In my previous post, I discussed some of the merits of sous vide cooking, using a medium rare steak as the most demonstrative example of the properties of this method. The proof is, of course, in the pictures and I think this picture of a hanger steak cooked medium rare(55C/130F) shows off sous vide cooking well:
Notice that outside of the charred exterior, it’s a beautiful medium-rare from end to end. More pictures about the process of cooking this after the cut.
I started off with a Painted Hills hanger steak(which is an amazing cut of beef that is incredibly flavorful, tender, and best of all cheap). Look at this wonderful slab of raw beef:
And of course to properly sous vide, one must place the food in a vacuum sealed bag. I use some ghetto Ziploc bags with a hand pump. After salt and peppering the steak liberally:
Hard to look like classy food when in a plastic bag. Even after a proper sous vide water path at 55C for 5 hours, it doesn’t look more appetizing:
Then again, you wouldn’t look tasty after a 5 hour bath either. Since the food never goes above the desired temperature, to overcook meat using sous vide you have to go over the proper cooking time by hours, not minutes or seconds like other methods may employ. Repeatable results are a huge bonus to sous vide cooking, and that’s why it’s commonly seen in restaurants, even if the other reasons aren’t convincing enough. But what this particular steak needs is a quick sear in a cast iron pan for a few seconds per side:
Much better isn’t it? One of the side benefits of sous vide cooking is that the food is cooked in its own juices the entire time. Since it’s cooked in a bag, you know that none of it escaped. If you measured the pre and post cooking weights of food, you’d find that sous vide cooking has a far lower reduction compared to conventional methods. If one is going to spend money on quality ingredients, why waste it by having it go up in smoke, dripped into a pan and tossed out, or boiled away?
And since the food is cooking in its own juices the entire time, you don’t even need to rest the meat prior to cutting. But really the best part is the end results: