Sous Vide - a New Way to Cook Meat

 Sous vide is new to us.  It is a cooking method that involves the use of an immersion heater in a pot of water.  The meat is seasoned and inserted into a plastic bag with air removed.  The water temperature is set (we like 138.5º).  The time is set, but it's quite flexible.  We tend to do a frozen steak for around four or five hours.  The bag of meat warms in the liquid for that time.  The meat temperature cannot go above the water temperature, so if you set it for medium rare, you can leave it for hours and it will not go beyond medium rare.  But there will be texture changes.  If you are interested in learning more, this is the most comprehensive guide I have seen:  Serious Eats.  Then when it is "done", dry it, refrigerate for 10 minutes, then you sear it to get a good char without cooking the meat.

Today's meat is a strip steak from Aldi's.  

We seasoned it with salt, black pepper, and sliced fresh garlic that D grew last summer.

You can put it in a bag with one of those sealer gadgets, but we have been happy with quart or gallon freezer (not storage) bags.  The Boulder brand from Aldi's works fine.  I notice many folks use ZipLock bags.  FWIW, I don't trust the zipper bags to keep out water, so we use the double zip bags rather than the slider bags.

The cooking container is a plastic file-folder holder, repurposed for sous vide.  We fill it with hot water.  This is when it's handy to have the flexible sprayer hose on the faucet.

We have found it wise to cook near the drain of the sink rather than trying to lift that weighty container when it's time to drain it.

The first time we used it, we put it in the dish-drainer part of the sink.

That tied up the sink for 5 hours - so for the next times, we got an extension cord and moved the set-up  to the counter.

The gadget - ours is Anovo (which gets the second highest reviews).

The Breville gets the highest reviews and is a little more expensive, 

but can only be controlled with a smartphone.

As old-timers, we like the control of push buttons.

This has been cooking for 6 minutes of the four and a half hours:

The temperature is set for 139.1º.  The container has plastic wrap on it to reduce evaporation.

It will cook for 4.5 hours, then we remove the bag and take out the meat and dry the meat with paper towels, so that in the searing process, there will be no steaming.  

The next step will be the refrigerator in summertime, but in winter, D takes the meat out to sear on a hotplate in the garage, and while warming the pan, the meat is chilling a bit in the unheated garage.  You want the outside of the meat a little cool so that the meat doesn't cook much more, just sears the outside.  

How does it look?

When it comes out of the bath, it is kind of gray and not very attractive.

But after it is seared - yum!

Note how evenly it is done.  

And it is delicious!

We tried a new searing technique, using butter instead of oil.

It ended up as brown butter and the meat was delicious.

We tried the brown butter on the potato.  Wow!

In case you were wondering, "sous vide" is French.  

It is pronounced "Soo Veed"

It translates to "under vacuum".

Today is our fifth dinner prepared this way.  Four are steaks or roasts.  One was chicken (but I forgot to photograph it!)

Our earlier attempts:

Rib Eye

Eye Roast

Skirt Steak

Rib eye

And the chicken breast was also excellent, moist, flavorful.

In the future, we will do flank steak and chuck roast.