where do you even put the probe

Three T-bones, a Wednesday, family dinner at home. Two rules for grilling a T-bone, both of them correct, and I spent about ten minutes finding out they do not like each other.

Rule one: the probe goes in the strip, the big lobe, tip dead center and well clear of the bone. Bone conducts heat faster than muscle, so a tip resting against it reads high and you pull the steak early.

Rule two: the tenderloin, the small lobe, points away from the hot burner. It runs 5°F to 8°F ahead of the strip no matter what you do, so you give it the coolest ground you have.

Fine. Now go stand in front of a Weber Genesis with three steaks and two TempPro probes and try to obey both.

Point the tenderloin left, away from the lit burner, and the strip is suddenly on the right side of every steak, which is the side facing the fire. Slide the probe in from that edge and the cable runs directly over the flame. Come in from the opposite edge and you are pushing through the bone to reach the strip. Meanwhile the cable keeps trying to lie flat across a grate bar, which is the thing that actually kills a probe. Not the ambient heat. The metal.

I stood there holding a steak in one hand and a probe in the other for longer than the sear took.

The fix is to stop thinking about left and right. Go in from the front edge of the steak and push straight back into the strip. It is a long muscle and there is plenty of meat along that axis. The cable comes out toward you, hangs over the front rail, and never touches the cooking surface at all. The tenderloin stays pointed wherever you want it. Two rules, no argument.

Everything after that was the easy part. Two days of dry brine on a rack, indirect until the strip hit 112°F, then off and patted dry again, because twenty five minutes under a closed lid quietly undoes some of what those two days accomplished. 90 seconds a side over a burner on high. Off at 125°F, onto a rack, ten minutes.

They were a hit, and nothing came back to the kitchen on the bones. The crust is the one thing I would push harder next time. It browned hard in the grate lines and stayed paler in between, which is the honest limit of searing on gas: you are cooking off hot bars, not radiant coals. A cast iron pan sitting on the sear burner would close most of that gap.

The corn was the only real miss. I put it on the warming rack when the steaks went on and it came off underdone, because by then I had shut two of the three burners off. It needed to go on at the start of the preheat, while everything was still ripping. Easy fix. Irritating to work out at the table with a fork in your hand.

Full method is in reverse seared T-bones with grilled corn if you want the timeline.

Anyone got a better trick for probe cables? Because "drape it over the front rail" is something I made up at 7:45 on a Wednesday and I would love to hear I am wrong.