dry brine steak

I've been reading and watching about dry brining, so I decided to give it a go. Normally I just salt my freshly purchased ribeye, let sit on counter until room temp and then reverse seer. This time I went with the dry brine.

I have no pics, because I didn't anticipate this being some photo journal for TD. It's that the results were so all over the place that I decided to see how others feel about it.


I bought two prime ribeyes with the intention of cooking one on Sat night after 24 hours dry brining (salt then rest on cooling rack in fridge) and the other for lunch Sunday (so about 40 hours).


24hr brine: I was not much of a fan. I cooked the same way as always with a reverse seer to 130, rest for 10 mins then seer 1min/side. The color was still med-rare, but it did have a larger gray line on the surface. It wasn't bad, but it was much dryer than my standard buy, salt, rest an hour then cook.

40hr brine: I didn't want to have a repeat, so I scrapped the reverse seer and decided to just seer on cast iron to rare. I did 2 mins/side and called it a day. Holy shite this was amazing. I generally am not a fan of rare, because the texture isn't very palatable to me. I prefer the change in texture that occurs with med-rare. With this dry brine, the internal texture changed to that standard cooked MR texture without being cooked. It also absorbed more of the salt flavor deep within the meat.

Ultimately the rare dry brine was a better version of the standard med rare. You get the texture of MR with the flavor profile of rare. Seriously this was great stuff.


How do your dry brines turn out? Anyone else have similar results with reverse seer at med rare? Did I do something wrong that you can tell to cause it to be dry?