how to cook steak sous vide (in vacuum)

Jul 12

Cooking sous vide can be daunting, but it’s basically just cooking meat internally to your desired internal temperature, and searing a later time.

Lots of restaurants use sous vide to prep different dishes, and then quickly finish them off when ordered. The longer ingredients are under vacuum like vegetables and lighter proteins like fish and chicken, the longer aromatics and flavors left inside the vacuum plastic can infuse the proteins.

For steak and beef, a simple seasoning of salt and pepper suffices as herbs and other aromatics give merely a tiny hint but not intensely strong flavor infusion.

The best way to vacuum seal meat is of course with a vacuum seal machine, however you can also use the water immersion technique by placing meat in a ziplock bag and sealing it to 95%, immersing it in water and sealing once all the air has been pushed out by the water.

Cook to your desired internal temperature using an immersion circulator (also known as a sous vide machine, a popular brand is Anova) and then sear with a good amount of oil and butter to get a good color after patting the steak dry. The maillard reaction won’t be as good as with a traditional sear or reverse sear. You can maximize the color by using a blowtorch. Remember that the meat is already cooked to perfection inside, so you don’t want to spend much time searing the exterior to maintain the nicely cooked interior.

Detailed how-to instructions in Steak 5 Ways section of Steak Simplified, page 114. Pre-order here.

Here’s how to do it: