The Alcoholian

Posted by johngl

A couple of years ago, while watching Iron Chef America, I noticed this thing called an immersion circulator that is used in a cooking style that is generally referred to as sous vide.  The price of the immersion circulators ($1400+) forced me to rethink this situation.  I am still trying to justify a $5000 stove (yet to be purchased).

Oh, to find a work-around.

When I went back to work on Jan 5, everyone was talking about the Wii Fits that Santa had given them.  When asked what Santa gave me, I said a “Sous vide controller”.

“A what?  What game is sous video?”
“It’s a cooking thing,” said I.
“Oh”

Anyway, the controller arrived and I tried it out last night.

This is a petite tenderloin with pearl cous cous.  Pretty damn tasty.

Start with a tenderloin:

By now, you should be able to go from a bagged loin to parted out in less than 15 minutes:

From the top, that is bits of silver skin and fat (save for stock), the chain (scrape the sinew for burger meat), a couple of petites (I tied these together), and the whole loin.  Dressed and finished, the petites and loin came out like this:

These went into my dry-aging fridge and after three days of aging, the petite looked like this:

I went with the petite because I wanted to give the controller a test drive on a small piece of meat.  I will be doing the large tenderloin later today for another wine salon (Rhone).

To prepare for the sous vide, I hit this with some finely chopped sage and thyme, garlic powder, salt and pepper, all stirred into some melted butter and layered it on pretty thick:

This then gets stuffed into the FoodSaver bag and evacuated:

So now we are ready for the water bath portion.  Think of this as a hot tub for food.  We’re looking for a constant temperature for relatively long periods of time.  To do this, we need something to control the temp:

Since I am pretty anal, I wanted to check the unit’s calibration so I rounded up a couple of probe thermometers that I keep around for grilling.  The one on the right is a remote unit that I can carry around while the other part remains stuck in the meat.  It looked like probe central in the roaster full of hot water:

I just drop the bagged meat into the hot water and left it alone for a couple of hours.  It came out looking like this:

It lacks some color and that wonderful crust we usually want on our beef.  The solution is to sear it off in cast iron or hit it with a torch.  I wasn’t in the mood for the torch last night, so I opted for cast iron.  It worked nicely.

And a couple of minutes later (after a short rest), the meat looked beautifully cooked:

Note how the color goes right to the edge.  Yeah, I like that.

We made up some pearl cous cous for a side and plated up:

Paired with a 2005 Lot 35 Cameron Hughes Cabernet Sauvignon from the Yountville District, this was a really great experimental dinner (experiments don’t necessarily turn out quite so well).  I am a happy guy.

The wine was inky colored with a nice purple edge and aged in 100% French oak.  It tastes of dark cherry and currant with a hint of prunes.  There were some chocolate notes as well, so I grabbed some 66% chocolate and gave it a try.  Perfect match.

I will probably be doing several sous vide posts and let you know how the Auber Controller holds up over time.  So far though, it is a great toy that didn’t break the bank.

The best things in life should be shared!

Tags: beef, sous vide, tenderloin

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 at 6:44 am and is filed under Land, Meat, Recipes: Eats, Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.