Mike Dwyer asks:
What’s your go-to dish to cook when trying to impress someone?
To impress someone with food, you need three things. First, it has to have visual appeal. Second, it needs to be something that they can compare your food to, so go classic instead of exotic. (Not a lot of people are going to say “That’s the best grouse kidney fricassee I’ve ever had” when it’s the first time they’ve had grouse kidney fricassee.) Third, it must be full of flavor.
So the answers will sound simple:Steak and potatoes, with Caesar salad. Or pasta carbonara.
The steak (likely a New York strip) is dressed with a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, three cloves of garlic minced and ground into a paste, salt, pepper, and about half a very finely-chopped onion per pound of steak. And… um… a schmear of bacon grease. That gets sealed up in a vacuum bag and it steeps in the sous vide for four to six hours at 126°F. It enjoys a pat-down with a paper towel and then a kiss of flame upon removal to produce the Maillard reaction. That’s going to help with your visual appeal and the taste — I love the taste of the char on meat but I love my red meat medium rare to rare. The sous vide and my blowtorch lets me have both.
Now, there is more to do than dropping a steak in a bath. Sautee some thin-sliced mushrooms and the rest of the onion with a pat of butter. Then blend them until smooth in a food processor with some balsamic vinegar, a generous handful of peppercorns, with some salt and garlic and herbs. Reduce in a medium saucepan. Thicken with a mixture of cornstarch and sugar that has previously been liquefied in a small amount of cold water, and keep on low heat with slow stirring until ready to serve on the beef.
Boom. Bistec a poivre, mes amis.
The potatoes are cubed, about one inch per side on the cube. They are dressed in olive oil and a spice-herb rub consisting of salt, cayenne pepper, black pepper, more garlic, rosemary, chives, and saffron. If some bits of onion left over from prepping the steak and sauce get in there, well, that’s very cool. The potatoes are then roasted at 450°F until they browned, and served hot. They need no sauce, and I promise you that everyone will want more even if they exercise enough restraint not to actually have them. And again, nicely browned potatoes look good so the guests start eating with their eyes, before fork meets food.
Of course, you need a vegetable with these. I usually use the vegetable portion of my dinner plate as the “cool down,” the place the diner can go to in order to get a momentary break from the spiciness of the other foods. But for the impress-the-guest on-the-spot dinner, Caesar salad with handmade dressing is a good way to go that you can do on the spot.
Now, everyone’s had Caesar salad. But surprisingly few people have had real Caesar salad; most people think that it’s iceberg lettuce with kind of a garlicy ranch dressing. Again, the real stuff is way better. Start with the croutons: peel a few cloves of garlic and rub the cloves on slices of day-old bread. Then brush the bread with olive oil, dress with salt, pepper, and a grating of Parmigiano-Reggiano. Toast them up in the oven until they’re lightly browned.
The inclusion of anchovies is a little bit controversial but damn do I love the anchovies. I’ll leave a series of the anchovies available, plated up on a crouton or two, for guests to add to their salads should they wish them, and lead by example with three or four of the little guys on my greens. Unlike in my previous post, I’ve also had good luck with the salad using whole inner leaves of the romaine as well as the one-inch squares that most people are familiar with and I’ve found that’s more visually impressive than a rough chop on the leaves.
If I’m in the mood for a hot vegetable instead, then I halve some Brussels sprouts and steam them in butter I’ve seasoned with salt and a bit of cayenne. They sit, slice-side down, in the butter, steaming in their own water, for about ten minutes or until I get a nice sear on the slice side. Then I grate some Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese on them and serve them up.
Another thing that really impresses people is linguine carbonara. Why this should impress them, I don’t know — but I suspect it’s because they’ve been trained by chain restaurants that carbonara sauce is alfredo sauce with bits of pork in it. That’s not even close to right. Use a long noodle with lots of surface area — spaghetti or linguine or fettuccine works best. Rolling boil before dropping in the pasta, in the drink for nine minutes until it’s al dente.
While that’s in the boil, fry up some small-cubed pancetta, or if you can’t get that, small-cubed thick-cut American-style bacon. Toss it with a little bit of sliced onion, a crushed garlic clove, and some peas. Then toss that into linguine fresh out of the pot. Crack and scramble maybe four eggs per pound of pasta, reserving one of the yolks. Remove the raw garlic from your sautee pan (the oil and flavor is all over the place), pour in the scrambled raw egg with the fried pancetta/onion mix directly on the steaming pasta along with some salt and pepper, and toss well. Then grate a generous amount of Parmigiano-Reggiano, and toss again.
Serve in a big serving dish, finishing off your presentation with the reserved egg yolk and some fresh-chopped parsley on top for a final toss. Don’t worry, the heat of the fresh pasta cooks the egg. Fantastically simple, pretty fast to whip together on short notice, rich and savory, stands on its own as a complete meal, and for some reason people think this is the most amazing pasta they’ve ever had. Again, I think it’s because they’re expecting a gloopy bland white sauce and what they get instead is fresh, simple, and intense.
Offer a cocktail while you do the final pre-service work, since your guests will be hanging out in the kitchen with you anyway. During the meal, keep everyone’s wine glasses full — an intoxicated guest is a guest strongly inclined to be pleased with your food! The steak will stand up to a big red like a cabernet-heavy Rhône very well, and the carbonara pairs best with an Italian white like a pinot grigio. I’ve rarely had to worry about dessert, as my wife usually makes that her contribution and she’s quite good at it. If it’s up to me, I’ll do a crème brulee (that lets me play with my blowtorch again!) or an apple tarte.
How much does a sous vide run these days?
You mention 4 to 6 hours of cook time, which seems a wide gap (even at that low a temp). I also like mine rare/med-rare. How do you determine final cook time? And does thickness matter?
If your a handy sort of person you could use a PID controller and make your own for far cheaper. Years ago I saw some pretty creative home made immersion cookers. From what I remember they used crock pots, rice cookers and coffee makers. I know they said the key is to make sure you really are keeping a consistent temp, gots to keep the nasties from growing while you meats are cooking.
Yeah you certainly could! I’m…. Well, I’m not that handy.
Do you still have the dart board?
No, it stayed at the old house in Tennessee.
The most popular sous vide suitable for home use runs $429. They make a smaller model they sell for $300, but don’t waste your time. As I understand it, there are competing ovens available now as well, but I’ve been quite happy with this one.
You’ll need a vacuum sealer, too. The makers of the popular oven also sell a vacuum sealer, but I’ve used it and don’t like it. This device is much easier to use, which can be a factor when you’re juggling several different dishes at the same time and will spare you frustration. A little shopping will get you one for $150-$160.
Once you have the stuff, you need to learn about technique and food safety. Doug Baldwin’s A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking is simply indispensable. He’s done the science. He gives away for free what you need to know, but if you find it useful, do consider buying his cookbook because he deserves financial reward for his work and making this style of cooking accessible to everyone.
You asked about a medium-rare steak. Yes, thickness matters. Most people get steaks from the grocery store and their butchers cut steaks to one inch thickness. One inch is close enough to 25 mm, so per Baldwin, you’ll want that immersed for not less than 165 minutes (two and three-quarters hours). I actually cook my steaks just a bit cooler than Baldwin’s tables, because I find that 131 degrees produces a medium rather than a medium-rare temperature. So I add half an hour to his cooking times. The trade-off is that I lose the ability to gelatinize connective tissue within the meat.
Mrs. Likko saw my enthusiasm for cooking with this tool and decided to ask around about the ultimate sous vide cookbook. She then produced Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure for me as a present. Chef Keller’s recipes from the French Laundry and per se are amazing and playful and well beyond my abilities. But if you want the summit, there it is.
I should add, my actual cook times are often even longer than this — because I will drop my protein in the water oven before going to work in the morning, and remove it only a few minutes before service in the evening. So that could wind up being nine or ten hours in the water bath. For something like beef or chicken, this is not a problem at all, in that time frame. Now, I wouldn’t treat fish that way, because fish is so delicate to begin with that it’ll collapse into goo over the course of nine hours.
How does 9 or 10 hours not lead to overcooked meat, if the preferred time is 4-6?
When you say “overcooked” meat, that usually means meat which to too far done, and therefore tough. That’s not our problem here at all. Because the meat never gets hotter than the temperature you want it, it never toughens and never gets to a temperature level where there is overcooking going on. Instead, it elevates to the temperature of the water around it and holds.
Our risk here is that the constant heat will cause the meat to become too tender, to become mushy. And that’s a very slow process at these temperatures. It takes a lot of accumulated heat transfer for a robust protein like beef or chicken to break down, usually something like an entire day. Pork ribs will tolerate 48-60 hours of cooking time before mushifying — and even then, you just pull the bones out with your fingers, mix in some sauce, and call it pulled pork.
I see. So it is the water temperature that matters, far more than the time. I see. Do you now cook all your proteins in it? And, absent a blowtorch, would a few seconds on the sear portion of the grill give a nice char? Texture is important.
I agree completely re: texture, and the Maillard reaction, otherwise known as “char,” and visual appeal. You want that nice crispy browned outside on the meat. In the summer, I char my sous vided meat on the outside grill for about thirty seconds on a side rather than with a blowtorch. These days, it’s a bit chilly outside so the blowtorch gets more work while my wife wears a Marge Simpson-like face, expressing a cocktail of anxiety and exasperation.
A few more questions (and sorry to be such a pest), but I assume you choose the water temperature based on the ultimate internal temperature you want for the meat (131 sounds like a perfect rare/med rare); I mean, the meat isn’t going to somehow get hotter than the water, right? Chicken, I presume you’d do 165-170. Etc. Do I have that part right?
Okay, if I do, here is my next question… on a grilled steak, you have your nice char (Maillard), you have a thin-ish layer cooked too medium and then you work through your pink and eventually into your red center; I tend to buy thick steaks so you see a little bit of that layering. I imagine that’d be absent on the sous vide, yes? If you put the steak in at 131, you’re eventually going to pull out a giant hunk of meat, all cooked to 131, yes?
I am an evangelist about sous vide cooking. I hope you’re inspired by our exchange to go try it out yourself.
So, yeah, you’ve got the idea of how it works. The whole steak never gets above 131 degrees so every millimeter of it is cooked to precisely that temperature. Here’s another fun difference: you don’t need to rest the steak before serving it. Because it’s exactly the right temperature all the way through, it won’t continue cooking above internal temperature as you rest. So typically, I plate the finished protein last, after the vegetable and the carbohydrate.
The surface comes out looking a little bit gray and unappetizing. That’s one of the reasons why you should char it afterwards. When you do char it, it’s really just the surface. You get maybe a millimeter of penetration with the Maillard reaction. If you use a cut with a ribbon of fat, like a sirloin, you can melt that ribbon and while it’s still all liquidy, find a way to distribute it over the meat. Then char it up a little more and you get all sorts of flava.
And when you slice that bad boy open and it’s perfectly colored and succulent and juicy and flavorful and tender all the way through, and have that first melt-in-your-mouth bite, oh yeah. You’ll have a happy little steak orgasm right there.
If you’re really curious, look around cooking implement stores like Sur la Table or Williams-Sonoma in your area — there’s usually a sous vide class on calendar. Treat yourself and Zazzy to the class, which will include eating the food you prepare under the chef’s guidance, and see how it’s done first-hand.
One last question (well maybe not the last)… Zazzy likes her steaks med/med-rare, while I’m med-rare/rare. How do we handle that? Are there two tanks with individual temp control on one machine?
One thing that I’d worry is lost is the experience of grilling. I love firing up the grill, lording over it, and coming away with a well-cooked steak. I can get steaks pretty close to perfect via careful timing and a sensitive touch. Sous vieing might yield a better product, but at what cost?
I could see it being a boon for chicken. I don’t get the same vesceral joy from nailing the chicken on the grill and chicken is either raw, perfectly cooked, or dry.
There’s less grilling but not none. I still grill chicken and of course I finish my proteins on the grill in summer. I also use a seasoned cast-iron skillet (using Mike Dwyer’s technique) to grill breakfast on summer mornings.
To prepare steaks of varying temperatures and still plate and serve simultaneously:
1. Separately bag each steak. This has the added benefit of letting you season each steak to personal taste. Label each bag with the intended diner’s name and the temperature with a Sharpie. E.g., “Zazzy: medium well.”
2. Set the oven to the highest temperature called for. Cook only those steaks, for the minimum period of time. Store the rest of the steaks in the freezer or the refrigerator.
3. When minimum pasteurization time has expired, turn the oven off. Allow it to remain off for three minutes or more to reset the computer. Add a few ice cubes to the water and leave the lid off while the oven rests. Don’t disturb the steaks already in the bath.
4. Turn the machine on again, and set to the next lower temperature desired. You may immediately place the steaks at that temperature in, the water will still be warm from the previous cook. The hotter steaks will stay cooked to the texture and internal color of the desired temperature, even if the service temperature drops a few degrees later.
5. Repeat as needed, moving down to the coolest desired temperature. The cooler steaks will not be as tender but they’ll still be damn good.
6. At time for service, remove, brown, and plate for each diner as desired. Drink a toast in honor of your friend Burt Likko for turning you on to this great way to make great steaks.
As you can see, sous vide cooking does not mean less thoughtful cooking. If anything, you need to do more planning ahead and practice better kitchen time management than you’ve done without this tool. But it’s really really worth it.
Amazing. I read an interesting article on the Nespresso or whatever its called and how, in a blind test, it often comes out tops, with the author discussing what this meant for the “art” or “craft” of cooking, and they mentioned sous vide as another development that might be negative for the art/craft. Sounds like that is not necessarily the case, especially if you take it seriously. The sous vide (or Nespresso) might make cooks out of schlubs, but nothing will make a chef.
Let me ask: Why grill the chicken? Why not sous vide and then finish on the grill?
Also, glad to hear the thing has a lid of sorts. Will keep the cat hair/cats out.
Grilling chicken is fun. So is spiking it on a rotisserie. No other reason. The sous hide would probably do a better job but I just enjoy butchering and trilling a chicken.
Kazzy,
Do you even know what a chef is?
Maybe I can sell Zazzy on the idea of it doubling as a bottle warmer!
You know what, it would be good at that.
Burt, for an attorney, you are a pretty good cook!
Although there are a number of pre-packaged sous vide appliances, people who are just beginning to wonder if this is worth their while should try something very simple — a beer cooler, or perhaps a tall beverage cooler, which you fill with hot water and then occasionally top off with the tea kettle.
And you don’t really need a vacuum sealer (he said, despite the fact that he has two chamber vacuums and two FoodSavers!) — you can use the Archimedes principle and a Ziploc bag. Put the meat in the bag, allowing only one corner to remain unsealed, and submerge the bag until all of the air is out, and then seal the corner.
Now, if you are cooking brisket or short ribs for 72 hours at 55C/131F, getting up every so often to heat up the water will begin to convince you that you need something better than the beer cooler.
But check out http://www.freshmealssolutions.com. Their Sous Vide Magic controller can be used with a CrockPot, a coffee urn, a rice cooker, or a simple electric hot plate or griddle and any kind of a large pot that you already have, and it costs only $169, including shipping. I was a beta tester for them, going back nearly five years, and they have excellent service and a great product.
And thanks for the recommendation for my good friend, Douglas Baldwin.
Sorry, I can’t type. It’s Robert.
Be careful with those plastic haggles. Some but not all are safe in an immersion situation. Pththlates: not just bad for you, but they taste bad too.
I love good carbonara. LOVE it. And now I’m shorting out my keyboard with drool.
I don’t have a sous vide in my house. But I often cook the same meal, only using my wood cook stove; stepping back in time to the way your great-grandparents likely cooked. Timing here depends on paying attention; temperatures are varient depending on the outside temperature and the type of wood, the size of the wood, and the amount of moisture in the wood.
I’d toast the bread for the croutons first, as the stove heats, and do so in the oven. The potatoes would go in the oven in a ceramic baking dish large enough to hold them in a single layer and give them a good shake now and then. My favorite potatoes to fix this way are the baby new potatoes, not much bigger then a golf ball. I quarter them, toss them in a dab of olive oil, salt, pepper, and a teaspoon or two of tandoori seasoning. Maybe some sliced onion or leek.
The steak gets the coating as a marinade at room temp while the potatoes cook. Same time, wash the greens (romaine only for a ceasers) and I don’t use the anchovies since I’m allergic to seafood. If I’m going to eat steak (rarely) I prefer a piece with bone in it; adds much in the way of flavor. I’d go for a ribeye with bone or porterhouse; perhaps a T-bone. One average sized steak, about a pound, will feed my family of 4 with leftovers, since we treat it as a condiment, not the thing you should fill up on.
After about 40 min. to an hour, the potatoes should be done, the salad waiting to be dressed. Take the tates out, and put a cast-iron fry pan in the oven in their place. Add small wood to generate high heat, and heat the pan a good 10 min. Now through the steak on it, and put it back in the oven for about 3 min. Turn, let cook another 3 min. or so, and take it out of the oven, and check the internal temp; looking for 125F. If we’re not there, put it back in the oven until you arrive, then cover and let stand while you finish the meal. The temp should rise to about 130 during the rest, for medium rare.
I want to note that I could also cook the steak on the stove top, taking off one of the burner circles over the fire box, and flame sear the steak over hot coals. I don’t do this because of internal air pollution. The oven easily gets to an excess of a thousand degrees F; and the smoke generated in the oven goes up the chimney, not into the kitchen. So I use the oven as a grill; putting the cast-iron pan on the ceramic stone on I keep on the floor of the oven for cooking bread and pizza.
Return the potatoes to the oven to re-crisp them.
I make brussel sprouts in a like way, I halve them if their small, quarter if larger; into a pan with butter and salt, cut side down, and a tablespoon of water, high heat, and cover for about 3 min. Remove the cover and cook until the water’s evaporated completely and the cut sides have seared. Now here’s the real trick: still over high heat, add just a splash more of water and toss to turn the browned sprout bits and butter into a glaze. While the sprouts cook, toss the salad, reclaim the potatoes from the oven, and put it all on the table.
And the real difference between Burt’s very delicious meal and mine is the matter of timing and the presence of wood flavor in mine. But I’m home to cook, and that take a good part of my day. (Much as I want to stand for modern women and the right to work, I also see great loss in the tradition of someone home in the kitchen preparing the family’s food, and the closeness a family has from gathering to share food at the end of the day.)
Nice burt.
I think this technique would work very nicely, and is available in some variant to anyone with appliances found in an ordinary kitchen (maybe not with the wood-fired flavoring if you’re just using a regular oven). So you don’t need all the modern fancy-schmantzy cooking toys I use. Obviously, back when all these dishes were first crafted, tools like the sous vide hadn’t been invented yet, so it just takes skill to do all this stuff with other equipment. Variations on bistec au poivre go back to the sixteenth century (the peppercorns were in relative terms quite a bit more expensive then, so it was a dish reserved for the wealthy) and the Inca were roasting potatoes with herbs and fats since before recorded history. Caesar salad was invented in the 1920’s, but egg-oil emulsions and sauces made with salted fish go back to the ancient Romans, and cheesemaking goes back before them, to pre-classical Greece.
The Caesar dressing sans anchovy gets a very similar umami and saltiness with a dash or two of Worcestershire sauce. There is a tiny amount of anchovy in Worcestershire sauce, so if your allergy to seafood is absolute, then you shouldn’t be using the stuff anyway and I’m out of suggestions. But if you could tolerate a few milligrams of fish fats at a time, you’d be good to go with lots of taste and essentially no fish products.
A dash might trigger migraine; sometimes I can get away with it, sometimes I can’t, so I don’t even bother any more. In place of worcestershire, I use Ume Plum or balsamico for umami, as well as kicking it up with fresh-grated parmesan (the real stuff, imported), and very finely diced sweet red, yellow, or orange sweet pepper or thin strips of roast red pepper (instead of strips of anchovy) in the salad.
I have discovered that if you use other high-umami ingredients in place of fermented fish sauces, you don’t notice the lack. So I always us ripe sweet peppers, for instance, in a Thai dish in place of the fish sauce. In Italian foods, black olives or artichokes work, too.
” tradition of someone home in the kitchen preparing the family’s food”
Apparently your great grandmother didn’t have to work then!
Mine did. She made food once a week, in bulk. Still homecooked, still hearty, but she was busy in the store the whole day, and didn’t have time.
Kim, I grew up on a farm. We all worked. At home. Including massive meals, hard physical, often in the wet/cold, makes people hungry.
hmm… did it not make sense to do up a few days food at once? Too much food to cook at once? I know from hiking how much caloric intake it takes hauling around stuff. (3000+ calories per day, and still losing weight).
I love your carbonara recipe, but don’t forget to top it with cracked black pepper. I’ve heard that the dish gets its name from the black pepper, hence “carbon”ara.
I should report that I finally got a friend to come up.from l.a. and watch the game while we ate my sous vide steaks. He was BLOWN AWAY by the strong beefy taste and pronounced that “this is what a steak should taste like.”
I grew up in a very meat & potatoes house and we never really ate anything very adventurous. In high school a friend introduced me to carbonara and it began my love affair with interesting food. So the dish has a very special place in my heart. Your recipe is very similar to mine Burt. Whta I like to do though is to mix the parsley, egg yolks and parmesan together in a large mixing bowl until it almost forms a thin paste. I add the cooked pasta on top and let it sit for about 30 seconds before I begin mixing. In my experience the sauce coats the pasta a little more evenly this way.
I think that will be on the menu this week.
I quite like looking through an article that can make people think.
Also, many thanks for allowing for me to comment!