tuftears | Cooking Experiment: Sous Vide Steak and Carrots

After

tugrik's blogs about his new sous vide machine and how he's been able to get perfect steaks with it, I gave in to temptation and ordered one up myself. It arrived today!

But, will it blend?

Well, if you're patient, it does get stuff cooked. I used a 12-quart stockpot, without worrying too much about evaporation or cooling from the open top, and it worked fine. I cooked carrots at 185F for 1 hour (it takes a while for sous vide to get up to temperature) and then scooped out about half the water and replaced with ice and water to cool it down until it was at 135F for the steak. After that, I glazed the carrots in a wok with butter, sugar, a bit of salt and pepper, and then did likewise for the steak.

In retrospect, it would have been better to dump the butter and go with a high-temperature oil, and get the wok sizzling before putting the steak in. I left the sides on the lesser side of searing since I was afraid the butter would burn. Still, the results were pretty tasty!

I must note also that sous vide at 185 degrees does... interesting things to carrots. It's a little firmer than the crockpot version of carrots, but all the fibrosity is gone. Weird! Still tasty, but next time I do this, I will probably skip trying to sous vide vegetables, since it's too much of a pain to set up the machine for two different temperatures.

This is one of the rare meals where I didn't have leftovers to add to the frozen food inventory, since Tug's advice on how to reheat steaks cooked with sous vide basically works out to the same effort as cooking the steaks in the first place. I will have to think about what else I can sous vide besides steak, which tends to be so susceptible to overcooking. It could be interesting to cook some chicken breasts sous vide, then cut them to finger-sized pieces and dredge in egg/panko crumbs for a quick pan frying. That should result in very tender pieces with crispy coatings.