An experimental investigation was conducted to correlate heat extraction with boiling phenomena at the liquid-probe interface during forced convective quenching of a steel probe in a laboratory-scale facility. A conical-end probe made of AISI 304 stainless steel instrumented with two type-K thermocouples was rapidly cooled from 850 °C in water at 60°C, flowing with a free-stream velocity of 0.2 m/s. Bubble formation, growth and detachment at the probe surface was recorded with a high-speed video camera. Using the experimental cooling curves measured with the sub-surface thermocouple, the surface heat flux was estimated by solving a onedimensional inverse heat conduction problem (IHCP) without phase change. The inverse boiling curve obtained showed that the maximum peak on heat extraction was reached during the nucleate boiling stage and is associated with the time at which the wetting front passed though the thermocouple axial location. From image analysis, two regions can be distinguished as the wetting front travels through the probe: the wetting front, formed by small bubbles that grew rapidly and coalesced due to the large bubble population; and a region trailing the wetting front, where the size, population and dynamic behavior of the bubbles was quite different. These bubbles grew conserving a spheroidal shape until they reached their maximum size; when they were decreasing, a concave deformation was observed at the interface due to condensation caused by the quench media rewetting the surface and, finally, the bubble departed from the probe surface, collapsing in the bulk flow near the probe surface.