John Myers
In the USA, no BBQ should be without it and it is becoming increasingly popular here too – the flank steak with its intense taste and incomparable aroma. At our table, we show you the core temperature at which you can get the meat perfectly grilled on your plate.
Flank Steak: little meat science
Maybe you’ve read the term bavette at your butcher’s and didn’t really know what it meant? This is a flank steak, which, admittedly, can also be described as a belly flap.
- a lean cut of beef
- thin and long
- beautiful marbling
- aromatic taste
- is sold whole, 600-1000g
- preferably from the heifer
- ideally hung for at least 3 weeks
Grill flank steak
You are probably more familiar with meat with long fibers than stew because it becomes nice and soft. But don’t worry – a flank steak is perfect for grilling. You can put your flank steak in a marinade, preferably strong, or just season it with salt and pepper. But please remember to take it out of the fridge in good time, i.e. about half an hour beforehand, so that the meat can reach room temperature. It doesn’t matter whether you grill with charcoal or use a gas grill, the only important thing is that the grill is really hot: the hotter, the more appetizing and beautiful the crust of the steak and the better the aromatic meat tastes.
Tip: If you cut the flank steak across the grain into thin slices after grilling and then serve, you will be amazed by the fantastic aroma of the long-fibred meat. With the fiber cut open, the flesh would be difficult to chew.
The perfect core temperature
Regardless of whether you prefer your flank steak rare, i.e. very rare, classic medium, or well-done – you can easily read from our table at which temperature the meat is grilled the way you like it:
Doneness and core temperature
- rare (very bloody) 48-53 °C
- medium-rare (bloody) 53 °C
- medium (pink) 55 °C
- well-done (through) 60-62 °C
Our recommendation is to grill a flank steak medium or medium-rare. This makes it wonderfully tender and you can enjoy the great taste of meat. If you decide on a high core temperature, it can quickly happen that the flank steak becomes tough. If you like it very rare, it is not that easy to conjure up a perfect piece of meat on your plate with a flank steak. On the one hand, the steak is very thin and after a short time it is medium or cooked through, on the other hand, you want your meat to have a nice crust – and that takes a few minutes, in which the flank steak is usually grilled more than rare.
Measure core temperature
It is best to use a meat thermometer if you want to measure the core temperature of your flank steak. With this, you pierce the thickest part of the steak and you can then easily read the core temperature that has already been reached.
Tip: Don’t stab the meat too often, otherwise too much of the delicious meat juice will escape, which makes the flank steak so wonderfully tasty. It is practical that many meat thermometers can remain in the meat throughout the grilling process.
We strongly advise against the method of determining the degree of doneness with the so-called “ball of thumb test” for flank steak. The method is simply too imprecise to be able to determine an exact core temperature and thus exactly the desired degree of doneness.
