Welcome to kidscookdinner.com! Today I (Alex) wanted to experiment with Sous Vide.  I took an online class with the Institute of Culinary Education at noon that demonstrated how to make a variety of dishes using Sous Vide and decided to try their strip steak recipe.

The first step was to cook a head of garlic (to be used in flavoring the steak).  Apparently, if you use raw garlic as a flavor element in Sous Vide, it can taste a little bitter but cooked garlic is fine and pretty easy to do: cut off the tops of the cloves in a head, wrap in foil and cook in 340-degree oven for 30 minutes.  Then you squeeze the soft cloves out of the head.

Next step was to sear the steaks (after salt and peppering them well). ICE recommends searing both before and after the sous vide cooking process because if you only do it after, by the time you have gotten the steaks appropriately brown, you will have overcooked them.

Meanwhile, the water is heating up to precisely 57 degrees Celsius.

Then the steaks go into plastic bags to be vacuumed sealed and placed into the water.  Per the ICE recipe I put one clove of cooked garlic and 1 sprig of thyme in with the steak.  They recommend that the flavor elements not touch the steak because they may get embedded into it.

Meanwhile, while the steaks cooked, I made a quick chimichurri sauce: chopped garlic, parsley, basil, and olive oil; prepped potatoes for baking; and chopped cucumbers, tomatoes, and avocado for a simple salad.

After 2 hours, I removed the steaks from the water bath, one by one, patted them dry, and seared them briefly one more time to remove any moisture.

Then everything went on the table and I plated up dinner. The steaks were perfectly, evenly, cooked inside. Yum.