The Apple Juice Trick For Perfectly Crusted Steaks At Your Next Barbecue

When the weather starts to warm up and the grass is ready to mow, it can only mean one thing: It's barbecue season. Yes, it's that magical time of year when you can step out of the hot kitchen and let your steaks sizzle under the sun and stars. Sure, burgers on the grill are great, but the best part of summer barbecuing is the chance to get a hard char on a good steak without worrying about filling the kitchen with smoke. If you like a nice brown crust on your meat (and really, who doesn't?), try a cool trick to make the crust even better: Coat your next round of ribeyes or strip steaks with apple juice. Thanks to the high heat from the grill, the sugar in the juice will caramelize and produce a perfectly crusted steak every time.

Adding apple juice to your steak routine is easy. In fact if you can swab barbecue sauce or spray olive oil, you've got all the skills required. The only tools and ingredients you'll need are some store-bought apple juice and either a spray bottle or a basting brush.

Apple juice might not be the first thing you think of when it comes time for grilling, but the sweet drink can be a much more useful ingredient than just a juice box to pack in a kid's lunch. Apple juice has a lot of natural sugar and flavor, not unlike barbecue sauce, so it's not entirely out of left field to use it on your steaks. In fact, lots of experienced grillmasters use an apple juice marinade for pork chops, chicken, ribs, and of course, steak to get extra flavor and color. This is all thanks to a little grilling science.

If you know anything about the Maillard reaction, you might think that it's counterintuitive to get the surface of your steaks wet with apple juice to achieve a perfect crust. That's a good instinct because the surface of food needs to be dry in order to turn brown. However, when you're grilling meat like steaks, you'll be working with temperatures as high as 450 and even 500 degrees Fahrenheit. If you spread just a thin layer of juice on the outside of your steak, the water will evaporate almost immediately, leaving behind the sugar and apple flavor. That sugar will caramelize at 300 degrees, so it'll start browning as soon as the water has evaporated.

The trick to getting a perfectly brown crust on your next steak using apple juice is to add a very thin layer of it to the steak. The easiest way to do this, if you want to be a bit of a grill geek, is to fill up a food-safe plastic or glass spray bottle with regular apple juice from the grocery store. When the grill is hot and it's time to sear the steaks, simply give both sides a spritz and let them cook over high heat for a few minutes on each side. If you don't have a spray bottle on hand, you can also use a silicone basting brush to dab juice onto each side of the steak.

As your steaks start to brown and cook, you can also give them a second spray if you want some extra sugar on the crust. Just make sure that the meat is starting to look brown and seared before you go for round two so that you get the caramelizing effect and you're not just keeping the surface wet, which will result in steaming instead of searing.