaccard tenderizer is marked down from $24 to $13 — its lowest price ever.
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