You freeze them so they don’t get squished when bagged? Are you using a food savr or ziplocks?
Yep, I lightly freeze so they maintain shape during vacuum sealing.
Neat solution! 
Another tip is to freeze marinade solid so that you can vacuum seal it with your meat/fish/poultry.
I gotta get me a sous vide rig and a blowtorch-- heard a lot of good things about it. Maybe it’ll be a Christmas present to myself-- I like grilling / BBQing too much in the warm months. Suppose I could sous vide, then sear on a hot grill but it seems a waste to fire up coals just for a sear.
I may be swimming against the current here, but I think the reverse sear is superior to sous-vide, at least for steaks, and assuming your oven has a pretty good low-temp mode (mine’s called “Keep Warm”).
Why do I say this? Because sous-vide retains ALL the moisture in the meat- you have to dry it off when you get it out of the bag, and even at that, it’s still clearly very wet. So searing becomes a bit of an adventure- you generally have to get rid of all that water on the surface before it’ll really start to brown much, and that takes a fair amount of time, or super-hot temperatures.
Reverse sear is a tad more loosey-goosey in terms of temperature, but with a good leave-in probe thermometer, you can hit the same internal temp as you could with sous-vide, AND effectively dehydrate the exterior at the same time. Searing is MUCH more effective with reverse-seared meat than sous-vide.
That’s not to say that sous-vide isn’t handy; that’s entirely untrue. But it’s not as handy for steaks as reverse searing is, IMO.
Thanks bump! This might be a good technique when I occasionally make steak au poivre— take the perfectly medium rare steaks out of the low-temp oven, give them a good sear in a pan, then let them rest while I make the pan sauce. A secondary sear might not make enough of a fond, though.
Unfortunately my meat guy closed last year. So now I need to find a new source of custom meat.
Your wish is my command! Wagyu Beef by Morgan Ranch
Yeah, reverse sear ends up with an utterly dry surface, quite amenable to searing. I don’t use it as much as I might because it works best with super thick cuts, or so I understand.
I don’t have much trouble searing a sous vide steak, but I start with an iron pan in the oven, then put the already-hot pan on a 22,000 BTU wok burner. Bam, seared.
I grilled a couple of New York strip steaks last Sunday.
I live in a relatively small NYC apartment, but I’ve got a large (by NYC standards) terrace, and I have a propane gas grill there. During the summer, the stove/range hardly ever gets turned on.
The steaks were amazing. It’s all in the steak - there’s not much to grilling them. But get the right steaks. Dry aged, at least an inch thick. Preferably thicker.
As to skirt steaks, well, wow. Entrana is the most amazing cut of meat you can get.
I grew up in what became a Hispanic neighborhood in NYC as I reached my teens. Argentine and Urugayan restaurants opened up. I discovered the skirt steak. A well-prepared grass-fed skirt steak rivals the porterhouse at Peter Luger’s any day of the week.
If you want an incredible meal, check out El Chivito D’Oro, in Queens, NYC (when they open up, that is, although they’re doing takeout right now). Get the parillada (the mixed grill). Unless you’re a vegan, it will be among the best meals you’ve ever had in your life.
Or get a couple of good-quality skirt steaks. Grill them at home. Marinate them a bit (I use soy sauce, balsamic vinegar and olive oil). Serve with chimichurri.
Yes!!!
This is what I do as well. Works a charm.
So, per my link up thread on fake-aging steak, I got the koji delivered on Thursday, and today I picked up a 4-pack of Choice grade T-bone steaks that were really just strip steaks because the tenderloin side was practically nonexistent. But it was Kroger, and their steak selection was paltry so I was lucky to score these. I miss the days of going to the local meat market and being able to get right in and pick up top-notch cuts…now there’s a line for the place a block long because they only let so many people in at a time.
But no matter, the point of the experiment is to use middle-of-the-road steaks and see how much they improve.
I was going to try the koji AND the fish sauce methods tested in the skillet.lifehacker.com article I linked up thread, but the fish sauce treatment involved soaking in fish sauce for 3 days, then letting the steak dry out for 3 more days, and I didn’t feel like waiting that long; so I followed the instructions in the bon appetit link below exactly, and now I have have 2 t-bones liberally coated in koji rice powder on a wire rack in my garage fridge, and 2 “control” steaks that I will just salt and pepper as usual on grilling day. I’m going to give it 48 hours so I can grill the steaks on Sunday— they aren’t too thick, like less than 1”, so I think that should be enough time.
Stay tuned…
Here are the results of my koji steak experiment:
I took the koji-covered steaks out of the garage fridge after 48 hours and noticed they were partially frozen. Crap, I forgot that old fridge cools unevenly, and things in the back can tend to partly freeze. When I rinsed off the koji and dried off the steaks, they didn’t really look any different than normal raw steaks, so I was concerned the partial freezing may have slowed or stopped the fake-aging process.
I salted and left the koji and “control” steaks out to all get up closer to room temp and got the grill going. I cooked all steaks the same way-- I grilled for 3 minutes per side over a very hot grill. The first thing I noticed was the koji steaks got a really nice sear, as the articles I linked to said they would. The control steaks seared pretty well too, but you could definitely see the difference.
Now, as for flavor, there was definitely some biochemical magic that happened. I have to confess here that I don’t think I’ve ever had a true long-aged steak in a top-notch steakhouse, so I can’t say how close the flavor of the koji steaks compared to the real thing. But there was a deeper, richer, more complex flavor profile thing, with a hint of something just a little bit “off” in the aftertaste. My wife called the flavor “interesting” but confessed that she actually liked the non-aged steak a little better. For me, though the flavors were definitely different, I couldn’t say the koji steaks were vastly superior. As puzzlegal said about the aged vs. fresh lamb, the control steaks tasted cleaner and “steakier”. But for me, I can see really acquiring the taste-- like when I tried 1000 day aged gouda for the first time: the funky aftertaste was kind of off-putting at first, but I quickly grew to crave it and aged gouda became one of my favorite things.
I definitely want to try this again- I have plenty of koji left and it’s supposed to last for a couple weeks in the refrigerator. Next time I will make sure not to let the steaks partially freeze, and another tip for anyone who tries this-- although I cooked all 4 steaks the exact same way, the control steaks were perfectly medium-rare throughout, but the koji steaks cooked though more than I would’ve liked-- closer to medium. Maybe the koji and the sitting uncovered in the fridge dried the steaks out just enough that they cook faster. I will take care not to overcook them next time.