sous vide filet mignon.

recently made this for my mom for her birthday. cooked them at 135 for 2 hours.

forgot to get an inside shot, but they turned out absolutely amazing.

roasted garlic powder.

i recently made this for the purpose of sous vide cooking. the thing is - when you cook at the low temperatures of sous vide, raw garlic won’t get warm enough to properly cook. thus - you pre-cook the garlic, dehydrate it, and chop it into powder. i tried it out on some filet mignons and it worked great!

this was relatively easy.

i took 10 heads of garlic, cut off the tops, drizzled some olive oil into the tops, turned them upside down on a sheet of foil, baked in the oven @ 425 for about 45 minutes. then took the garlic out of the pods - this was the time consuming part. i then put them in my food dehydrator and left it on for a day. did my house ever smell good! i wish i would have chopped the cloves in half half way though, but it worked almost perfectly. chopped in my food processor and sifted through a sieve and got the quantity you see above. not a lot for 10 heads of garlic, but well worth the effort.

this is how nerds cook ribs.

sous vide baby back bbq ribs, zip tie guns, ibc cream soda

sous vide hanger steak in progress!

48 hour sous vide bbq baby back ribs.

i heard that this is an insane way to make ribs. being the bbq fan i am, i went for it. first i brined them for 24 hours. this makes them hold water much better when cooking. i also added a little bit of brown sugar and liquid smoke to the brine.

after 24 hours i dried them off and put my kansas city dry rub on one half and some famous daves rib rub on the other. i re-made a small batch of the kansas city rub because i read that no additional salt is needed after brining. so i made it without salt. i noticed this with the dave’s rub, it was still good, but much too salty. next time i will try not brining.

i cooked them for 48 hours at about 143 degrees F. when researching on the internet, a lot of dudes did 72 hours and reported that the meat falls away from the bone under its own weight. i was hungry and figured they’d still be good after 48 hours. next time i’ll try 72 hours.

once out of the bag, i used a butane torch to create a flavor crust on the surface of the ribs. when making sous vide steaks i would sear them in a hot pan or on the grill for a minute per side - but the blowtorch is much better and much cooler.

i then covered them in my kansas city sauce and put it under the broiler for about 5 minutes. this warmed up the sauce and made it thinner and stick to the meat. i also torched it briefly to caramelize the sauce :D

i’ve been eating ribs my whole life.
i’ve had a lot of ribs.
these were easily the best ribs i have ever had.
unlike any other ribs i’ve ever had. 
the meat stuck together very well, but pulled away cleanly from the bone. for the meat staying together so well, they were unbelievably tender and juicy. the texture is nothing short of silky. this cooking method is so incredible.

delicious bison ribeyes i sous vide’d recently.

sous vide organic grass fed ribeye steaks!

experimented with all three.

one had a couple sprigs of fresh rosemary.
last time i used aromatics in a sous vide bag, i wrapped it loosely in some seran wrap. this time i just stuck the rosemary right in there with the steak.

one was a special steak seasoning, and the other was the mocha java dry rub. 

all of them were also first seasoned with kosher salt and fresh cracked pepper.

cooked them for about 6 hours at 131 degrees (medium rare).
this time i also stuck the hose of a fish pump in the sous vide rig to help keep the water circulating and developing heat pockets. 

preheated a charcoal grill super hot, lightly oiled it, and grilled for about a minute on each side.

all of them turned out absolutely awesome. they were perrrfectly cooked, just barely seared on the edges and extremely tender. made these for my dad and brother and we all agreed these were the best steaks we’ve ever eaten.

today i went to the whole foods metropolis by my house and picked up some fresh asparagus, and a monster organic grass fed strip steak.

i took a sprig of fresh rosemary (also from whole foods) and a pressed clove of garlic, loosely wrapped them in a sheet of seran wrap and threw it at the bottom of the bag. i heard this is to not give it such a direct taste of the aromatics, but next time will go back to just having the aromatics contacting the meat. dried, salted and peppered the steak, and vacuum sealed!

also prepared the asparagus. washed and dried, seasoned with salt and pepper. cut some butter into little cubes and distribute them throughout the bag and that was it! cooked them for 10 minutes at the end.

cooked the steak at 140 degrees for 4 hours. an hour before i took it out i put in a couple eggs for an hour. i heard that eggs when cooked sous vide are also absolutely awesome (and kept seeing them on top of asparagus!).

finished the steak as always on a super hot pan (this time with butter!), which gave it some great color (very plain looking out of the bag) and also makes for a DELICIOUS crust of flavor on the outside. the center was very pink but absolutely perfectly cooked! can’t believe what great results i’ve been having. however, the eggs i felt were a little underdone, but will try again with more time next time. also, the asparagus was very crisp and tasty! next time will add more butter and seasonings (forgot rosemary and garlic :P).

sous vide filet mignon.

i recently hacked together a sous vide cooker. i read about these a while ago but just recently thought it was a good idea. the idea is you hook a temperature controller up to a crock pot full of water and cook vacuum sealed food for a long time at a constant temperature. the results are spectacular.

first i needed to get a vacuum sealer. i knew these were pretty awesome, but never had a use for one. after doing some research on amazon i realized to get a nice one would be like $100. i found the wolfgang puck BVS0010 on eBay refurbished (with warranty!) for $30 with a ton of bags, not bad! it seems to be pretty decent quality and am very happy with it. tthere were some nice industrial temperature controllers on eBay, but after some internet research it seemed as if the cheapo ones do the job just as good as anything else. i got a $13 “aquarium” controller from china (2 weeks shipping). spliced  a $1.50 white extension cord from home depot into the controller, hooked up a spare 12V wall wart, and i was in business!

first i made some dry rubbed chicken breasts. you can do marinades, but you must freeze them so they don’t get sucked out when vacuum sealing the bag. either way the dry rubs worked great. finished on the grill for a couple minutes and was excellent! by far the juciest tastiest chicken i’ve ever had, texture was also real unique. also made some filet mignons. dry rubbed one with my previously made mocha java dry rub, and just salt/pepper and a clove of crushed garlic in the other. cooked at 140 degrees and pulled the coffee dry rubbed one out after 4 hours. came out looking weird so finished on a super hot frying pan with a tiny bit of peanut oil for a couple minutes which just browned it and gave it a crust. it was totally excellent, unbelievably easy to cut, super tender, super juicy, and perfectly cooked. the salt/peppered/garlic’d one i took out after 8 hours and was also incredibly perfect. there was a little bit of juice in the bag that i thickened with corn starch into a great sauce. i got these “filet mignons” at jewel and they were kinda weird, both had dime sized cylinders of fat in them, but after cooking easily peeled away from the steak. while the dry rub was excellent, i preferred the simpler taste of the seasoned one. next time will add more seasonings to everything! this guy wrote an excellent research article regarding cooking sous vide steaks. will try with many different meats and vegetables in the future.