Benton's Jazz

As I was explaining to Julie last night, I am a dismal chef when it comes to making the *perfect* medium rare steak. Our conversation skirted the the idea that, in order to have a great steak, you must start with great meat. Although this is very true, I can't justfiy wasting money on great meat since my problems is consistency. Or rather, inconsistency. Either my steaks are way overcooked, or super under cooked. This image basically sums up my skills to date.

As I mentioned, my problem is consistency. All the of the methods that I've tried are prone to my errors. As a side note, this is why I became an engineer. I can overcome my imperfections by letting technology do the heavy lifting. Unlike an artist, that perfects his or her skill over a life time, I prefer the easy route. My quest to develop a fool-proof method of perfect (and more importantly consistent) steak led me to the Sous Vide method. I'm not going to go into all the details here except to explain on a high level: Vacuum seal your food in a food storage bag (eg. foodsaver), place the sealed pouch into a temperature controlled water bath, and let the water do all the cooking. The benefit of this method is that you are able to cook at relatively lower temperatures, preserving tenderness, flavor, etc. Click here for the Wikipedia entry, if you'd like to know more.

Suffice it to say that I wanted all the benefits of Sous Vide without the price tag of consumer units. As an engineer, I know that I can do better. With some savy searching, I discovered the world of temperature controllers, and their amazing simplicity. I purchased one, along with a handful of other supplies and I built a unit that would convert my wife's crock-pot into a temperature controlled immersion bath (see image below).

Now, I can set the temperature controller to a desired point, and the controller will hold that temperature within 1/10th of a degree.

My first experiment was grocery store chicken breast, cooked at 140F for 2 hours. The results were as tender and juicy as any beer-can-chicken we've ever done. It was tremendous.

My second forray was BBQ pork riblets, and this time, I took a picture of the result.

It may not be apparent in the picture, but they had an amazing color and texture in the center. Aside from this, they were super moist, and fell right off the bone. The recipe that I was using called for a 48 cook time, but I only went 24. In hindsight, I should have went the full 48, but there is always time for that later.

The main event will be held this Sunday, when I attempt a set of Ribeyes! Here are some images and a video of the results/process.

Sous Vide on the left, Benton quality on the right...

This video highlights another method of using your beer cooler as a sous vide bath. The only problem that I have with this is that you have to babysit the cooler and add hot water as the heat escapes, otherwise, it works to the same end. I am using a temperature controlled crock pot for (all together now...) CONSISTENCY! Babysit a beer cooler?!

The key, as always, is consistency. If I can simply throw a bag of meat into a crock-pot Jacuzzi, and perhaps quick sear it afterwords (if only for show), and get a perfectly medium rare steak out the other end, I take it over years of honing manual skills any day of the week.