And now for an opposing view…
I have a friend that is hooked on sous-viding (sous-videing?). I’ve tried quite a number of meats that he has cooked that way, and I can’t say I’m impressed. Especially the beef, which loses it’s structure and turns kind of mealy and mushy. But then, I like my steaks to require at least a bit of chewing. BBQ can fall off the bone, but please not my steak. Maybe it’s his technique, but I’m not a fan.
I know. Her palate is permanently stuck in the 1950s. If her mother didn’t make it for her that way when she was growing up she will have none of it. I had to take over the cooking else it would be the “Gallery of Regrettable Food” around here.
I generally do ribeye steaks about inch and a half thick. Temp is 128°. Medium rare all the way through then sear. They are tender, but not mushy at all. I do use my foodsaver and their bags to vacuum pack for cooking. There is an upper limit to cooking time, but as I recall it’s in the several hour range.
Boil-in bags are for boiling food. The point of sous vide is to cook food at a tightly-controlled temperature that is well below boiling. For instance, you can sous vide a steak at 130 F/54.5 C for a couple of hours and get meat that is perfectly done throughout.
I use my sous vide system for pork chops and salmon, which are two foods that are easy to overcook. Both come out great.
No story. My wife is a great cook and also taking medication for depression. One side effect is that she really doesn’t like me in the kitchen. Secondly, if I cook any thing new or experimental, it simply must be incredibly awesome and without flaw, or it gets the passive aggressive treatment with fireworks until being thrown in the trash with maybe a tiny bite taken out of it.
I save up a couple of recipes to test out when she is gone. Sous Vide fits into that category when I make it, but when we visited her high school classmate it produced a wonderful result.
As an aside, I use the Sous Vide Anova device extensively for the small batch mash when brewing beer. Great tool for that.
I see a lot of love on the sous vide boards for salmon (and there are recipes for testing this out in the kitchen sink
But… I’ll bet a 165 degree sous-vide steak isn’t quite what everyone thinks of when they think “well done”.
It’ll likely be less godawful than the usual kind, because it’ll be 165 throughout, with only the most outer layers getting any hotter. With a normal steak, the rest would have had to have been damn near incinerated to get the middle to 165.
Still not great, but I’ll wager it’s a great deal better than an old school “well done”
It could even be temperatures. Very specific things happen to meat at very precise temperatures - BUT with the more traditional cooking techniques, the temperature inside a piece of meat is subject to a number of conflicting variables, the “magic temperature” is reached at different times in different areas, and the results are predictably inconsistent.
It makes no difference whether your skillet is heated to 400 or 401. (I don’t know skillet temperatures, I just picked a number.) But with sous vide, one single degree can make a major difference - if that one degree is near one of the “magic temperatures” where the particular food you’re cooking will undergo a change.
I think it also depends on the cut you use. I can see no advantage to using a tenderloin, but as I noted a top round/ benefits greatly because of the connective tissue in the meat that slowly breaks down.
That’s one reason to sous vide, but the other is entirely applicable to a tenderloin.
The whole point of sous vide cooking is to have extremely accurate temperature control, not really to tenderize the meat through long cooking.
It’s been known for a long time that beef cooked to 130 F is “medium rare”. But if you have a big thick 2" tenderloin steak and want the very center cooked to 130, you have to cook most of the rest of the steak well above 130- there’s usually a gradient from overdone through well done through medium well, medium, and finally medium-rare in the very center, because the heat has to go from the outside in. In this hypothetical 2" filet mignon, you might have 1/2" at 130-ish in the very center, with the other 3/4" on either side being more done. And that’s assuming that your steak cook got the temp right in the first place- it’s not so easily done on a hot grill or pan.
By using sous vide, you set the temp where you want it to finally end up, and then cook the meat all the way through at that exact temp, giving you a piece of meat cooked to medium rare all the way through.
The only downside is that it doesn’t have any of that crust/searing/maillard reaction stuff going on, so we usually take it out and sear/blowtorch/grill it with very high heat to produce that sear on the outside without overcooking the rest.
So your tenderloin may now have 1.75" of perfect 130 degree medium-rare meat, and 1/4" right at the surface that’s more done. To a lot of steak lovers, this is a better deal than the higher heat, more done alternative.
Yeah, I like my anova and I use it a lot but I fully realize that the vast majority of foods don’t benefit from sous vide. What I like is being able to pop a steak or chicken or whatever in the sous vide, go for a walk, have a cocktail, skype my mom, whatever and not have a deadline for moving onto the next step of the meal. Also, in America, we don’t have guaranteed salmonella-free eggs like the UK so I keep a stash of eggs that I’ve pasteurized with the sous vide for meringues and flips/nogs and other stuff that require raw egg.
It was my understanding there would be no math.
My brother has done sous vide for the past two years with corned beef flats (that he corns himself). I believe the sous-viding takes 48 hours. It actually is pretty damned amazing. I bought him the Anova two or three years ago for his birthday, and he’s just gone to town with it, he loves it so much. He went so far as to buy a commercial vacuum sealer (one that normally costs around $2-2.5K, he found for something like $500 at a restaurant liquidation sale.)
Myself, I do a reserve sear starting in the oven for steak, and I honestly can’t tell the difference between that and a sous vide steak. Serious Eats actually claims reverse sear is superior to sous vide, as you can get a better crust on the reverse seared meat than the sous vide. Honestly, that wasn’t my experience. To me, both crusted up fine, but I saw no advantage to sous vide other than it’s really hard to screw up.
But for other cuts of meat, like pork chops, or tougher collagen-heavy cuts that usually require long slow cooking to higher levels of doneness to achieve gelatin conversion and softness, sous vide is pretty darned impressive and impossible to replicate with other cooking methods. Still, it’s not something that interests me enough to have one around, but eventually I may get around to it, just to be a completist.
Double cut pork rib chops are one of my favorite things to do SV. After 24 hours they’re really tender (36 hours is better). I’ve made these for dinner parties and gotten tons of compliments.
Ha!
I like the fact that I can have a nice medium rare pork chop and not have to worry about anything. Trichinella dies within a few minutes at 140F. Sous vide your pork whatever at that for a couple of hours and then sear it. no risk of illness, and a cut of pork which isn’t shoe leather.
Souse Vide is the only way I’m allowed to make steaks at home now. New York strips you can cut with a fork. A little salt, pepper, and a crushed garlic clove. Seal it up and leave it in the cooker for 4 or 5 hours.
Boil-in bags aren’t limited to boiling. You can simmer with them, too, fer cryin’ out loud. And all this concern about food poisoning tells me that the nanny state has left us too many citizens with untrained and unexercised immune systems. Wimps. 
Simmering means just barely bubbling. In other words, boiling. In any case, it’s at a temperature far above what we’re talking about here.
As for pork chops, there hasn’t been trichinella in commercially raised pork in the U.S. for decades. It’s safe to eat rare as long as the outside is cooked. I prefer to cook my sous vide pork chops at 135 F. At 140 F they’re starting to dry out.
My thought exactly. We both like our steaks rare. I buy custom cut filet mignon, rediculously thick. I sous vide the beef, then do a 15 second intense sear. Heavenly!
Sous vide enthusiasts: check out Sous Vide Everything on YouTube. It’s great. He does things like comparing Prime, Choice, and Select steaks, cooking one of each, then having friends do a blind taste test. He compares different seasoning regimes, lengths of cooking times, even combining sous vide with smoking.