My Labor Day weekend T-bone steak sous vide and grill experiment....

Saturday I went down to the local Safeway and saw they had T-bones at $5.77 a pound and decided to cook up enough steak to last a few days.  I picked up a couple of 2 inch cuts.

In the past, when I've experimented with thick cuts like this the results have been pretty variable... part is over cooked, some of it is perfect, and some of it may be raw or bordering on raw to where it needs to go back on the fire and then I have more overcooked meat to deal with.  That has pretty much ended now that a friend showed me sous vide cooking.

With sous vide cooking, you are cooking your meat in a bag in a pot at a specific temperature to bring your meat to the proper amount of cooking you desire. You can cook an entire chunk of meat to pretty much any level of "done-ness" you'd like... rare, medium rare, medium... etc by adjusting the temperature you are running the sous vide at. There are a couple of different ways of getting your pot of water to the proper temperature, but the easiest and likely most accurate way of doing it is to pick up one of the sous vide cookers. They're starting to come down in price these days and can be had for 60-80 bucks and up.  With thise you can pretty much dial in the temp you want and they will heat and circulate the water so you get an evenly cooked piece of meat.

 Different cuts or types of meat may have different cooking temperatures or lengths of time to cook (you need to make sure you are cooking it long enough to pasteurize it when cooking at low temperatures).  These were 2 inch cuts, and I wanted to go for medium rare so I went to 131 degrees for about 4 hours to ensure they were done.  Fatty cuts like ribeye or T-bones can be done in a couple/few hours, cuts like chuck steak can go for days if needed to soften them up.

Basically the plan is to get your meat, salt and pepper it then add a bit of smashed garlic and rosemary, then put it in bags and vacuum the air out of them (these particular bags some with a one way valve and a little hand pump, but you can use regular sandwich/storage bags by immersing the bags in water part ways to push the air out before sealing them), then put them in a pot of moving water at a particular temperature.

After your time is up, you are left with basically a blob of quivering gray-ish meat.. not very appetizing looking but they smell great... You'll need to put it on a hot grill or in a hot pan with some oil and finish off the outside to where it has the amount of char you'd like.  There are actually torches and butane/propane torch attachments made for charring the outside that some people go with.





In theory you can cook a huge chunk of meat, say a roast, and get the entire roast to a perfect medium rare/medium/whatever, then just crisp up the outside of that chunk of cooked meat and  have yourself a glorious chunk of meat that any chef would envy.

I've only tried a couple of things so far.  Next time I'm going to shoot for medium rather than medium rare and see if it comes out as soft.  This was really good steak, even better after a day in the fridge.

People are cooking all sorts of meats this way.  I've heard of people doing chicken breast, pork and all of the usual suspects this way.  I did try small lamb loin chops a couple of weeks back - it worked, but frankly I don't think the lamb picked up the grill flavor my wife and I like in the 60 or so seconds a side they received on the grill.  I've also done slightly under one inch thick ribeyes, turned out fine, but I'm not sure if the final results were worth the extra effort.

In the end, I'll probably do this from time to time when I want to look at a big impressive piece of properly cooked pinkish meat that will last us a few days.

 Later,

    Steve