Sear in bursts. Rest in between. Repeat.
Instead of one long sear, short rounds of hard heat with the meat off the pan between them. The same principle runs at every size:
- 90 seconds a side on a venison medallion, rest 3 minutes, go again
- 3 minutes a side on a bone-in chuletón, rest 6 minutes, go again
- 4 minutes a side on a tomahawk and rest 8. Then 3 and rest 6. Then 2 and rest 4.
- 15 minutes in and 15 minutes out of a 500°F oven on a whole chicken, three times over
Why it works
In one long sear the heat piles up under the crust and cooks a grey band into the meat before the middle is anywhere near ready. Take the meat off and that stored heat moves inward instead of adding to the band, so the band stays thin.
The surface also dries out again while it's off the pan. A wet surface can't get hot enough to brown, because the water sitting on it caps the temperature. A dry one browns straight away. So each round browns faster than the one before it.
Harold McGee found the milder version of this and Kenji López-Alt confirmed it: a steak flipped every 15 to 30 seconds browns just as hard, cooks around 30 percent faster, and comes out with far less grey under the crust. Taking the meat off the heat entirely is the same idea with a longer interval.
On the whole chicken it does one more job. The rests allow heat to equalize and fat to render slowly, resulting in crispier skin and juicier meat than continuous roasting. Fat needs time to melt out, and it can't do that while the surface is being driven hard.
Two things that make it work in practice
Wipe the pan and re-oil between rounds, and get it ripping hot again. The bits from the last round will burn and turn bitter into the crust.
Check the temperature between rounds, not just at the end. It keeps climbing while it rests, so read it before you decide whether to go again. That's carryover, and it's the reason a fourth round is sometimes one round too many.
The rounds get shorter, or the rests get longer
Both work, and both are in these recipes. The core is warmer with every round, so it needs less time against the pan and more time to even out. A tomahawk goes 4, then 3, then 2. A venison loin rests 2, then 3, then 5.
Two places this is the wrong move
Rendering skin. Duck goes into a cold pan and stays there, because fat needs long steady contact to melt out. Bursts are the wrong instruction entirely.
A pan that can't recover. This needs cast iron or carbon steel. A thin pan won't come back to temperature between rounds, so every sear after the first is weaker than the last, which is the opposite of the point.