How to Season Steak Experiment - When to Salt Your Steaks, I

My gold standard tends to be the The Food Lab.

They seem to go the whole hog in placebo controlled, double blind experimental design on a variety of things.

In South Africa, the common conviction is that you should never salt your steak before it goes into the pan / onto the fire.

In fact, optimally you should salt your steak before you cook it. What you should not do is to salt it within about 40 minutes before cooking it. I.e. if you did not salt your steak and it's about half an hour before you're going to cook it, then don't salt it now - better to then salt it immediately before or while you are cooking it. This is the time-period which the above video actually misses - it leaves out the crucial time during which you must not salt your steak.

The explanation seems to be that, when you salt your steak, the immediate reaction is that the salt will draw some of the moisture out of the steak. So if you cook your steak during that time, it could be dry and tough. But what happens after that is that the salt dissolves in the moisture, and the moisture together with the dissolved salt gets reabsorbed back into the steak. Salt is an excellent tenderizer, and because it is a small molecule it can penetrate the entire steak. This is something that no marinade can do, since marinades are always composed of extremely large molecules. (Marinades never penetrate beyond about a millimeter or so - their function is to add flavour and aroma, they rarely actually tenderize the steak, unless it also contains some salt).

So usually I would salt my steak up to a day before I'm going to cook it, and keep it uncovered in the refrigerator, maybe turn it now and again. I suppose some people could have a problem with keeping uncovered raw meat together with other food in a refrigerator, but I usually clear a shelf so that the meat sits all by itself. Anyway, it doesn't bother me in the least.

(There was a time when I was quite into marinades, but these day I prefer to cook the meat very minimalistically, and then maybe make some fabulous sauce to go with it. I do still marinade beef, but then I'm going for a sort of kebab kind of thing with a different sort of feel to it).