Unrelated but how would you rate sous vide cooking? I am tempted for a bunch of reasons but I’m worried it’ll be just another kitchen appliance that I rarely use.
I was using it for steaks and it’s been great - sous vide then cast iron pan - but I moved somewhere where the smoke alarm is extremely sensitive so haven’t used it much lately 😞
There are different type of smoke alarms. Some detect smoke. There are two ways of doing that. Near a kitchen area it’s usually best to get a completely different one that just uses changes in temperature. Though they will only notify you way matter. So highly recommend keeping the existing one and moving that one somewhere else.
For steaks, they’re excellent. About the only thing I haven’t been able to do over a good steakhouse restaurant is an extremely crisply outer layer. There’s some techniques there that I haven’t learned yet that might fix that. Everything else about the juiciness and taste is easily the same or better.
You’re basically taking all the art of out it that you would have to learn to become a top steak grill master, and replacing it with precision.
Make sure you dry your steak extremely well, and then basically shallow fry it in a cast iron or other heavy pan. Don’t need to deep fry it, but if you really want it as crispy, you want a real layer of oil.
One strength of sous vide is you can get even normal steaks much more tender than otherwise possible, just by extending your sous vide time up to two or three hours.
If you’re not committed, you don’t actually need an appliance for it, have had great results with a Dutch oven and a programmable BBQ thermometer monitoring the water temp. One of my burners goes really low so just a matter of adjusting to keep in range. You don’t get forced circulation (get some natural circulation though) and it’s not set and forget, but you can do with stuff you probably already have on hand. Done with heavy freezer bags before I was gifted a vacuum sealer.
