I’ve wanted to try out sous-vide cooking methods for a while now. Once the technique was written up in the New York Times a few years ago, it has become the next big thing among home chefs.
There are now home sous-vide ‘water ovens‘ which are within the price range of your average yuppie, but still not something I want to spend money on. ($500 will buy a lot of food and drink. Also an iPad.)
Since I’m not in the market for a $4000 laboratory quality thermal water circulator or a $500 dollar yuppie toy, I figured I was out of the running until I saw an article about people using coolers for low temperature cooking.
Well duh. Coolers are big insulated boxes and will keep hot things hot just as well as keeping cold things cold. You might have add some hot water to the cooler from time to time to manage the temperature, but it should be as simple as bringing water up to temperature on the stove top, sealing up some food in a bag, putting the whole mess into a cooler, and waiting.
I decided to do a small scale test with my thermos, which is like my cooler, just smaller. If I messed up, the worst thing that would happen is that I have to put the food into the oven to finish cooking it.
Mise en place
My thermos has a convenient flip-top lid which allows me to insert a probe thermometer inside without removing the lid. It’s also big enough for a steak.
I bought a 12oz New York steak, rinsed it, patted it dry, seasoned it with salt and pepper, then shoved it into a Ziploc bag with a splash of Worcestershire, lime juice, and olive oil. When you are trying to seal up food in a bag and make it as air tight as possible, it helps to have a little liquid in the bag – assuming you don’t have a food vacuum-bagger-device.
You can get a near vacuum in a Ziploc bag by sealing up the bag, leaving one end open and submerging the bag slowly into a bowl of water, leaving the open end just up above the water. As the bag sinks, the water pressure pushes the air out of the bag. When the opening of the bag is just at the surface of the water, seal up the bag, creating a near vacuum inside the bag.
I heated water on the stove top to 145º F – I wanted my steak to be medium rare at about 130º F – the higher temperature allows for both a small amount of heat loss from the thermos and for the fact that the relatively cold steak will cool off the water a little bit. I dropped the steak-in-a-bag into the thermos and poured the water on top.
In the 'water oven'
I put the lid on top, covered it with a tea-towl, and threw a bowl on top for good measure (to help keep the heat in).
And then I waited.
40 minutes later this emerged:
It's a bowl of meat
This didn’t look terribly appetizing, but I patted the steak dry and seared it in clarified butter and then WOW.
Medium rare
Perfectly medium rare, with a nice crust on the outside. Also, delicious. Best steak I’ve made.
(These photos kind of suck. I discovered my good camera’s battery was dead right as I was going to take a picture, so these are all crappy iPhone shots)
