Sous Vide Hanger Steak

Lee — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 06:51:49 +0000

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:

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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?

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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:

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Sous Vide Fennel Garlic Pork Tenderloin

Lee — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 02:56:43 +0000

Now that my kitchen is unpacked, cooking seems like the natural next step(as opposed to unpacking the rest of my belongings). Living in an apartment means that I do have some limitations with regards to how many random, expensive, but ultimately useless kitchen gadgets I should possess. Luckily I one of the main “gadgets” that I do own is a SousVide Supreme.

What is sous vide cooking? My friends may ask. Muffin(being full of bullshit) might try to convince you that the french means “under armpit” which hardly sounds like a delicious way to cook. In reality it means “under vacuum”, which is a bit of a misnomer. While vacuum sealing the food is part of cooking sous vide, the most important part of cooking sous vide is the temperature controlled water bath.

Just a teaser, here’s a picture of a pork tenderloin that I cooked sous vide recently:

As Alton Brown may say, Food + Heat = Cooking. While there are inexhaustible combinations of food components, there’s a relatively limited number of ways to apply heat. A medium rare steak has an internal temperature of 55C/130F. Traditionally on a grill or a hot skillet, you’re hitting the exterior of the meat with at least double this temperature(150C/300F), so that eventually the interior can hit the desired doneness. So when your steak is done, you basically have a gradient of temperature in the steak from overcooked to perfectly done.

With sous vide cooking, you vacuum seal the food, and put it into a water bath of exactly the desired temperature. Then take it out at any point once your food has hit equilibrium temperature. Said medium rare steak is now a perfectly done 55C/130F from edge to edge. Unfortunately that wonderful tasting crust on a steak is no where to be found with sous vide cooking. This crust is due to the Maillard reaction, which starts to take place at 155C/310F. Luckily for sous vide cooking, this is easily done to meats by searing the meat quickly with either a blowtorch or a smoking cast iron skillet.

Perhaps I’ll write more later, but here’s some samples with a simple pork tenderloin(bought from my local butchery – Rain Shadow Meats) with some fresh fennel.

First off, here’s an image of the pork tenderloin that’s been salted with chopped fennel bulbs and garlic in a vacuum sealed bag:

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After a 4 hour water bath at 55C, it’s not the most appetizing piece of pork out there:

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After a quick sear in a cast iron skillet with smoking oil, garlic, and chopped fennel it looks much more delicious:

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Notice how the pork has a slightly pink medium rare color pretty much from end to end. Too bad the gnocchi paled in comparison. The flavors of the pork were excellent, but I probably need to combine it with some kind of sauce(perhaps apple or pears). There’s a bit too much depth of field in this photo, definitely something to pay attention to for future food porn photos.

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Sous Vide Hanger Steak

Sous Vide Fennel Garlic Pork Tenderloin