Sous vide cooking, is hands down, the most foolproof method of cooking a steak to perfection. If fact you can actually turn a cheap steak cut into an amazingly tender, tasty steak that is far beyond any other method I’ve tried.
Still, if you want to go old fashioned and straight up grill it, there is one place I cook for my cooking reference and information. Thats Serious Eats. In their Food Labs, they break down the science of cooking into an understandable format and provide you with proven information.
My part-time college job was cooking in a small chain of steakhouses (counter service, but actual high-quality, never frozen steaks - an interesting concept long since out of business). We cooked on a great big charcoal grill. “Scruff the surface with a sharp knife”, douse with basting oil and seasonings and briefly back on the fire was actually the technique we used to save a steak that got accidentally burnt on one side.
We didn’t actually cut it off - just the act of cutting a cross-hatch pattern plus basting hid the fact that it had been burnt. This wasn’t somebody’s ‘method to do steak’, it was our method to avoid throwing a steak away and having to start over after we’d screwed up. It worked quite well, in fact.
It’s quite possible we’re using different definitions of burnt. In a restaurant, a steak that is over-charred to the point of being unsuitable for sending out to the customer is burnt. If you mean basically turned to carbon, then no, we couldn’t fix that. But I was never that inattentive while at the grill.
