Glossary
Carryover cooking
The rise in internal temperature that continues after meat is pulled off the heat, sometimes several degrees.
Carryover cooking is the heat energy stored in the outer layers of a piece of meat that keeps traveling inward after the meat leaves the grill or smoker. Because that stored heat has nowhere else to go once cooking stops, the center of the cut keeps rising in temperature for several minutes, sometimes climbing five to ten degrees on a large roast, brisket or whole turkey, and only a couple of degrees on a thin steak or chicken breast.
This is why pulling meat at the exact final target number almost always leads to slightly overcooked results. Recipes that account for carryover tell you to remove the meat a set number of degrees below the goal, then let the rest period finish the job. The bigger and denser the cut, the more carryover matters, which is part of why a thick roast behaves so differently from a thin cutlet on the same grill.
The main mistake is ignoring carryover entirely and cooking straight to the final number, which often means a lot of gray, overdone meat right under the surface by the time it is sliced. The fix is simple: know roughly how much a given cut tends to climb, pull it early, and trust the rest period rather than the grill to finish the last few degrees.