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But one of our family traditions is to eschew the insanity of Valentines Day, in favor of just having a nice steak dinner at home. This year, we’re utilizing our AMAZING butcher shop and got some excellent looking ribeye steaks.

And we’re going to Sous-Vide them. Sous-Vide basically means ‘vacuum seal your dish in a bag, and dump in water to cook’. The trick is that water needs to be at a pretty tight temperature band. We want our steaks medium rare, so the water bath is between 131 and 133 degrees Fahrenheit.

After that, you get a skillet rocket hot (cast iron for this), and sear each side for up to 30 seconds a side.

And the results?

Awesome.

Perfect 2 MILLIMETER crust/sear, 26mm of perfectly medium rare meat, 2mm of crust. Everything was great.

How can you do this?

Hardware:

Tall Stock Pot
Good skillet (Cast Iron of Stainless steel)
Probe thermometer
Some way to vacuum seal the steaks (hack way: zip top bag, and a straw to suck air out)

Process:

Mix 1/2 teaspoon salt with 4 heaping tablespoons of minced garlic.
Put steak (refrigerator tempurature, not frozen) in vacuum seal bags, spread garlic/salt mix on both sides of steak.
Seal bag.
Fill stock pot 3/4ths to the top. Put probe of probe thermometer in water, heat water to 125 degrees, drop heat to the lowest setting, and set temp alarm on the probe thermometer to 133 degrees.
Put steaks (in bags) into the water.
Whenever the temp alarm goes off, add 1 cup of cool/room temp water. Temp should go down 2-3 degrees, and start climbing again. I was going ~10 minutes between cool downs. You may have to remove some hot water though as the process continues.
sous-vide steak for at least 1 hour. You can go up to 4 hours. (there’s a chart out there which correlates thickness to length of time, but after 1 hour, you’re good
Open bags, rinse off steaks, pat steaks dry.
Take the skillet, put on stove top, set to MAX heat, let it get hot.
Sear steaks for up to 30 seconds per side.
Serve. (No need to rest the meat)