Food Science

Why a roast keeps getting hotter after you take it out: carryover cooking and the heat still on its way in

Graph of temperature from surface to centre of a roast: a hot outer edge sloping down to a cooler centre, with an arrow showing the centre still rising past the target line
30seconds
The 30-second version

You pull the roast at 60 °C, and five minutes later the probe says 66 °C. Nothing is heating it, so where did the heat come from?

The answer is that an oven heats a roast from the outside in, so when you take it out the outer layers are still far hotter than the centre. That stored heat keeps flowing inward. Try the simulation: pull a roast at the moment you think the centre will end up at 60 °C, then change the thickness and oven temperature to see why thick roasts and hot ovens overshoot the most.

Deep dive · 4 min
Deep dive · 4 min

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