The Gentle Heat of Sous Vide
Cut open a sous-vide steak, however, and it’s the same color all the way through. That’s by design: if the water bath is set to 130°F/54°C, then the whole steak, inside and out, will become exactly 130°F/54°C—and not a degree more.
The great advantage of cooking sous vide, as demonstrated time and again, is that there is no fear of cooking unevenly; you can dial in the exact grade of doneness you prefer; and you can walk away from the kitchen for hours without overcooking your meal.
The disadvantage is that sous vide cookery can take significantly longer than the broiler method. The nature of heat is that it always moves through a material from a hotter region to a colder region—in the case of your steak, from the outside, where you apply heat, to the inside. And the bigger the difference in temperatures between the hot region and the cold region, the faster it moves. So heat will penetrate to the center of a steak that’s under a hot flame quite a bit faster than if the same steak is in a bath of warm water.
That means that in order to ensure our sous-vide meat is done—to ensure that the gentle heat has made its way all the way into the center and cooked it—we leave it in the bath for at least 1½ hours.
Since sous vide–cooked meat is the same temperature all the way through, it requires an additional step to brown the exterior. By searing it with high heat, we make sure that stage happens as quickly as possible, before the heat has a chance to travel into the interior and start to cook more than just the surface.
Leave a comment and join the conversation!