Who knew this thread would end up with a lot of great recipes and techniques being posted?!
My and my wife's favorite sous vide "thing" for the last few years has been this:
I buy a few full cryovac tenderloins at Sam's. They're a lot less per pound than cut tenderloins.
I get out the vacuum sealer and bags and cut the loins into approximately 8 ounce steaks. I season them (we like a store-bought rosemary garlic mix).
Then I vac-seal them individually, not too high of a vacuum, but getting all of the air out.
Then I freeze them.
When we know we'll want steaks, we put one (to split) or two if we're starving into the pot with the circulator at 131F (55C).
From frozen, I like about 3 to 5 hours for these little beauties.
Then we can prep some asparagus, or whatever, and when we and whatever else we want are almost ready, I take out the steak, pat it dry, and fire up a cheap ceramic-coated non-stick skillet and sear them in butter over high flame for a minute or so.
Super fast and easy. Cheaper and less effort than a trip to a fast food drive thru, and I kid you not, the best tasting, most tender steak either of us have ever had. Bar none!
It's to the point that neither of us will even bother ordering steak when we go out anywhere because we know it won't compare.
We both had steaks at a Ruth Chris's, and Kobe steaks at The Stratosphere in Vegas. Sorry, great meals, but the steaks simply cannot compare to what ends up being about ten minutes of actual "work" at our house with the sous vide!
Melt in your mouth doesn't begin to describe it.
Now, I do a mean steak on the grill. A little Smokey Joe with raging charcoal is my favorite. I love super hot charcoal, and the effect of getting an incredible initial sear from the radiation off of perfect coals, and the subsequent cooking with the lid on, and vents choked back so you have some lower heat and a highly reducing atmosphere to get them just right.
And I love my smoker. And I want to try some reverse sear, etc. But man, we are absolutely spoiled by the sous vide.
For Christmas this last year, I bought two big rib roasts. I cut them into six two-pound rib eye steaks. Seasoned them. Vacuum packed them. Froze them.
I bought a picnic cooler just to use for this one sous vide meal. I modified it to accommodate three circulators because I could not work out the thermal load calculations, and wanted to be safe.
I bought two additional sous vide circulators, and used all three at once. It turns out it was overkill, but I needed to be sure with such an important family meal on the line.
Four hours before we planned on eating, I fired up the trio of circulators to make sure the temperature would be up before I put these enormous steaks in.
Three and a half hours before the meal time, I put in the steaks. I used a grate from a smoker to force all of the bags to be completely submerged, and every so often, moved the bags-o-steak around to assure they all got equal treatment.
When everything else was ready, or almost, I got the steaks out, dried them, and seared them in a huge cast iron skillet, in butter. I did have to do them in two batches, three at a time.
Every single person said they were the best steaks they had ever eaten, including my son, who is a grill/smoker/sous-vide fanatic in his own right.
The adults shared their steaks with the grandkids, and even the kiddos ate mass quantities! I could not have been happier!
Having worked for a chain of environmental laboratories for many years as, among other things, their expert on precision temperature control and monitoring, I can tell you that an actively-stirred water bath is the most stable and precise temperature reference and control method available.
For precise incubation of bacteriological samples, nothing comes close. I built systems for them to incubate hundreds of samples at once with control within 1/10th degree C, and these were always recirculating water baths.
Water has a very high specific heat. It has relatively high density. It has high thermal conductivity. And it is a liquid! It is almost the ideal heat transfer medium. And it's just plain water! So convenient, safe, and easy to work with.
Immersion circulators have been a staple in the laboratory for 30 years or more. They're the standard by which all other temperature control systems are judged, (and come up short). My hat is off to whoever came up with the idea of using one to cook food.
Anyhow, as cheap as an immersion circulator is these days, you really owe it to yourself to give it a try. Another tool in our arsenal. And a really easy way to make a world-class meal with "fast food" ease.
You can have my immersion circulators when you pry them from my cold, dead, fingers! But I will also keep my smoker, and my charcoal grills, thank you!
I have to try some of the other techniques from this thread now!
