I hated cooking steak at home for one big reason: the smoke. I rent an apartment in Brooklyn, which means I have to deal with a nearby and sensitive smoke detector. But even without the threat of a piercing siren, steak was always one of those “sometimes” dishes that ended up making more of a mess than I wanted to clean up.

Until the concept of reverse searing came into my life and changed everything. Now I can cook myself a perfect steak, and so can you.

Searing is the classic way to cook a steak: simply place it in a piping hot pan and sear it until it’s cooked through. “Reverse searing” is the catchy term for first cooking a steak low and slow in a conventional oven, then throwing it into a hot pan for a few minutes to get a nice brown color on the outside. The steak effectively cooks almost all the way through in the oven; you sear it to get the delicious browning and flavor that comes with the process.

A restaurant kitchen has industrial fans and grease traps, and getting a meal done in minutes is the priority. That’s a good place to quickly pan-fry a steak. But at home, there are complications, particularly searing, especially for newbies learning to cook steak at home. Searing the fat and meat creates smoke in your kitchen. And while it’s mostly aesthetic, searing a steak over high heat cooks the protein fibers on the outside much faster, causing the outer layer to shrink and the center to bulge, and that warping of the meat makes it difficult to sear evenly. Searing is primarily about adding flavor, so an uneven sear actually minimizes flavor.