For my birthday, Matt got me a new play toy for the kitchen. A sous vide immersion circulator made by Anova. Sous vide is a relatively new cooking method to make it to the home kitchen - it's quite popular in restaurants, but has been a little too pricey for home use.
I've heard pretty amazing things about them - especially with regard to cooking steak! We actually were doing amazing at cooking steaks back in Houston, but our outdoor method really doesn't seem to work as well in 30° and the ventilation in this kitchen has a 99% chance of the smoke alarms going off when cooking steak. So when Anova started popping up in my newsfeed, I got interested in the technique and off-handedly mentioned to Matt that it would be fun to play with it. And he always pays attention to these things! :)
Since we were cooking for a crowd, I decided to make a Costco run. They are honestly one of the better sources of beef up here. (I miss you, Texas cattle!) The ribeye packages were all different sizes though, so I went with New York Strip!
My carnivore child got pretty interested at this point. Shocking...!
Sous Vide literally means "under vacuum" and that is how you cook most foods. The Anova is merely a fancy water heater and circulator. The idea of sous vide cooking is to maintain a set temperature precisely for a set period of time and the piece of food immersed in the water (no floating because it's vacuum sealed!) will slowly reach the same temperature throughout. No overcooking the outside while trying to reach safe temperatures inside!
I used my giant pot I bought in 2014 for the giant recipe of French Onion Soup and clipped the steaks to the side. I am unsure if this was necessary or not - I didn't want to risk blocking the ports on the Anova. And you can see the multitude of thermometers we were double checking the accuracy with - Anova was as awesome as advertised on temperature control!
The one downside is that the meat came out looking a little blah. Obviously you can't sear the meat with sous vide, so it comes out needing a little bit more attention before serving.
Into the cast iron skillet with you! Just a quick sear on both sides to make them extra scrumptious, but not enough to overcook the outer edges.
The final result - a perfectly medium rare steak with just the right amount of sear on it. Look at that evenness all the way through! I think maybe next time I might cut off all the extra fat on the side, but that's just a good excuse to do this again! And again...! :)
And to top it all off, Heather and Mom made me a cake for my birthday! And it was Oreo! And it was delicious. Also my mom decided to decorate it with a J33 because she loved BB8 in the new Star Wars. Cute, mom!
Henry was chowing down on the cake! He has a bit of a cold and can't really breath through his nose. Which meant he was scarfing food down, with a pause occasionally to take a deep breath. He finally shoved the empty plate across the table to me and said "What do you want, Henry?" He replied without any hesitation and in a very big-boy voice "More!" This boy loves his cake...!
But don't think Thomas was any less excited about the cake. He finished it and Matt suggested he lick the plate. I don't think that it had ever occurred to Thomas to do this and he was completely on board with this method of frosting recovery. That plate was pretty darn clean when he was done.
Happy birthday to me and thanks to everyone for making it a great birthday! :)