Like a lot of hobbies, you can spend as much as you like. But I wouldn’t recommend that kind of spending for someone new to the technique. Get the specialized peripheral equipment down the road and just use household binder clips, zip bags and a stew pot or cooler to start out. Based one what I’ve heard from the community, I think the devices have proven quite reliable, particularly for something with a motor, display, and controlled heater used around water.
I’d let you borrow mine if you were local. I’ve let others use my rig about four or five times and most (all?) have gone on to buy a setup themselves. In fact, it’s out on loan now.
Yes. The meat will be wet after cooking. However, some people SV, pat off the worst of the ‘bag juice,’ then put in the fridge to dry (and chill) before the sear.
Higher heat = tastier steak, I say. Most Home grills don’t get hot enough to grill steaks ideally. Restaurant wood-fed grills approach 700° F. Steakhouse infrared grills get over 1,000° F. That will grill the perfect Pittsburgh steak. Chef tip: slather on lots of butter when grilling.
I vacillate between Pittsburgh rare and Pittsburgh medium-rare, depending on how bloodthirsty I feel. After all, I’m Tibby-cat, the obligate carnivore. I crave blood.
The good and bad thing about sous-vide is that since it’s sealed in a bag, there’s nowhere for the moisture to go. So it’s going to be wet when it’s done cooking. You can still get a good sear, but not quite that crisp crust that you get from a reverse sear.
It turned out great! (If anyone has any suggestions for anonymous image sharing services I’ll post a pic or two).
Cooked in the oven until my thermometer read about 118 (like I said, I was definitely erring on the side of more done). Pulled it out and onto a hot cast iron with some vegetable oil and seared un-disturbed for ~90seconds a side. Then added 3tb of butter, a rosemary sprig and three crushed garlic cloves and spooned it over the meat over the course of another minute or two.
Results: tender meat, evenly cooked across the whole piece, light pink center, and tasty! I think an even hotter pan would have emparted a bit more flavor (or maybe pulling the meat earlier and searing longer). It didn’t reach the level of a good restaurant steak, but definitely as good as an “ok” restaurant steak. I’m happy!
Great!!! Glad it turned out good. Keep up the work on experimenting, as that is the best way to satisfy your own palette.
In our house we have a saying on experimenting. “It might be a cereal night”. As we always have cereal around and you never quite know how your creations will turn out.
The only downside is that the whole house still smells like cooking from yesterday (and did quite strongly when we went to bed). Yes, cooking smells are generally “good”, but there’s something a little unsettling about a house that smells kind of thickly like meat or any smokey/fatty cooking long after you’re done in the kitchen (YMMV of course).
I got one of those room air filters during the pandemic, and one advantage is that it filters out cooking smells, too. So my house doesn’t smell today like what I cooked last night.
(The filter isn’t in the kitchen, but it’s quite large, and cleans a lot of air. I upgraded from just HEPA to HEPA+active carbon, thinking it might be good for odors.)
Just have a look at your steak and if it isn’t good enough, feel free to sear longer. My sears are anywhere from 1 minute to 2 minutes, depending on how long I preheated the pan. (I preheat from 3-5 minutes at medium-high heat [instead of full blast] to both heat it up and reduce hot spots.) You can reach a point where it’s too hot and it burns your steak, so just use your senses. Every cooktop is different, so it’s hard to say how long to preheat and how fast your sear will be.
Glad it worked out! Oh, and I also read this:
As “Then added 3lb of butter,” which I thought was just a wee bit aggressive.
ETA: And I thought that looked familiar. Turns out I had watched this video on Youtube:
Oh, and look up Guga Foods for all sorts of steak porn. You’ll see a very similar approach to what you did in a lot of his videos.
Makes sense. Following a suggestion in one of the links shared above, I pre-heated my pan in the oven (@ 275) while the steak was cooking, which got me complacent. The meat hit temp and I hadn’t thought about taking the pan out and really getting it going on the stovetop before I was ready to sear. So, the pan came out first and I blasted it on high and as soon as the oil was shimmery I put the steak on it- I definitely could have let it get hotter if I wasn’t worried about over-cooking in the oven. So, a few timing things to work out for next time for sure.
I like Guga Foods but my one problem is keeping track of what is the best way to cook a steak. He has done so many tests I am no longer certain what the bottom line is.
