I am not bad at cooking steam. In fact, I enjoy it quite a lot and for years I’ve been doing a small marinade followed by cooking a room temp .75” thick steak on a 550 degree cast iron skillet covered for a few minutes flipping only once and enjoying medium rare. I quite like my unevenly cooked steak. I prefer using a cast-iron to the grill as I do think steak needs to be intensely seared to hold in all of the juices. Marinade + some salt & pepper is all you need.
Before Christmas, the Anova Culinary Bluetooth Sous Vide Precision Cooker was on sale for $80 (or maybe $89). I don’t need smartphone integration as you can just set the temp on the device locally and have Alexa run a 3 hour timer. The advantage of the Wifi version of the cooker is the output of 900 watts over 800 so it heats up a bit faster and can combat colder foot easier.
I decided to keep things simple. I read online that a 2” thick steak is ideal and just split it up for 2 people so I grabbed a 2.5 pound porterhouse and a 2.2 pound T-Bone along with 2 bunches of Asparagus. On Sunday, I cooked the Porterhouse at 129F for 3 hours and seared it on the cast-iron skillet for 2-3 minutes at 500F.
This lead to a lot of blood in the meat and a real lack of flavor on the outside. On Wednesday, I cooked the T-Bone, 135F for 3.5 hours followed by 600F cast-iron skillet seared for 5 minutes per side along with 1-2 minutes along the edges to sear the grizzle.
For the asparagus, day one was 185 for 12 minutes but the asparagus was too raw tasting. I also only used salt & pepper. Wednesday’s dish was 185 for 17 minutes with the addition of oil & vinegar to the bag. The steak only saw salt & pepper both times.
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Overall, last night’s meal was a huge success. Far more delicious, more flavor on the steak & asparagus, the steak was still juicy and not chewy and the extra searing helped a lot. 135 is the top end of medium rare and bottom end of medium as opposed to 129 being the bottom end of medium rare. I think I prefer it closer to medium than rare although I can admit the flavor isn’t as good but the consistency is better.
I snapped a few photos with the Panasonic DMC-LX10 during the process. They came out okay.
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