Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, the site where one man makes a mess to help you make meals. I’m your Socially-Distant-Sensei, Jon O’Guin. And today’s recipe is one that certainly matches with our ever-more-isolated present day, Sous Vide Steaks. What’s that mean, and how do you make it? We’ll cover all that. But if you’re just here for the meat of the matter, click this link, and get to it. Everyone else, let’s settle in.

Before we get too far, I want to do what every content creator must, and express my sincere wishes that you all are doing okay, that you will be healthy and safe in the coming days, and that new options for treatment and containment present themselves. This is a frightening time, but fear can be toxic. Better to be safe, be smart, and hope. And have a couple laughs.

Sous Vi-Doo-Be-Do

The first laugh is that, sadly, today’s recipe is probably going to be PRETTY USELESS for a lot of my viewers. Ain’t that just like a man? Always late, and then the instant you really need him, no help at all?

IS that what men are like? As a man, my understanding is naturally biased.

Yeah, I cooked this several weeks ago, before I knew we were heading for isolation, so it relies on a technical bit of equipment we’ve already covered on the site at least once before, a Sous Vide Circulator. If you DON’T have one of these, then…Well, you can, theoretically, replicate the effects at home, it’ll just take a LOT of time and fairly boring work, which we’ll cover in a second.

It will be frustrating, take up more of your time, but won’t need as much electricity and will be easier to explain to your family.
So also just like a Man.
Hey-o!

To remind everyone of what they’re looking at: that giant robot dildo-looking-doodad is a Circulator. And what that means is that the bottom end of it contains a thermometer, a pumping system, and some heating elements. And what the machine does is, once lowered into water, is bring that water up to a specified temperature (by using the pump to circulate the water in the vessel) and hold it there. This allows for relatively precise temperature control.

The value of this is explored through Sous Vide cooking. Sous vide is French, and means “under vacuum”. And the idea is relatively simple: see, cooking works, fundamentally, via heat transfer: the colder food sits on or in a hotter space, and heat moves through it .But, since you tend to use cooking surfaces or instruments that need to be hotter than you would ever want the food to get, you have to time the cooking process right, or too much heat will transfer, and you’ll overcook the food.

So, some time ago, a Frenchman asked “Well, what if I cook the food in a precisely controlled heating thing? Like, I have this machine I use to dehydrate potatoes. It goes to about steak temperature. What if I just leave a steak in it for a couple hours? Will it cook?” And no one answered him because he was a weirdo in 1799 with a food dehydrator, but the answer was “yeah, it’ll cook”, as he wrote in his diary after trying it when no one answered. This discovery turned out to have limited utility however, since it meant that food was sitting in the “danger zone” for a long time, where the meat was warm, but not warm enough to be safe, and bacteria could develop.  So people were exploring how you could get the same idea, without getting people sick. And in the 1970’s, they figured it out: smother it.

The 70’s were very good at smothering a lot of stuff.

See, most bacteria (like most humans) need air to live, so if you remove the air, you remove the danger. (This is why so many foods are vacuum sealed: while it won’t work FOREVER, it’ll work for a long time.) So you take the food, put it in a clean plastic bag, force all the air out of the bag, and boom , vacuum-sealed environment. And while yes, you could feasibly then cook using hot air, water has a much higher thermal capacity, meaning it will absorb (and transfer) heat much better. Hence the water-bath.  

Thus, Sous vide cooking is a cooking technique that allows you, in theory, to cook food without fear of overcooking it, since you’re keeping the water the exact temperature you want the food to be (or at least, a sufficiently low temp to give broad windows of  “this is about the right level of done”.

And as a great number of restaurants and chefs immediately thought of when the idea was pitched to them, just as that weird count from centuries ago asked, “What about steak?”

IN many ways, the Bill Murray of Foods.

Steak is maybe the king ingredient of “I need to be an exact temp to be right, and you have no reasonable way to check” So when the idea was suggested to high-end restaurants “hey, what if you pre-cooked your steaks in this vacuum-sealed things, and then only needed to sear them for like, 2-3 minutes to finish them?” a lot jumped at the chance. And that’s what we’re trying today.

Rigging a Jury is VERY Different than Jury-Rigging.

Now, given the details I’ve explained to you, it’s probably not hard to get a mental picture of how you replicate a “close enough” system to a sous vide. Because I get it, they can be pricey: the kind of “low-end” Walmart brand ones are still $50-60, and GOOD ones can be as much as $200. I picked mine up on a black Friday sale, and I think it was still like, $75.

But if you don’t want to pay that, you can avoid it by just…figuring out how hot your stove gets. Take a saucepan, fill it with water, stick a thermometer into it, and just see how hot it gets if you leave it on low for an hour. Or Medium low. Just figure out the range of the bottom end of your stove-top.  It’s not impossible, just…kinda tedious. But once you know it, you can use the thermometer and saucepan to set up semi-regulated sous-vide systems. Yeah, the bottom will be warmer than the top, and you might need to ensure that your bag doesn’t touch the pan, but it’s not impossible.

For a circulator, you can just pin or tape the bag to to side. For a jury-rigged home system, you’d probably want something that held the bag in the middle. Like a hook dangling from the range hood? Or just like, a steamer basket.

And while you might be wondering how you vacuum seal a bag without some kind of fancy kitchen gadget, I have to chide you, and remind you that your grandmother and great-grandmother probably knew how. Or could have guessed. After all, they probably knew tons of people who canned. So they know that if you want the air out of something, you push it out with water.

Yes, while some chefs spring for actual vacuum sealers (which can be useful if you’re trying to flavor/season the food while cooking it, since the pressure of the vacuum forces any marinade you put in with the meat/veg/whatever more fully into the product) you can make a weaker vacuum seal by just…lowering a resealable plastic bag into water. You gotta squeeze it and shake it a little, but the water pressure will push the air out of the bag. Just lower it in up to the sealing line, pinch it shut, and boom, sealed!

Who knew that Water would be the perfect weapon against Air?
People who drowned, I suppose.

So, let’s cook some steaks! 

A Journey of Sitting

Now, my family started this process by picking up some tri-tip steaks, but any steak will do. My family just likes the visible marbling of the tri-tip, and my mother used tri-tip to make my father’s meals while he was sick, so it became something of a routine to grab some whenever we’re at Central Market.

It’s fine looking steak. Little lung-y, but good.

Season them with salt and pepper, pour in a bit of oil (the oil helps minimize the amount of liquid pushed out of the meat by the water pressure and heating, by forming a slight barrier), and get them into your bag in the water, which you want at 130 degrees. (This recipe is mostly based on America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe for them, so if you have that resource, you can check that.)  And just walk away, if you’re using a real circulator, or do whatever you need to do for a jury-rigged set-up. The process will take between 90 minutes and 180. By which I mean “after 90 minutes, it will be functionally done, but you can leave it in for up to 180 minutes. Try not to go too far past 3-4 hours, at least on your first cook: While you can’t overcook the steak in terms of making it more done than you want it, what you CAN do is break down the connective tissue in the meat, creating more of a pot-roast level of tenderness, which can be off-putting. How long that takes depends on things like how thick your steaks are, what type of steak you’re using, etc, but you can’t RUIN the meat, you’ll just make it a little weird. (I’ve watched videos of people making sous vide steak up to 24 hours: the steak is still perfectly edible, it’s just not as good as it was at 3 or 4 hours.)

Now, I tried taping my steaks to the side of the pot, and came back 40 minutes later to find the tape had come off, and they had suctioned to the circulator pump. Once I checked the bag was still fine, I then took a clothespin to hold the meat in place.

And after about 105 minutes, we had THIS.

Drab little slugs of meat.

Yeah, that’s the “problem” with sous vide steak cooking: the great outer crust of a steak is driven by Maillard reactions, which NEED high heat to get that browning and crust. But, luckily, you can still do that! You might be aware of a steak cooking strategy called “reverse searing”. See, normally, in high end steak-preparation facilities, what they do (or used to do, depending on the business) to cook a large steak or other piece of meat is sear the outside of it for a couple minutes, and then move it into a hot oven to roast the rest of the way. The oven provides gentler, all-encompassing heat, which will ensure you cook the whole piece at the same rate, and has less risk of overcooking. Then, as I mentioned, restaurants found the sous vide method, where they cooked the steak sous vide first, and then seared it. But this was decades ago, so sous vide machines were prohibitively expensive, especially for home cooks. So the reverse sear method was invented: just use an oven instead of a sous vide machine. IN exchange for narrowing the window of ‘overcooked’ from a couple hours in sous vide to 10 minutes in a hot oven, you could cook the meat faster and get roughly the same effect. The POINT is that reverse searing is inspired by sous vide techniques, and that in both cases, you have to cook the steak twice: once in slow, and again in a hot pan to sear off.

Just crank up a pan on medium-high heat, dry your steaks, and sear without moving for 60 to 90 seconds a side, and you get some gorgeous looking steaks.

They could be BETTER looking, if I weren’t a fool, and did stuff like “color balance” and “Not use a non-stick pan to develop crust”

Now, at this point, I had heard that you could make a pan sauce out of the pan oil and the liquid left in the sous vide bag, mixed with some ingredients. And, fun fact, while, I’m perfectly fine at making roux and béchamel, I cannot make a pan sauce for beef to save my life. I’ve made Chicken Piccata several times, and in theory, it’s a pretty similar process, but for some reason, it just fails to click. My first batch wasn’t TERRIBLE: it was a little too bright, but it was perfectly serviceable. And then it took Nate 40 more minutes to get home, so I tried to wake-up the sauce and re-heat it, and the whole thing seized on me.

This later poured out of the pan, into the trash, as a single floppy unit.

I ended up throwing that away, and nate just had to live with pre-made sauces for his steak. But looking at the cut-up steak, it certainly wasn’t a huge burden to just eat it as is.

Oh, the horror.

The process was easy, low-effort, and while it took a while, hey, a lot of us have a lot more time to spare right now. Even if you can’t afford the sous vide machine, and don’t want to go through the hassle of making a substitute, at least try the reverse-sear method: set your oven somewhere between 200 and 275 (the lower, the longer it’ll take but more even the cooking will be), season your steaks, and cook them until about 10 degrees below where you want them to be when done. Preheast a cast-iron skillet with some oil, and go from the oven straight into the skillet, and sear for maybe a minute per side. And see if that steak isn’t amazing.

No plugs for Patreon or social media today, as we don’t know how long these measures will last, so we want to ensure people have the funds they need to keep themselves and their loved ones safe and happy. I’d much prefer you spend the money trying out some of our cheaper recipes (or splurging on a treat) than giving it to us right now. Kitchen Catastrophes does not need your money at the moment. Our endurance now, as like so many others’, relies on safety, health, and forces beyond our control. We can only try and share some info and laughs as we wait.

THURSDAY: ALL THESE DAMN PEOPLE ARE KILLING MY INTERNET CONNECTION, SO WE’LL SEE. I MIGHT DO A SIMPLE SOUS-VIDE RECIPE, OR COVER MORE SHOWS, I DON’T KNOW.

MONDAY: I CAN’T FIND MY DAMN POLENTA FOR THE RECIPE I WANT TO MAKE. MAYBE I’LL CHANGE IT UP, MAYBE I’LL FIND IT.  

Recipe

Sous Vide Steaks

Serves 3

Ingredients

1.5 pounds steak (1 inch to 1.5 inches thick)

Salt and Pepper

¼ cup vegetable oil +3 Tablespoons vegetable oils

1 tablespoon butter

Preparation

1. Preheat your water to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Season your steaks, and place in a plastic bag. Add the ¼ cup oil, and press the air from the bag, using the water to push out additional air before sealing. Secure the steak bag away from the heating element, and let cook, 1.5 to 3 hours.

2. Remove the steaks from the bag, and pat dry. Preheat a pan over medium high heat with remaining vegetable oil until oil is just beginning to smoke. Add the dried steak, and tablespoon of butter and sear for 1 minute per side, until well-browned. Slice and serve warm.