My madness for cooking gadgets knows no bounds.  I saw a sous vide cooker on sale for fathers day and couldn’t help myself.  A coworker friend of mine has had one for a while and made some awesome meals in it.  His enthusiasm for this method of cooking was infectious and I had to do it.  If you are not familiar with the method, basically you bag food, ideally in a vacuum sealer, and place it in a water bath of the desired cook temperature.  You basically can’t overcook things!

I got an Anova cooker, and I will talk about it more at some later date.  For now I had to rush head first into this new world and try out steak.  Cooking steaks is one of the things sous vide is famous for.  I lined up some test subjects (coworkers) picked up a pile of steaks from the local meat market, and got to cooking.  Take a look at these gorgeous steaks.

While sous vide cooks the meat and pasteurizes it to a food safe level, it doesn’t look that great.  Kind of wet, grey, and unappetizing.

That is where a good searing comes in.  You want to cook in sous vide and then brown with high heat.  I got 4 steaks, and seared each with a different method.  On the grill, on the grill with steak seasoning, cast iron, and with a blow torch.

• Blow Torch: I used my mapp gas plumber’s torch to sear the outside.  This was the softest because of how little time the steak saw the heat
• Grill: Great steak.  Probably the most cooking on the outside.  The outside had some good chewiness while the inside was still good and tender.
• Grill w/ Season: Same as above but with montreal steak seasoning sprinkled on before the sous vide.  Best flavor of all!
• Cast Iron: I put a big cast iron skillet on the grill, and seared there.  Kind of in between the grill and torch.

All the steaks were good.  The torch was definitely the softest if that is what you are looking for.  Seasoning goes super well with the sous vide process, so that one is a winner.  Really there are no losers here.  I think we will try the cast iron next time with seasoning on it.

As a curiosity and because I have always adored time lapse, I did a time lapse shot of the steaks in the sous vide cooker.  They were in for about 1hr 45minutes.  It took me about 5 minutes to get the GoPro setup, but in that time they had already started greying quite a bit.  Amazing how fast that happens!

Bonus steak and eggs

The next morning I warmed up some left over steak, and did scrambled eggs in the sous vide.  I set the cooker in my mini crock pot and tossed in the eggs when it hit the right temperature.  20 minutes later it was finished!

I broke it up with a fork and sprinkled on my steak.  It was a good breakfast, but the texture was a little odd.  I don’t mind my eggs being a little loose, but these were really consistently so.  I almost feel like eggs need searing for the same reason steaks do.  It adds flavor and provides a good texture contrast.  The experimenting continues.