How to Grill Juicy Steak

Featured Pro: Curtis Stone
Category: Cooking
Time: 2:38


CURTIS STONE: Last year, Automobile Magazine voted this Yukon hybrid technology of the year. Now I’m going to give you a GMC Trade Secret that’s going to make your friends say that you are the cook of the year.

Here I’ve got a beautiful piece of succulent, juicy tri-tip. Now, whenever you’re grilling, make these really important steps to follow to make sure that your meat turns out as juicy and delicious as possible.

The first thing is you need to cook it to between 120 and 140 degrees. That’s medium rare. Now, you can either just poke it and sort of use your experience to know when it’s ready, or if you want to step it up a bit, you can grab one of these meat thermometers and just poke it in. Make sure it’s right in the center of the meat. You need to just hold it in there for 20 seconds or so and let it come up to temperature, and it needs to read 120 degrees. Now, once it’s between 120 and 140, you know it’s medium rare. Take it out of the grill.

The other thing you need to do is you need to let your meat rest when it comes off the grill. Now, I know this sounds a little bit weird, but I’ve got over here a tri-tip that’s been cooking. It’s just coming straight off a hot grill, okay. Now, a lot of people will bring it straight off the grill and carve it, and I’ll show you what’ll happen. If you do that, you’re going to lose a lot of juice as soon as you cut it and it’s not going to be cooked evenly, because there’s something that happens when it comes off the grill. It’s called carry-over cooking. It carries on cooking, and the heat has to go right through to the center of the meat.

I’ll show you what I’m talking about. If I cut this right down the middle, see, here in the middle it’s still really red, okay. And then on the outside it’s quite gray. So it’s not even. And you can see, as soon as I cut it, all that juice. Look at all that juice that just literally pours straight out of the meat. It’s the worst thing that you want to happen, because you’re going to end up with a dry piece of tri-tip.

This one over here, you make sure it’s at 120 – perfect – and then you just slice it up. Go against the grain, and then just slice it like this so it’s beautiful and tender. You don’t lose too much juice when you cut it because you’ve let it rest. Look at that – beautiful. Delicious.

And then, when it comes time to serve, you just bring your plate over, pick up your meat – delicious stuff – and just place it right there on the plate. And, of course, the juice, the natural juice, is the jus. That’s the sauce. So don’t forget to pick up your sauce and just drizzle that all over the meat. Oh, delicious.

I’m Curtis Stone, and that’s my GMC Trade Secret. Rest your meat and undercook it to medium rare.