So I recently purchased the Anova Bluetooth immersion circulator, and I couldn't wait to try to make myself a perfectly medium-rare steak!
We started with a strip, a steak I've never had much luck with in the past. They usually come out overcooked and tough. Read on to see how it went!
Setup
I'm only doing a single steak, so I don't need a huge pot for this one. I decided that the inner pot from my Instant Pot would work just fine.
I filled the pot with water and set the temperature to 130 degrees.
Then I prepped the steak while I waited for the water to come up to temp. Just some garlic salt, kosher salt, and pepper. We have a rosemary plant that's doing ok so I threw in a sprig too just because. Everything went into the vacuum sealer.
Time to cook!
I clipped the steak to the side of the pot, and let it go. I later removed the spoon holding down the bag because I decided it wasn't necessary.
I pulled the steak at around 1:45, and prepped the grill for the reverse-sear. It's an interesting color, not really gray, more red-pink than anything.
I didn't get an amazing sear on the steak on the grill. It probably spent 1.5 minutes or so over as hot a fire as I could get. If I had this to do over again I'd probably let it go another minute or more as it didn't seem to overcook the middle at all. It'll be interesting to see how different searing on the stovetop is.
Finished product, as you'll see below I'm not willing to call this a success.
Verdict
The positives: I think the steak was cooked to just about a perfect medium-rare. Some parts of the steak were tender, flavorful, and delicious. The rosemary I threw in during the sous vide really came through, I would definitely do that again, and I'd probably add another sprig to have one on both sides.
The bad: The meat was tough, like some parts were shoe-leather tough. I'd estimate that 33% of the meat ended up in the trash. I'm not ready to blame this one on the cooking method yet though. I've personally never had a good strip steak, so I don't know why I chose this to be my first experiment. I don't think I had a particularly great cut of meat to work with; I checked the label and it was a $9/lb "Angus Reserve" cut from HyVee. Next time I'll make sure I'm working with a good cut of meat, probably going for Choice or better.
Final Thoughts
This was a fun experiment. The final temperature on the steak came out just about perfect, I think working with a crappy piece of meat really set me back. Clean-up was easy so I'll definitely be doing this again. Thinking the next sous vide experiment will be with a boneless-skinless chicken breast. I'm really interested to see what a piece of chicken that hasn't been cooked to 165deg. feels & tastes like!