The Absolute Best Time To Salt Your Steak For Maximum Juiciness According To Anthony Bourdain

A good steak will change your life. However, making a good steak is something else altogether. You can find a litany of advice on cooking the "perfect" steak, much of which is contradictory. It can be hard to determine which cuts you should skip for a reverse sear steak or whether you should pan-sear or grill the meat. There are endless decisions to make when cooking your steak, and each one can make or break your meal. One such quandary is when to salt your steak.

Luckily for us, we have some steak-salting guidance from Anthony Bourdain, who remains a font of foodie wisdom. From his foolproof "fluffy scrambled egg" cooking method to his "one-hand" rule for burgers, there are many lessons we can still learn from Bourdain. He revealed the best time to salt steaks in a video with InsiderTech, saying, "Salt dries stuff, it cures stuff, it pulls moisture out." 

Getting to the meat of his guidance, Bourdain advised against putting salt on a steak after it cooks, preferring to season his steaks just before they hit the grill. Because salt extracts moisture, it has the potential to make food too dry, which was Bourdain's concern. He wasn't anti-salt, and he admitted that he enjoyed using a lot of it in his food. What seemed to work best for him was adding salt just before setting steaks on the grill — specifically, sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper.

While Anthony Bourdain remains a respected figure in the culinary world, some of his takes are a bit controversial. His stance against salting steaks before cooking is not exactly universal. Food Network star Alton Brown, for example, is known to salt his steaks for several days at a time before cooking. So, does salting your steak well before cooking turn it into a tough, dry hunk of meat, as Bourdain seemed to indicate? Though he was correct in his assessment that salt tends to draw out moisture, he was incorrect in his assessment that salt will always dry out a steak. In fact, it can do quite the opposite.

In a short video posted to his YouTube channel, J. Kenji López-Alt, another prominent cooking expert, explained how pre-salting your steak can make it even more tender and tasty. According to López-Alt, salt draws out moisture, creating a brine on the surface that breaks down the muscle proteins in the steak. He commented that the steak will begin to reabsorb the moisture at this stage. The added salt helps loosen the steak's fibers, so it's less likely to become tough during the cooking process. Achieving a satisfying steak crust is all about timing — try cooking your steaks both ways to see which one is truly worth its salt.