Steak cook time
A one-inch medium-rare steak needs 3 minutes per side in a hot pan, 6 minutes in all, and three and a half per side on the grill. Enter the thickness and doneness from rare to well done, and get a timer you can trust. Free in your browser.
- Free
- Runs in your browser
- No sign-up
- Your data stays on your device
Run — free
Worked example
- Thickness
- 1
- Doneness
- Medium rare
- Thickness unit
- in
- Doneness label
- medium rare
- Minutes per inch
- 3
- Minutes per side
- 3
How long to cook a steak is the question home cooks type when the butcher tag lists thickness and the recipe only says medium rare. This steak cook time calculator turns a positive thickness in inches and a doneness level into pan or grill minutes per side using a fixed minutes-per-inch chart for a hot sear that you flip once. Enter a one-inch steak at medium rare on the pan path and you get three minutes per side; the same steak on the grill path is three and a half.
How the minutes-per-inch steak chart works
Home cooks estimate steak cook time from thickness because a whole-muscle steak on a screaming-hot pan or grill cooks on a roughly linear minutes-per-inch ladder when you sear one side, flip once, and rest off the heat.
This capability encodes a fixed high-heat chart: rare is two minutes per inch per side on the pan and two and a half on the grill; medium rare is three pan and three and a half grill; medium is four pan and four and a half grill; medium well is five pan and five and a half grill; well done is six pan and six and a half grill. A one-inch medium-rare steak in a pan is three minutes per side and six minutes total.
A one-and-a-half-inch medium steak on the grill is one point five times four point five, which is six point seven five minutes per side. The grill adder of half a minute per inch models slightly less continuous contact on open grates versus a flat skillet; it is not a live weather feed and not a substitute for a probe thermometer.
Carryover during rest can raise the center a few degrees after you pull the steak, so treat the returned minutes as sear time, then rest the meat separately on the board. Frozen steaks, reverse-sear ovens, sous-vide baths, and ground-beef safety are different search intents with different tools. What this page answers is the everyday query how long to cook a steak per side by thickness and doneness with one honest, reproducible formula that meal cards and timers can pin in tests.
Where a steak cook-time calculator shows up in real work
Weeknight cooks converting a one-inch ribeye into a three-minute-per-side pan timer stop guessing from color when every lookup uses the same minutes-per-inch chart. Recipe sites and meal-kit cards need one oracle so a one-inch medium-rare steak never prints two minutes in one draft and five in another. Culinary schools quiz students on the classic per-side rule; a deterministic function grades the one-inch item the same in every classroom.
Grill apps can store user thickness and doneness and start a two-sided countdown without scraping conflicting blogs. Grocery meal planners that already know package thickness can attach a clock estimate without standing up a recipe engine. Restaurant expo tickets that list a one-and-a-half-inch New York strip at medium can resolve a grill window for the station clock.
If you later need beef steak doneness temperatures, pork roast minutes by weight, or vegetable steaming times, treat those as separate search intents and landings rather than overloading this steak-cook-time-by-thickness page; the same house keeps those tools distinct so search landings and product contracts stay clear.
What you can do with it
Weeknight pan-sear timer
Turn a one-inch steak at medium rare into a three-minute-per-side pan countdown with a six-minute total for the kitchen display.
Recipe card generators
Emit a stable per-side window from one fixed minutes-per-inch chart so drafts never drift between two minutes and five for the same inch.
Culinary quiz and LMS checks
Grade how-long-per-side-for-a-one-inch-steak items with a deterministic oracle that rejects non-positive thickness cleanly.
FAQ
How does the steak cook time calculator work?
It multiplies steak thickness in inches by a fixed minutes-per-inch-per-side rate for your doneness. Pan uses two through six minutes per inch from rare to well done; grill adds half a minute per inch. The response is minutes per side plus total minutes for both faces.
How many minutes per side for a one-inch medium-rare steak?
Three minutes per side in a hot pan (six minutes total) and three and a half minutes per side on the grill. A one-and-a-half-inch medium steak on the grill is six point seven five minutes per side.
What heat does this assume?
A preheated high-heat pan or direct grill, flipping once. The grill path adds 0.5 minutes per inch versus the pan chart because grate contact is less continuous than a skillet. Always confirm doneness with a thermometer, not the clock alone.
What does it cost?
The browser tool is free and runs locally.
How long per side for a 1.5-inch medium steak on the grill?
About 6.75 minutes per side. Medium on the grill is 4.5 minutes per inch of thickness, so a steak one and a half inches thick takes 1.5 times 4.5 minutes on each face before you rest it.
Related tools
For developers — API access
Everything on this page is available programmatically. This section is for teams who want to wire it into their own systems; everyone else can just use the tool above.
API endpoint
Prefer to automate it? One authenticated POST creates the task; the result comes back by webhook or a signed link. The same capability also runs here on the web, by email and from Telegram — and soon from our app too.
Call it from your stack
curl -X POST https://api.kit.forhosting.com/cook/steak-cook-time \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KIT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"thickness":1,"doneness":"medium_rare"}'const res = await fetch("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/cook/steak-cook-time", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Authorization": `Bearer ${process.env.KIT_KEY}`,
"Content-Type": "application/json"
},
body: JSON.stringify({
"thickness": 1,
"doneness": "medium_rare"
})
});
const { task_id } = await res.json();import os, requests
res = requests.post(
"https://api.kit.forhosting.com/cook/steak-cook-time",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['KIT_KEY']}"},
json={
"thickness": 1,
"doneness": "medium_rare"
},
)
task_id = res.json()["task_id"]<?php
$res = file_get_contents("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/cook/steak-cook-time", false, stream_context_create([
"http" => [
"method" => "POST",
"header" => "Authorization: Bearer " . getenv("KIT_KEY") . "\r\nContent-Type: application/json",
"content" => '{"thickness":1,"doneness":"medium_rare"}',
],
]));
$task = json_decode($res, true);body := bytes.NewBufferString(`{"thickness":1,"doneness":"medium_rare"}`)
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "https://api.kit.forhosting.com/cook/steak-cook-time", body)
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("KIT_KEY"))
req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
res, _ := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)Example request
{
"thickness": 1,
"doneness": "medium_rare"
}Example response
{
"task_id": "tsk_a1b2c3d4e5f6a1b2c3d4e5f6",
"type": "cook.steak_cook_time",
"status": "queued",
"_links": {
"result": "/tasks/tsk_…/result"
}
}The API is asynchronous: the call returns a task_id immediately and the result arrives by webhook. Polling is capped at 1 req/s per task.
Pricing
Published price — no tokens, no invented credits. A failed task is never charged.
Errors
| HTTP | Code | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
401 | unauthorized | Missing or invalid API key. |
402 | insufficient_balance | Your balance doesn't cover the task price. |
404 | unknown_type | That task type doesn't exist. |
429 | rate_limited | Too many requests. Use the webhook instead of polling. |
Technical notes
Zero or negative thickness fails with invalid_input because a non-positive cut cannot scale a clock.
What you send and what you get back
Optional method is pan or grill and defaults to pan when omitted. Zero and negative thicknesses fail because minutes scale from a positive cut, and a non-positive thickness cannot produce a meaningful timer. The capability does not accept centimetres as a first-class unit on this landing, does not take a starting fridge temperature, and does not return an internal-temperature target beyond documenting the chart assumption in this guide. Send two required fields: thickness, a finite number of inches strictly greater than zero, and doneness, one of rare, medium_rare, medium, medium_well, or well_done. Thickness may arrive under aliases thickness_in, inches, thick, or steak_thickness; doneness may arrive as level, doneness_level, cook, or done; method may arrive as cook_method, heat, pan_or_grill, or surface. Numeric strings such as one are accepted for thickness; empty strings, missing keys, and non-finite values fail with invalid_input naming thickness. On success the response echoes thickness and thickness_unit as in, reports doneness as a stable snake_case key plus doneness_label, method as pan or grill, minutes_per_inch as the chart rate, minutes_per_side as the product, total_minutes as twice that for both faces, known_levels as the accepted English labels, plus formula and timing_method strings for audit logs. Example: thickness one, doneness medium_rare, method pan yields minutes_per_side three and total_minutes six. Example: thickness one point five, doneness medium, method grill yields minutes_per_inch four point five and minutes_per_side six point seven five. Wire minutes_per_side into a countdown per face and total_minutes into a kitchen display. Pricing for successful API calls is the published base of $0.002 per item; validation failures do not consume prepaid balance.
Where a steak cook-time calculator shows up in real work
Content pipelines that normalize cook until medium rare can replace the vague phrase with numeric minutes_per_side before they emit localized copy. Because this capability is a pure parse engine, API pricing is the published base of $0.002 per successful item and failed validation does not consume balance.
Technical questions
What happens if I enter zero or a negative thickness?
The request fails with invalid_input because a non-positive steak thickness cannot estimate cook time. Failed validation is not charged.