Roasting and grilling: carryover and resting

Suppose you take a thick pork chop off the heat when its centre is 15°F (about 8°C) short of where you want it. You'd expect to have undershot, and to need to put it back. In a test published in 2025, Daniel Gritzer of Serious Eats did just that with a chop 1.5 inches (about 4 cm) thick, and wrote that "it had reached 140°F and threatened to surpass it in under three minutes."¹ The chop was off the heat, and its centre kept cooking. His 140°F (60°C) was the target for a tasting test, and it's below the US figure for pork, which comes later in this lesson.

That's carryover, and it is the reason this lesson exists. Lesson 6 was about the surface of the meat. This one is about the centre, which is where doneness and safety are decided, and it's harder to control because it lags behind everything you can see. A roast leaves the oven with its outside much hotter than its middle, and heat keeps moving inwards after you've turned the oven off. Once you see that, the old advice to rest meat makes a different kind of sense, and so do the rules for a whole chicken, a rolled joint, a pork chop and a burger. The lesson ends on roast potatoes, and the argument about how brown they should be.

You'll need an oven for this lesson, and your thermometer from lesson 2.

What an oven and a grill do

Lesson 2 gave you the three ways heat moves. An oven uses two of them at once: hot air moving over the food, which is convection, and heat radiating from the hot walls. Grilling is mostly radiation from one side at close range, from a glowing element above the food or a fire below it. The words differ by country: in the UK a grill is the element at the top of the oven, which Americans call a broiler, and an American grill is usually what the UK calls a barbecue. Either way the heat comes from one side, so you turn the food to cook the other.

Both methods do the same thing to a piece of meat. They put heat into the surface far faster than the inside can take it away, so the surface browns and dries while heat is conducted slowly inwards, which is lesson 2's centre that lags. Lesson 2 also warned that turning the oven up does not cook a thick piece proportionally faster; it mostly makes the outside race ahead. FSIS, the US Department of Agriculture's food safety agency, sets a floor on how low you go: "When roasting meat and poultry, use an oven temperature no lower than 325 °F" (about 163°C).⁴ The page does not give its reason, so this course won't supply one.

Between the floor and a blazing oven is a choice about the gap between outside and inside, and that gap is what the rest of this lesson turns on.

Carryover: why a roast keeps cooking

When a roast comes out of the oven, its layers are at different temperatures. The surface is near the oven's heat, the centre is at whatever your thermometer reads, and in between there is a slope from hot to less hot. Heat flows down that slope in both directions. Some of it leaves the surface into the kitchen air. Some of it keeps travelling inwards, and for a while the centre goes on rising even as the whole piece starts to cool. Gritzer describes it in a steak: "heat was flowing from the hotter exterior towards the center, cooking it further", while "that stored heat was dissipating into the wider environment, leading to an overall cooling even as the center warmed."¹

You've seen this before. Lesson 5's boiled egg kept cooking after it left the water, which is why the cold-water plunge stops a yolk where you want it. A roast is the same thing on a bigger scale, and nobody plunges a roast.

How far does the centre climb? The usual advice, as Gritzer sums it up, is to cook meat "roughly 5–15°F shy of the desired final core temperature" and then "let it rest off-heat for 5 to 30 minutes, depending on the type and size of the cut", and for steaks and chops to pull them "5–10°F before the target temp".¹ His chops didn't fit it. The one at the top of this lesson climbed the whole 15°F in under three minutes, and his verdict was: "Follow the conventional resting advice, and in many cases, you're going to blow right past your target temp."¹ So he won't offer a rule of his own. How early to pull meat, he writes, "depends on the type of meat, the cooking method, the cooking temperature, and the size and shape of the cut. In other words, it's damn-near impossible to offer a meaningful general rule. A good thermometer and some trial and error to build up experience are probably your best bet."¹ He credits Chris Young, who comes up again below, with the point his own chops bore out: "Carryover cooking is greatly underestimated in both its speed and degree".¹ Those are one cook's measurements on one cut, so the practice at the end has you measure your own.

That reasoning is also why the reverse sear works the way it does. Lesson 6 described America's Test Kitchen's steak test, where one batch went into a low oven first and was seared at the end. A steak cooked gently has a shallow slope from outside to centre, so there is less heat stored in the outer layers to overshoot with, and the sear at the end adds a thin hot layer and not a thick one. That is this course's inference from carryover, not something ATK's test measured; what ATK measured was juice loss, and it found about the same in both orders.¹⁷ J. Kenji López-Alt demonstrates the method in a video, linked here as a demonstration: The Best Way to Cook Steak: The Reverse Sear. This course checked its title and channel, not its contents.

Carryover and the safety rules

Here's the part cooks often get backwards. Carryover is a tool for doneness. Whether it counts towards safety depends on which rule you're following, and the two US documents in this course say different things.

The US consumer chart is explicit: "Cook all food to these minimum internal temperatures, as measured with a food thermometer, before removing food from the heat source."³ So under the chart, the minimum is reached in the oven, and carryover takes you above it. For a US home cook, then, pulling early is something you do above the minimum: a pork roast can come out at 145°F and climb to a doneness you like better, but it can't come out at 135°F and count on the rest to reach 145°F. For whole cuts of beef, pork, veal and lamb, the chart then adds a rest: "145 degrees F (62.8 degrees C) and allow to rest for at least 3 minutes".³ That rest is part of the safety rule, and the USDA said why when it brought pork into line in 2011. CIDRAP, the University of Minnesota's infectious disease news service, reported the statement: "During that time, the temperature stays the same or continues to rise, killing pathogens".⁶ foodsafety.gov puts it the same way: "Rest time is important for certain meats because it allows the innermost parts and juices of the meats to become fully and safely cooked."¹⁶ The three minutes is carryover and lesson 4's time at temperature, working together.

The FDA's Food Code, which is written for restaurants and not for home kitchens, goes further. Its table for whole roasts gives a time at each temperature, and a footnote says: "Holding time may include post-oven heat rise."⁵ So a restaurant may count carryover as part of the time a roast spends at a killing temperature. A home cook following the consumer chart doesn't do that; the chart wants the reading before the meat comes out.

The UK's rule is that "the middle of the food should reach a temperature of 70°C for 2 minutes", or one of the FSA's equivalent pairs.⁸ The FSA page this course read does not say whether time out of the oven counts towards those 2 minutes, so this lesson does not say either. It does let a seared whole cut of beef or lamb be pink in the middle, as the section on joints below shows, so for those cuts carryover in the UK is a question of doneness alone.

Resting: what it is actually for

Nearly every recipe for a roast or a steak says to let it rest before carving, and nearly every one gives the same reason. Gritzer sums up the usual explanation fairly: resting "gives the muscle fibers time to relax and reabsorb juices that were pushed toward the center during cooking."¹ Cut too soon, the story goes, and the juice runs out onto the board.

That story had evidence behind it. More than fifteen years ago, López-Alt, then at Serious Eats, cooked steaks to 125°F (about 52°C) and sliced one every two and a half minutes. As Gritzer describes that test, "The steak that wasn't rested gushed juices when sliced, but by the 10-minute mark, the meat was hardly losing any at all."¹ This course has not read López-Alt's original article; Serious Eats blocks automated readers, so what's here is Gritzer's account of it.

The 2025 re-test

Gritzer's article draws on two sets of tests. The first are Chris Young's. Gritzer describes Young as a chef and food scientist, one of the co-authors of the original Modernist Cuisine books, and now the maker of a thermometer, the Combustion Predictive Thermometer. That is an interest worth knowing about, since part of his case is that carryover is bigger than cooks think and needs tracking. Gritzer used that thermometer in his own test and adds "(and no, this isn't an ad)". Young had long argued for resting, Gritzer says, and changed his mind in the video. His tests are in that video, which this course has not watched. Gritzer's summary is that Young's tests "suggest that when samples of seared meat are sliced at the same final internal temperature, resting has no measurable effect on juice loss at all."¹ Young's explanation is heat, not reabsorption, in Gritzer's paraphrase: "The hotter the meat, the more energy the internal moisture has, leading to higher vapor pressure that pushes liquid outward when the meat is cut."¹ On that account, a rested steak loses less on the board because it's cooler when you cut it.

The second test is Gritzer's own, and it asked whether anyone can taste a difference. He cut chops of equal thickness from one boneless pork loin, left them unsalted so salt wouldn't make tasters salivate, and cooked them in a pan held at one temperature, some to be sliced at once and some to be rested, all aimed at the same final temperature. The slices were covered and cooled to room temperature. Then four tasters, taking turns over 30 rounds with their eyes closed, were each given one rested and one unrested sample and made to pick the juicier. "Across 30 tasting rounds, my tasters identified the rested meat as juicier 16 times, an almost perfect 50/50 split. That's no better than a coin-flip".¹ One detail to know: his target was 140°F (60°C), which is below the US consumer figure for pork of 145°F with a rest. It was a tasting test, not a recipe, and lesson 4's rules still apply to your pork.

Serious Eats' own later summary, by Laila Ibrahim, puts the conclusion in one line: "When testers controlled for final internal temperature, rested and unrested meat lost essentially the same amount of juice."² Gritzer's own one line is the one this lesson is built on: "Resting meat is best understood as a method of temperature control, not juice retention."¹

How much to trust it

This is contested, with the evidence moving, and the new view rests on a narrow base: one publication's writers, Young's video, and a tasting test of 30 rounds by four people. Gritzer is candid about it: "Is this the last word on meat resting? Eh, probably not."¹ It is also fair to say what the old view had going for it. The juice on the board in López-Alt's photos was real. The question the re-test answers is what caused it, and the answer it gives is temperature at the moment of cutting.

So resting survives, for a different reason. Gritzer's conclusion: "It's a good idea to pull meat early from the pan or oven and let it rest, but only long enough to give it the time to slide up via carryover cooking to the target internal temperature, which you need to track closely."¹ In practice that means you leave the thermometer in, or check it every minute or two, and carve when the centre gets to where you want it, not when a timer says so. A fixed "rest it 15 minutes" can carry a small cut well past your target. Gritzer also passes on a point from Meathead of AmazingRibs.com: skipping the rest keeps a crisp skin or crust from steaming and going soggy.

That's the course's question at work. What was "rest the meat" protecting? The cook thought it was protecting the juice. The tests say it was protecting the centre's final temperature, and a rule applied for the wrong reason will be applied at the wrong length.

A whole roast chicken

A whole bird puts everything in this lesson on one tray: an oven, a thermometer, a thick part and a thin part, and a rule about where to measure. Set up for raw chicken as lesson 4 did, and if you're going to truss the bird, which ties the legs and wings in close to the body, do it now.

1. Heat the oven to at least 325°F (163°C), FSIS's floor for roasting.⁴ How far above that you go is your choice; the floor is FSIS's figure.
2. Don't stuff the bird. FSIS says: "For optimum safety, do not stuff whole poultry."¹⁰ The page doesn't explain, but lesson 2 does: the stuffing sits in the very middle, the last part to heat, and it's been soaked in raw juices. Cook the stuffing in its own dish. That reason is this course's reading, not FSIS's.
3. Pat the skin dry, which is lesson 6's point about browning, and season it.
4. Roast it. A recipe's time is the writer's estimate for their bird in their oven, which lesson 2 taught you to treat as a rough guide. Start checking well before it.
5. Check it where it matters. FSIS says to "check the internal temperature in three places: the innermost part of the thigh, the innermost part of the wing and the thickest part of the breast."¹⁰ In the US, all three should read 165°F (73.9°C) before the bird comes out.³ In the UK, the FSA puts the thickest part of a whole bird at "the leg between the drumstick and the breast", and if you're not using a thermometer, you cut in there and check that the juices run clear, there's no pink, and it is steaming hot.⁸

6. Rest it as temperature control. Move it to a board and carve once the centre has stopped climbing, which your thermometer will tell you. Now you can measure your carryover too: leave the probe in the breast and write down the reading every few minutes.
7. Carve it, and keep the carcass. Lesson 10 turns it into stock.

Pépin's KQED series has a carving video too: How to Carve a Roasted Chicken. As with the trussing one, this course checked its title and channel only.

The same beef as a whole joint and a rolled one

Now take one cut of beef and prepare it two ways. Leave a sirloin or a rib as a whole joint, or have the butcher bone it, roll it and tie it. It's the same meat. Under the UK's advice, the first may be pink in the middle and the second may not.

Lesson 4 gave you the reason, and it is worth reading in the FSA's words. Whole cuts of meat other than poultry and pork, it says, "only ever have bacteria on the outside surface of the meat", so they can be pink inside once you "sear the meat by using a high temperature to seal the meat and kill any bacteria that might be on the outside".⁸ Notice the word "seal". Lesson 6 showed that searing does not seal juice in. The FSA is not saying it does. Its "seal" means cooking the surface where the bacteria are.

Then, under a separate heading, the FSA lists meats that must be cooked all the way through: mince (what Americans call ground meat), burgers, sausages, kebabs, rolled joints, and offal. The reason it gives is this: "When a whole cut of meat is minced or skewered, this moves any bacteria from the outside all the way through the meat."⁸ Rolling is not in that sentence, but the same thing happens. When a joint is rolled, what was its outside surface ends up in the middle, where your sear can't reach it. That is this course's reading of why rolled joints are on the list; the page lists them without saying.

The US consumer chart does not treat rolled joints separately. It gives 145°F (62.8°C) with a 3-minute rest for "Roasts", and it says consumers "may choose to cook food to higher temperatures", not lower.³ The Food Code for restaurants does draw a line of the same kind: it puts "non-intact" meat, with injected meat as its example, under a stricter rule than intact meat such as a steak.⁵ Both countries' documents follow the same mechanism. Where the germs can be decides how far in the heat has to go.

Pork: pink and safe, or cooked through

Lesson 4 set out the difference: the US allows whole cuts of pork at 145°F with a 3-minute rest, and the UK advises pork cooked through with no pink. Here is where the US figure came from.

Until 2011 the US figure for pork was 160°F (71.1°C). That May the USDA lowered it to 145°F with a 3-minute rest, the same as for beef, veal and lamb. It gave two reasons, as CIDRAP reported them. One was quality: pork done that way is "both microbiologically safe and at its best quality". The other was memory. Elizabeth Hagen, the USDA's under secretary for food safety, said: "Now there will only be 3 numbers to remember: 145 for whole meats, 160 for ground meats and 165 for all poultry."⁶ The statement also took on colour directly. If raw pork is cooked to 145°F and then stands for 3 minutes, "it may still be pink but is safe to eat".⁶

Behind the old caution was trichinellosis, a disease caused by a parasitic worm that pork once commonly carried. The CDC's surveillance report for 2008 to 2012 gives the before and after. In 1947 to 1951, "approximately 400 cases with 10–15 trichinellosis-related deaths were reported each year". By 2008 to 2012, "the mean annual incidence of trichinellosis in the United States was 0.1 cases per 1 million population", and more of the cases came from bear meat than from pork.⁷ The report credits farming: "measures taken by the U.S. pork industry many decades ago to improve the health of farm-raised hogs have made Trichinella infections in U.S. swine rare".⁷ The Food Code's own background notes add that the parasites found in pork "are inactivated at temperatures below 145oF" (the "o" is the PDF's degree sign).⁵

The UK advice has not moved. The FSA says pork, like poultry, "can have bacteria all the way through the meat", so it should be cooked through, with "no pink, fleshy meat".⁸ Lesson 4 read that difference as one of how cautiously each agency phrases its advice rather than of microbiology, with the FSA's own 60°C for 45 minutes as the evidence, and that is still this course's reading. A pork chop at 145°F with a blush of pink follows the US advice and doesn't follow the UK's. Follow the advice where you live.

One trap on colour runs the other way. Cured pork, such as ham, "will remain pink after cooking", CIDRAP's report notes.⁶ Pink tells you less than it seems to in both directions, which is why the US answer is the thermometer.

Burgers: why a rare steak and a rare burger differ

Everything above leads here. A steak is a whole cut, so its bacteria are on the outside, and the pan kills them. A burger is minced, so whatever was on the outside of the meat is now all through it, and a pink middle means those bacteria may not have been heated enough.

The FSA spells out that the quality of the meat does not change this. Its burgers page says: "This applies to all burgers, including burgers made from good quality or expensive meat." And: "That’s why a burger needs to be served well done, while a steak can be served rare."⁹ In the UK, restaurants may serve burgers pink under strict controls, but the FSA's guidance to those restaurants says it aims to discourage people from eating them that way at home.⁹ The US figure is 160°F (71.1°C) for minced meat.³

A grilled burger is where colour misleads people most. FSIS reports that "In a USDA study, 21% of participants relied on visual cues such as color and grill marks to determine if their hamburger patties were fully cooked", and that "even if hamburgers look fully cooked, one in four hamburgers may not be safely cooked."¹⁰ The page does not give the survey's year. For a thin patty, the thermometer goes in through the side until its tip is in the centre, as lesson 2 showed you.

Grilling thin meat, and a tray of vegetables

Thickness decides how grilling goes. Radiant heat is fierce at the surface, and for a thick steak that means a dark crust long before the centre is ready, so by lesson 2's reasoning a thick cut does better moved further from the heat, or into the oven, once it has browned.

Thin meat is the opposite case. Korean-style grilled beef, sliced thin and cooked fast over high heat, is lesson 2's thickness rule running in your favour: the slices are so thin that the centre is cooked in about the time the surface takes to brown, and there's barely any carryover to manage, because there is no thick band of stored heat. This course has not read a source on how that dish is made, so take it as an example of the heat, not a recipe.

Vegetables roast by the rules of lesson 6. A tray of cauliflower, carrots, onion wedges and chickpeas, tossed with oil and spices such as cumin and chilli, browns if the pieces are dry, cut to one size (lesson 1) and spread out with room between them, and steams if the tray is crowded. That's a meat-free way to practise everything in this lesson except the safety rules, and a whole cauliflower roasted in one piece should show you carryover too. This course has not read a test of that, so it's your experiment.

Roast potatoes, and how brown is too brown

A roast potato is a dry surface browning over a soft middle, which is lesson 2 and lesson 6 again. López-Alt's roast potato video pushes it a long way: its description says the method is built for potatoes "incredibly crisp and crunchy on the outside", and gives one reason the method works: "Parboiling the potatoes in alkaline water breaks down their surfaces, creating tons of starchy slurry for added surface area and crunch."¹⁸ The link is How to Roast the Best Potatoes of Your Life, J. Kenji López-Alt. This course read the description, not the video.

How brown to take them is a live question, because browning a starchy food makes a chemical called acrylamide. The FSA says it forms "when starchy foods, such as potatoes and bread, are cooked at high temperatures (above 120°C)", and EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority, says "The main chemical process that causes this is known as the Maillard Reaction; it is the same reaction that ‘browns’ food and affects its taste."¹¹¹² The FDA adds that "Boiling and steaming do not typically form acrylamide", and that it "does not form, or forms at lower levels, in dairy, meat, and fish products."¹³ So this is a question about toast, chips and roast potatoes, not about a seared steak.

Whether it matters for people is contested. This course treats it the way the institute treats any contested claim: each side in its own words, and what would settle it.

The regulators: reduce it, as a precaution

EFSA, which assessed acrylamide in 2015, puts both halves of the evidence side by side: "Currently, studies on human subjects have provided limited and inconsistent evidence of increased risk of developing cancer. However, studies on laboratory animals have shown that exposure to acrylamide through the diet increased the likelihood of developing gene mutations and tumours in various organs." From the animal studies, its experts concluded that "acrylamide in food potentially increases the risk of developing cancer for consumers in all age groups".¹²

The UK's FSA starts from the same place. "Laboratory tests show that acrylamide in the diet causes cancer in animals. Scientists agree that acrylamide in food has the potential to cause cancer in humans as well. We recommend that the amount of acrylamide we all consume is reduced, as a precaution."¹¹ It is frank about the limits: "it’s not possible to estimate how much the risk is increased."¹¹ Its reasoning is a margin between the doses that harm animals and what people eat; it cites EFSA's scientific committee for a margin of 10,000 or more being of low concern for a substance like this, and says its own diet study found margins between 300 for an average adult and 120 for toddlers, which "indicated a concern for public health".¹¹ Its advice to home cooks, the heart of the 2017 campaign it called Go for Gold, is to "aim for a golden yellow colour or lighter when frying, baking, toasting or roasting starchy foods".¹¹¹⁵

The US FDA is more reserved. It says: "Acrylamide caused cancer in animals in studies where animals were exposed to acrylamide at very high doses", and that the "FDA is now conducting research to determine whether the much lower levels of acrylamide in food pose a health risk to people". To its own question, "Should I stop eating foods that are fried, roasted, or baked?", it answers: "No." It then gives tips for anyone who wants to cut down, including cooking cut potatoes "to a golden yellow color rather than a brown color".¹³

The other reading: no reliable human evidence

Cancer Research UK reads the same evidence from the other end. "Eating acrylamide in burnt food is unlikely to increase cancer risk." It sets the animal work aside for a reason: "It is true that animal studies have shown that acrylamide has cancer-causing effects. But these studies gave animals very high levels of acrylamide." And it gives the human side: "Good quality studies of people have found no link between eating foods high in acrylamide and cancer." Its advice is the plain opposite of a campaign: "You don’t need to avoid burnt starchy foods. There is no reliable evidence that eating acrylamide increases the risk of cancer in people."¹⁴

When the FSA launched Go for Gold in January 2017, the statistician David Spiegelhalter, then Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge, wrote about it. He began by granting the other side its ground: "Acrylamide can be, in large doses, a very nasty substance", and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) "considers it a ‘probable human carcinogen’". Then: "there is no good evidence of harm from humans consuming acrylamide in their diet".¹⁵ He quoted EFSA's own report to show how hard people had looked, and the passage he quoted includes the part that cuts the other way: "A few studies suggested an increased risk for renal cell, and endometrial (in particular in never-smokers) and ovarian cancer, but the evidence is limited and inconsistent."¹⁵ He read the FSA's margin of exposure the other way round: "adults with the highest consumption of acrylamide could consume 160 times as much and still only be at a level that toxicologists think unlikely to cause increased tumours in mice", and he called the margin of 10,000 that toxicology committees demand for cancer "rather arbitrary".¹⁵ His objection was to the campaign more than the chemistry: "the FSA provide no estimate of the current harm caused by acrylamide, nor the benefit from any reduction due to people following their advice. To be honest, I am not convinced it is appropriate to launch a public campaign on this basis."¹⁵

What each side is doing

This course's reading is that both are true to their method. EFSA and the FSA reason from animal studies and a margin of safety to precaution, which is what regulators are for when a substance causes cancer in animals and a risk cannot be ruled out. Cancer Research UK and Spiegelhalter reason from studies of people, which haven't shown a reliable link, to the advice that you needn't avoid burnt starchy foods. Neither side is ignoring the other's evidence; they weigh it differently. What would settle it, in this course's research notes, is large studies that follow people for years with their acrylamide intake measured in their blood, not estimated from what they say they ate, and count the cancers. The course's research found no such result that decides it.

Nutrition: The Evidence doesn't cover acrylamide, and this course is not making a health claim about it. Nutrition's lesson 8, "Processed food and meat", does show how a body that grades whether something can cause cancer differs from one that says how much risk you face, which is the distinction this argument turns on.

For the cook, the practical choice is small. A golden potato and a deep brown one are both roast potatoes. Which you make is a choice about flavour and about how much weight you give to precaution, and this course leaves it to you.

Potatoes in the fridge: the two countries differ

One piece of this advice has changed in the UK and not in the US. The FSA used to tell people not to keep raw potatoes in the fridge, because cold storage was thought to raise their sugars and so the acrylamide they make when roasted. It withdrew that. A study reviewed by its toxicity committee "has shown that home storage of potatoes in the fridge doesn’t materially increase acrylamide forming potential when compared to storage in a cool, dark place", so you may keep them either way.¹¹ The FDA still says: "Storing potatoes in the refrigerator can result in increased acrylamide during cooking."¹³ EFSA's page lists storage below 8°C among findings that raise sugars, with the warning that "EFSA has not evaluated the validity of these findings."¹² This course didn't read the studies behind either position, and neither regulator is called wrong: follow your own.

What people get wrong

"Resting lets the juices redistribute." When tests matched the temperature at the moment of cutting, rested and unrested meat lost about the same juice.¹² Resting is worth doing to let carryover bring the centre to your target, and its length is set by the thermometer, not a clock.

"Carryover is a few degrees at most." One of Gritzer's 1.5-inch chops rose 15°F (about 8°C) in under three minutes, more than the usual advice allows for.¹ How much yours rise depends on the cut, its size and the oven, and the only way to know is to measure.

"Pink pork is unsafe" and "pink means raw." Under the US rules, whole-cut pork at 145°F with a 3-minute rest can be pink and safe, and cured pork stays pink however long it's cooked.⁶ The UK advises pork cooked through. Colour isn't a thermometer in either country.

"A good burger can be served rare at home." The FSA's advice covers all burgers, expensive meat included, because mincing puts surface bacteria in the middle.⁹

"Searing seals the meat," read into the FSA's advice. The FSA's "seal" means cooking the surface where a whole cut's bacteria are. It says nothing about juice, which lesson 6's test showed a sear does not hold in.⁸

"Burnt toast gives you cancer" and "acrylamide is nothing." Neither end is what the sources say. Regulators advise cutting down as a precaution from animal evidence; Cancer Research UK says there's no reliable human evidence and you needn't avoid it.^11121314

Practice

Connections

Lesson 2 gave you the centre that lags, and this lesson showed it running the other way after the oven goes off. Lesson 4 gave you time plus temperature and the rule that mince is cooked through; here both came back as the 3-minute rest, the rolled joint and the burger. Lesson 5 showed proteins setting at their own temperatures and an egg still cooking out of the water, which is carryover in miniature. Lesson 6 dealt with the surface; this lesson dealt with the centre, and the reverse sear joins the two.

Lesson 8 turns to water: boiling, simmering, poaching, steaming and braising, where a pot of water holds the heat at a known temperature and carryover matters much less. The chicken carcass you kept goes into lesson 10's stock.

Go deeper

• Daniel Gritzer, "This Major Rule About Cooking Meat Turns out to Be Wrong", Serious Eats, 2025, the publisher's copy on AOL. Read in full for this course. The best account of why resting was misread, with the old test, Young's argument and a tasting test laid out step by step.
• FSA, Cooking your food. Read in full. The UK's rules for whole cuts, rolled joints, kebabs and poultry on one page.
• David Spiegelhalter, "Opinion: How dangerous is burnt toast?", University of Cambridge, 2017. Read in full. A statistician's reading of the evidence behind the FSA's campaign, including the margin of exposure explained in plain words. Read it beside the FSA's page on acrylamide, below.
• FSA, Acrylamide. Read in full. The regulator's case for precaution, with its margin-of-exposure figures and the withdrawn advice on potatoes.

Sources

1. Daniel Gritzer, "This Major Rule About Cooking Meat Turns out to Be Wrong", Serious Eats, syndicated on AOL, 22 July 2025, https://www.aol.com/major-rule-cooking-meat-turns-155336379.html . Read level: full, directly, the AOL copy; the Serious Eats original was not opened. Supports: the chop rising to target in under three minutes; the usual pull-early advice and the conventional-advice verdict; the flow of heat in and out; the variables and "no meaningful general rule"; carryover underestimated; the usual explanation of resting; López-Alt's old test and its flaw, as Gritzer describes them; Young's credentials, change of mind, tests and vapour pressure, as Gritzer describes a video this course did not watch; Young's thermometer business, and Gritzer's use of it; Gritzer's pork tasting test, its 140°F target and 16 of 30; the conclusion, the pull-quote and "probably not"; Meathead's point on crusts, as Gritzer summarises it.
2. Laila Ibrahim, "Why So Many Meat Cooking “Rules” Are Wrong—and What Actually Makes Steaks Juicy and Chicken Crisp", Serious Eats, syndicated on AOL, 21 December 2025 . Read level: full, directly, the AOL copy. Supports: the one-line summary of the matched-temperature finding.
3. USDA FSIS, "Safe Minimum Internal Temperature Chart", last updated 14 April 2025, read through the Internet Archive's September 2026 capture . Read level: full. Supports: the chart's opening instruction, 145°F with a 3-minute rest for steaks, chops and roasts, 160°F for minced meat, 165°F for poultry, and "may choose to cook food to higher temperatures".
4. USDA FSIS, "Danger Zone (40°F - 140°F)", last updated 28 June 2023, read through a 2026 Internet Archive capture . Read level: full. Supports: the 325°F oven floor.
5. US FDA, Food Code 2026, § 3-401.11 and Annex 3, https://www.fda.gov/media/194741/download . Read level: the sections cited, searched in the full PDF. Supports: the roast table's footnote on post-oven heat rise; non-intact meat (injected, as the example) under a stricter rule; the Annex's sentence on the parasites in pork. The Food Code governs restaurants and retail, not home kitchens.
6. CIDRAP News, "USDA: 145 degrees is safe temp for pork", 24 May 2011, https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/foodborne-disease/usda-145-degrees-safe-temp-pork . Read level: full, directly. The USDA's own release was not read; its words here are as CIDRAP reported them. Supports: the 2011 change from 160°F, the reason for the rest, "at its best quality", Hagen's three numbers, pink but safe, and cured pork staying pink.
7. N. O. Wilson and colleagues, "Trichinellosis Surveillance, United States, 2008–2012", MMWR Surveillance Summaries 64(SS-1), 16 January 2015, read through the Internet Archive . Read level: full, directly. Supports: about 400 cases a year in 1947 to 1951, 0.1 per million in 2008 to 2012, bear meat as the larger source, and the credit to the pork industry's measures.
8. FSA, "Cooking your food", GOV.UK, published 18 December 2017, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cooking-your-food/cooking-your-food . Read level: full, directly. Supports: 70°C for 2 minutes at the middle; whole cuts with bacteria only on the outside, seared to "seal"; the list of meats to cook through, rolled joints and kebabs included, and the minced-or-skewered sentence; poultry and pork cooked through with no pink; the thickest part of a whole bird. Why rolling belongs on the list is this course's reading, as the body says.
9. FSA, "Burgers", GOV.UK, 19 December 2017, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/burgers ; and "Less than thoroughly cooked beef burgers: guidance for food businesses", version of 22 May 2023 . Read level: full. Supports: "all burgers, including burgers made from good quality or expensive meat"; well done against rare steak; restaurants under controls, and the aim of discouraging rare burgers at home.
10. USDA FSIS, "Food Thermometers", last updated 21 March 2025, and "Doneness Versus Safety", last updated 10 July 2024, read through Internet Archive captures . Read level: full. Supports: three places in a whole bird, not stuffing it, the 21% who relied on visual cues, and one in four hamburgers. The survey year behind "one in four" isn't given on the page.
11. FSA, "Acrylamide", GOV.UK, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/acrylamide/acrylamide , public_updated 9 January 2018 . Read level: full, directly. Supports: forming above 120°C; animals, humans, precaution; "not possible to estimate"; the margins of exposure, 10,000, 300 and 120, and "a concern for public health"; golden yellow or lighter; the withdrawn potato advice and the COT-reviewed study.
12. European Food Safety Authority, "Acrylamide" topic page, https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/acrylamide , describing its 2015 opinion . Read level: full, directly; the 2015 opinion itself was not read. Supports: the Maillard sentence; limited and inconsistent human evidence against the animal studies; "potentially increases the risk"; storage below 8°C in a literature summary EFSA says it has not validated.
13. US FDA, "Acrylamide Questions and Answers" and "Acrylamide and Diet, Food Storage, and Food Preparation", both content current as of 5 March 2024 . Read level: full, directly. Supports: very high doses in animals; the FDA's research; "No" to stopping fried, roasted or baked food; boiling and steaming; dairy, meat and fish; golden yellow; potatoes out of the fridge.
14. Cancer Research UK, "Does burnt toast cause cancer?", last reviewed 18 December 2024, https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-cancer/cancer-myths-questions/does-burnt-toast-cause-cancer . Read level: full, directly; the meta-analyses it cites were not read. Supports: every Cancer Research UK quotation.
15. David Spiegelhalter, "Opinion: How dangerous is burnt toast?", University of Cambridge, 23 January 2017, https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/opinion-how-dangerous-is-burnt-toast . Read level: full, directly. Supports: his title and the date of the Go for Gold launch; "no good evidence of harm"; the EFSA passage he quotes, including the renal, endometrial and ovarian studies; his concession on large doses and IARC; his reading of the margin of exposure; his objection to the campaign.
16. foodsafety.gov, "Cook to a Safe Minimum Internal Temperature", last reviewed 21 November 2024, read through a 2026 Internet Archive capture . Read level: full. Supports: the sentence on why rest time matters.
17. America's Test Kitchen, "Searing Steak", Cook's Illustrated how-to, no author or date, https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos/5699-searing-steak . Read level: full, directly. Supports: the reverse-sear order in lesson 6's test and its equal juice loss. That the reverse sear leaves less heat to carry over is this course's inference, as the body says.
18. J. Kenji López-Alt, roast potato video, YouTube, 2 December 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=argKpeiKFfo . Read level: the title (by oEmbed) and the video's written description; the video was not watched. Supports: the two phrases quoted from the description.

The Pépin trussing and carving videos (KQED Food) and López-Alt's reverse sear video were checked for title and channel only . Nothing in the lesson is attributed to what they show.