How to Sous Vide Your Premium Meats?
When you hear immersion circulator, exact water temperatures, vacuum, and more, it sounds like you are about to embark on a serious science project. Thankfully this is not even close to what sous viding your premium steak is.
Sous vide cooking used to be reserved for Michelin-starred chefs, but nowadays, everyone is doing it. If cooking a perfect steak or whole beef tenderloin scares you, sous vide may just be the secret weapon you need to move you from amateur to accomplished cook amongst your family and friends.
The Ribeye Club has a selection of premium beef steaks, whole roast tenderloins, yellowfin tuna & black cod steaks, lobster tails, and many other great protein options perfect for sous vide cooking. And the best part of it all is that it is cut, trimmed and delivered directly to your door anywhere in Cyprus.
What Is Sous Vide Cooking?
Before we dive into what, we will excite you with a bit of history about where sous vide cooking came from. Reliable cooking sources credit French chefs – Bruno Goussault and George Pralus for creating and improving the sous vide cooking method. Goussault, regarded as the “father of sous vide,” created this cooking method in 1971 while attempting to increase the tenderness of roast beef.
Sous Vide is therefore often referred to as a French cooking method even though it is widely used around the world today. Even though it started out as a popular way to cook proteins, world-renowned chefs have recipes for fruit, veg and even desserts using the sous vide method.
Sous vide cooking in its most simple form can be explained as cooking just about anything in a vacuum sealed bag using regulated water temperature. When compared to traditional cooking methods – many will vouch that it provides improved taste, texture, presentation and nutritional value. And quite literally, the term itself loosely translates in French to “under vacuum”.
For the best sous vide cooking results, it is recommended that you use an immersion circulator, a heat-retaining water bath and high-quality zipper-lock bags.
Easy Step-By-Step Sous Vide Cooking Instructions
With all the right tools as mentioned above, sous vide cooking is an easy 3-step process.
Sous Vide Cooking Instructions
Step 1
Fill your sous vide container with water. This can be a large pot, a polycarbonate container, a cooler, or a specifically designed sous vide cooking container – any of these will work just the same.
Step 2
Attach your sous vide immersion circulator (this device maintains the water at a consistent temperature for the full duration of the cook) to your water bath container. The most common cooking temperature for steak is 130ºF (54.4ºC). This temperature seems to work for most proteins but to be sure, check your recipe and adjust accordingly depending on what you are sous-viding.
Step 3
Season your favourite premium meats, fish steaks or veggies well. Leave it to rest for 10 to 15 minutes, and then place it into a good-quality zipper-lock bag. Sous vide as per the recommended recipe cooking time.
Sous Vide Steak
Great Premium Steak Cuts for Sous Vide The Ribeye Club always has many popular steak cuts perfect for sous vide in stock. The best cuts for sous vide are ribeye, skirt, T-bone, New York strip steak and filet mignon.
New York strip steak is bold and beefy but does not have a great reputation for being the most tender steak. This cut is a favourite for people that like a chewier steak. But when you sous vide this cut to perfection, it makes for a delicious eating experience for any steak lover.
The Perfect Temperature for New York Strip Steak Sous Vide
You can achieve the tenderness of filet mignon or ribeye with all its unique beefy notes by sous viding your 2-inch New York Strip Steak for a minimum of 2 hours, at a constant water temperature of 130ºF (54.4ºC). You can keep your steak in the water bath at this temperature for up to four hours with no risk of overcooking or drying your steak out.
Finishing Off Your Delicious New York Strip Steak Sous Vide
If you followed our 3-step sous vide cooking process and stuck to the recommended cooking time, you are well on track to a delicious steak experience. To finish your New York Strip Steak off – all that is needed is to get that perfect sear.
To achieve this:
- Pour a little oil into a cast iron skillet
- Place the skillet onto your stovetop on the highest heat setting
- Once the oil is hot, sear your steak for one minute on each side
If you are looking for a little something extra, add a generous knob of butter and a few sprigs of fresh rosemary or thyme to the skillet just after you added your steak. Once the butter melts spoon the juices for the full minute on both sides. It will definitely give you that finger-licking good effect, if that’s what you are after.
Conclusion
While sous vide is not great for your everyday quick meal cooking needs, it definitely can be a crowd pleaser for that special occasion. The only drawback of this cooking method is that it can be quite time-consuming – because the food needs to sit in the water bath for an hour plus, depending on what you are cooking. But on the flip side, it requires hardly any intervention other than 15 minutes of upfront prep time and 5 minutes of finishing time.
So, with little to no risk of overcooking or losing any of your premium steak’s natural juices, sous vide cooking is your fool proof way of moving from ordinary home cook to extraordinary. And if you doubted making that small investment into an immersion circulator, you now have many reasons why you should make that investment.
