Sous-vide is a fucking miracle for cooking.

Some of you may remember my Previous post on Sous-vide

I been using this technique for a while now and I can't begin to explain how much this has done for my cooking.

Good meat is off the chain expensive in DK, don't know how expensive it is in other countries. But for example a kilo of Filet Mignon is around 40 US dollars, most other meats is not worth buying unless you make stews out of it, tough as shoeleather, commercially brined to increase the water content so a kilo of meat will turn into half a kilo when cooked. Fucking bullshit. Impossible to get a reliably tender steak, it's a crap shoot and then you spend a lot of time and effort and sit down to eat and it's touch as an old shoe, grrr.

Sous-vide has allowed me to go out and buy just about any cheap cut of meat and it consistantly turns out to melt in my mouth. I recently found a good offer for flank steak and I tried cooking it normally, even at rare it was tough, even when pounded flat it was STILL tough.

Sous-vide cooked it, tender as filet mignon.

I've experimented a lot with Sous-vide to see if I could make it accessible for people that don't want to go total nerd on thier home cooking and yes, it realy is quite easy to get started and you DON'T need to turn your kitchen into a laboratory.

A rice cooker, a voltage regulator, and a decent thermometer and you can do it allmost as well as with expensive lab equipment. You may be a degree of here and there but it's still miles better than normal cooking of meat and fish. You don't realy need the vaccuum sealer, it works fine with ziplock bags, just squeeze the air out and close them up.

If anyone's interested in being able to buy cheap as shit meat and turn it into mouth watering, melt in your mouth goodness let me know and I'll write up some info on how to get started for under 50-80$ bucks, less if you allready have a rice cooker and a decent thermometer. It's NOT hard, try it once and you will be SOLD.

Here's a short easy and cheap version, sort of faux Sous-vide that you can try, just to see how amazingly Sous-vide works, it doesn't work for meats that needs to be cooked long and low to dissolve collagen into gelatin, like meats with lots of tough connective tissue, but for a steak or some other clump of meat that doesn't have tough connective tissie it works superbly well.

Grab your meat and a ziplock bag. cut of a slice of butter, salt and pepper the meat and place the butter slice on top. Now grab your digital meat thermometer and stick the probe into the midde of the meat lengthwise. Put the meat into the bottom of the ziplock bag, squeeze the bag so there's as little air in it as possible, best way is to zip the bag almost all the way, then sqeeze the air out and zip the last part.

Got your bag with the meat in it and the thermo wire sticking out of the bag?

Now heat a pot of water so it's just below boiling, we don't want any bubbles, just gently steam from the water. Put the bag into the pot so it floats, set your thermometer to go off at 60C or 140F.

When the beeper goes off remove the ziplock bag from the water. Heat a skillet to searing hot, in with a drop of oil, quickly sear both sides for 30 seconds.

Slice meat and marvel at the perfect color all the way, try a slice and taste just how good and tender the meat is. The meat is so tender because sous-vide doesn't need high heat to penetrate the meat fast, it just cooks the meat until the desired doneness is slowly reached so the outside becomes dry and the heat is not high enough that the fibers in the meat contracts.
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