If you’ve ever prepared a steak and wished you could see what the meat actually looked like on the inside before you cut into it, Cook My Meat can offer a glimpse.
Cook My Meat, created by MIT students Kate Roe, Laura Breiman, and Marissa Stephens, isn’t exactly new. It was developed back in 2013, but the nifty tool has recently resurfaced, much to the excitement of steak-lovers everywhere. Here’s how it works: you enter some juicy parameters, pick some temps to cook your cut with, then you’re shown an approximation of how your meat will turn out when it’s all said and done. You’ll see some familiar colors, like red, pink, and overcooked.
The tool does this by calculating heat diffusion in the meat at each time step with the Crank-Nicolson method, using On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen as a rubric for protein denaturaization temperatures. You can even compare two cooking methods to see which is better for that expensive slab of beef you picked up at the butcher.
But even with a high-tech tool like this, cooking the perfect steak is still up to you. Cook My Heat can’t account for stove and grill quirks, different pan types, and different meat consistencies. It’s best to think of this tool as a fun way to conduct steak cooking research.