Bain-marie [water bath]. I’ve never heard of it done that way, that’s an interesting method. Thanks.
ElGuapo:
Um, because it tastes better that way? You’re just squeamish, unless it’s because you don’t like the sight of blood. Wait, you like medium-rare dripping. So what’s wrong with bleu?
I don’t know, I find it kind of gross, that uncooked portion in the center. Like something went wrong. But to each his own.
It’s like sashimi. If you’ve ever had a good piece of arctic char sashimi, a blue steak should have that same lovely texture.
I’ve had blue steak, and the part that’s a turnoff for me is the “unfinished” feel. I do love the taste of steak tartare, but blue (or the greatest abortion of steakery, “Pittsburgh rare”) just seems off to me somehow.
For just plain simple-and-great steak, though, I’ve recently become enamored with the flat iron steak. Little bit of olive oil, salt and pepper, and grill/broil it right up. Quick, easy, and delicious.
The term is “sous vide” and means “under a vacuum,” because the food is vacuum sealed. It’s a form of low-temperature cooking and very much used in high-end restaurant kitchens and high-volume institutional food service. For example, if you eat at The French Laundry or Alinea or somewhere similar, it’s likely that nearly every dish you eat has at least one element that’s cooked sous vide.
A reasonable facsimile can be reached at home with a big pot of water (to control thermal shock, so the temperature of the water does not change when you introduce the food), a probe thermometer and a careful eye on the burner. You want to seal the food in a Food Saver or similar vacuum packing apparatus, and cook it in water that is the same temperature that you want the final product to be. You can also use certain brands of plastic wrap, but not others - it needs to be food-safe up to 200 degrees or so. For example, you’d cook a steak to a rare consistency at 125 degrees F, for an hour, and then unpack it, sear it, rest it, and serve it. If you want it blue, cook it at 110 degrees F - it’ll be just warm to the touch. A particularly telling photo of the effect of this kind of cookery:
Here’s a good explanation of sous vide and low temperature cooking, which can be used to various effects that are impossible to duplicate with traditional high-delta T cooking method. For example, you can cook a short rib at 130 or 140 degrees over the course of four full days, and end up with a pink, juicy, but perfectly tender short rib:
http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/02/12/sous-vide-and-low-temp-primer-part-i/
Wow, interesting. I have seen steaks at Trader Jim’s vaccum packed in heavy plastic. Is there a way to tell if this is food safe to a certain temperature? That would save a step, if you could just throw it in the pot already sealed.
Great, thank you. He said French for “in liquid” which is why I went for bain-marie.
I’ve seen the vacuum-sealed method before but that’s a good write-up.
I looked up Pittsburgh rare and that’s apparently what bleu/blue is sometimes called in the US. Just about cooked on the outside, inside barely cooked at all. Red and perhaps warm on the inside.
It’s not for everyone but as far as I’m concerned, it tastes better than other ways of cooking steak.
Slight difference. “Blue/bleu” is “barely cooked, warm on the outside”. Pittsburgh Rare is “char the fuck out of the outside because people like the taste of Kingsford Briquets apparently”.
The human body is not designed to eat elemental carbon, dammit.
There’s a statute of limitations!
It would be perfectly safe to do, but you wouldn’t want to do it, because the food would be totally unseasoned. A steak without salt is not a steak you want to eat.
The human body is kinda weird. We have incisors and canines and forward looking eyes and hunting instincts like a carnivore, but lots if molars and the long, complicated GI tract of a herbivore. Helps us eat lots of stuff I suppose.
It would be perfectly safe to do, but you wouldn’t want to do it, because the food would be totally unseasoned. A steak without salt is not a steak you want to eat.
I didn’t catch that part … so you want to season the steak before putting it into the bag/water?
Some of them come preseasoned. Like the carne asada they sell. But will note the unseasoned ones.
Yes, dumb question but could you just season it afterward, when you are about to sear it? Or is it too late then?
My guess is that you want to let the salt soak into the meat during the boiling phase but … I thought the salt was what created the crust. Now I’m confusing myself. :)
A hazy recollection of a Good Eats episode makes me think the salt actual does something chemically to the meat as it cooks. Brings out flavor somehow. Maybe breaks down the muscle tissue? Fat? Both? Something like that. Though this is when you grill/broil, not sure about this crazy French method. But I definitely like the pic of the results.
By the way, that primer on this method: http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/02…primer-part-i/ is from tomorrow! Cooking . . . in the fuuuuuuture!
Salt brings out flavor in anything (except for bitter foods–it reduces bitterness). Last week’s Good Eats actually went over the specifics of why that is, which has to do with how the taste receptors on your tongue work. I seem to recall that with meat it also helps draw moisture to the surface, along with proteins, which help with crust formation (which in turn adds flavor).
Sorry, yes - at the very least you want to salt it. If you add herbs or other flavoring elements, you want to do so sparingly, as they will be extremely strong.
No, it’s too late then - needs to be exposed to the meat for longer to properly season it, and the denaturing of muscle proteins interferes with the whole process, so it needs to happen when the meat is raw.
Salt does a lot of stuff, but creating the crust is not one of them, although it can help accelerate browning in the pan, which is one of the reasons that a lot of places that use this method will season meat well in advance - thirty minutes to an hour, so that the salt has time to extract liquid from the meat, dissolve itself in that liquid, and move into the meat via osmosis. With traditional cooking methods, this wouldn’t be practical, but with sous vide you can hold the meat on station at the proper temperature for something like four hours. Also, although the salt only penetrates to a depth of around a quarter inch, the meat SEEMS more evenly seasoned. This is particularly true of large cuts - roasts and such.
For this particular method, salt’s main function is to make the meat taste awesome. It doesn’t really aid in the breakdown of muscle tissue over such a short timeframe.
My memory, she is not so good these days. But the picture he linked is what I think everyone is going for, so there’s your method.
H.
I just hit the button for whichever steak I want, then hit the “manager meal” promo key and wait about 12 minutes.