What about doing sous-vide in a pressure cooker at lowest possible heat? Or a big pot with water? Can the low heat of around 55-65°C be acchieved in that, or does it unavoidably become hotter? I never measured it.

I do not have a big cooling box, and I do not need one. And the thing is big indeed, I do not know where to store it. So I am looking for a more managable alternative. Preferrably with an item thjat already has its place in my household.

I think if you kept it on a low flame, it may get too hot. I suppose you could do a test run by getting your water up to the proper temperature, put it in the pressure cooker, turning your burner on as low as it goes and coming back an hour later and measuring the temperature.

Do they have the disposable styrofoam coolers over there? Like this?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_p4PkoeXYyO...2520cooler.jpg

It'd be cheap, they're usually small, and if you didn't want to bother with storing it, you could always throw it in the recycle bin.

yes you can do it with a big pot. i have done this several times.

you need a large pot and a thermometer, and keep it on the lowest possible heat. you have to monitor it, but the temperature can easily vary this way, and the degree of cooked will be determined by the highest level of the temperature variation. it is difficult to keep it finely controlled.

may actually be easier to put the waterbath in the oven rather than on top of the stove, since you can typically set oven temperatures more precisely.

mookie's method has similarities to the sous vide method, but the key difference is that since his oven is set hotter than the required internal meat temperature, then the degree of 'doneness' is determined by time in the oven.

but if the cooking temperature is set exactly at the required internal temperature, then the cooking time becomes (more-or-less) irrelevant, and only the temperature matters.

anyway it is great fun to try this, but the amount of effort makes it not something you are likely to want to do very often :DL

soft boiled eggs btw are famously awesome done this way! google for the time and temp required!

That is good info from both of you, Joe&Mookie. I definitely will try it both ways. Since there are sort of similiarities b etween both methods, you two are giving mutual confirmation, so to speak. :)

you are welcome

another thing to watch out for with the pot is that the temperature at the top will be lower than the temperature at the bottom. The food objects will interfere with the convection currents, and evaporation at the top will lower the temp.

therefore you need to kind of stir the water too!

in the oven may be better than on the stove top. and i think the icebox method sounds better again

http://images.cheezburger.com/comple...d1982e93df.jpg


I only know "sous-vide" as a word they throw around a lot on Top Chef. :O:

sous=under
vide=emptiness, vacuum

So it means: cooking in vacuum.

:woot:

This is really good advice! If your oven will go low enough to maintain a 130-140 temperature (lowest mine goes is 175) then you can certainly do it in the oven. A sous vide steak is certainly something that's worth the effort at least once in your life.

130 degrees is a little bit low even, I wouldn't be too worried, but usually steaks are like 150 degrees, Pork is 165, and fish 144 for saftey. at least as far as we know in meat dept. and I think im quoting those numbers right

I've cooked steaks in a pan, and sometimes they were pretty good. I've never put one in an oven. My George Foreman grill does a pretty good job, but it's hard to clean.

I have got to get another hibachi. Nothing tastes like a steak, or a burger, cooked over a coal-fired open flame.

If you cooked my steak to 150 degrees, I'd send it back and say I ordered a steak, not a piece of charcoal. :O:

The government numbers on what's "safe" to eat are so full of crap. I've been eating rare steak all my life, and eggs over easy, and eating off of the corner roach coach food truck, and never have I had food poisoning from any of them.

Now food from the food court in the mall, or from the Holiday Inn...oh you betcha bubba. Been more sick from those supposedly "safe" sources than anything else.

Just so long as it's out of the bacteria 'hot zone', 3-65 Celcius it is always a fine piece of food.

Jez, 65°C is 149°F.

I repeat my earlier question: has nobody ever tried to use a mild microwave treatment, then putting it into the pan? And wouldn't the microwaves help to kill germs?

i don't know much about advanced microwave cooking, so i stand to be corrected. But i imagine you would have problems. Microwaves do not cook evenly, and produce distinct hotspots due to the focus of the waves and also the characteristics of the food.

the rotating plate is an attempt to mitigate this effect, but it is still clearly visible. eg. try melting a pack of butter in a microwave - you will see the waves create a hole in the center of the butter while the rest is still solid. also put a wiener sausage in the microwave for 10 seconds and you will see the ends heat up before the middle.

even defrosting a chicken breast can result in narrow extremities becoming cooked while the rest is still frozen solid.

so it is my guess that a sophisticated approach would be required to even out the cooking effect using a microwave, but i do not know what that would be.

Mookie, I need your advise.

Had a 300 gr point steak today. I let it rest at room temperature for around an hour, it had 18°C, then used salt, black pepper and fresh garlic on it. I put it into the oven on a plate, at 130-140°C (its difficult to reach a precise temperaturwe with an ordinary household oven). A needle to measure the temperature was stuck into the heart of the meat.

However, after 7 minutes the steak's heart was at 36°C already, but still looking red as before, like fresh from the refrigerator. I switched off the oven to slow the temperature rise.

But the temperature climbed and climbed, and very fast, impossible to keep it at 35°C (the minimum mark is 50°C). I opened the door early, then took the meat out after 12 minutes - the temperature meanwhile had spiked to almost 45°C, but the meat on the outdside still looked and felt like raw meat, fresh from the refrigerator. I have bitten into it, and it had the exact same consitency asd any usual raw beef meat. I felt like that, and it looked like that, the only difference was that it was warm, considerably warmer than body temperature.

I meanwhile had heated up a heavy cast iron pan to max heat, and when using olive oil, it smoked. Put the meat into it for 2 minutes, and did not touch it, then flipped sides, and went another 2 minutes. Then put it out of the pan and onto a warm plate, sealed it into aluminium foil and let it reast for 6 or 7 minutes.

After that, there was the juice in the alumium foil, the meat was done with a slightly rosy heart, well: it tasted okay, and was absolutely eatable, but - it was nothing special, nothing different, it did not make the smallest or the slightest difference to throwing it into the pan immediately and occasionally flipping sides and immediately serving it - the way I have done it for years. I would not like to do this effort again for this kind of absolutely mediocre result.

It made no difference at all, not in consistency, and not in taste. All it did was to triple the preparation time. The whole oven thing was totally in vain, and made no noticable difference at all.

Now I sit and wonder...!?!?

Will be gone Saturday and most of Sunday, will not be back before Sunday night.

Any advise and feedback welcomed. I have a second steak bought today, the same kind like today, so I can try again with exactly the same type of meat. I just cannot try it every couple of days, its too expensive for me. :) But I want to know.

P.S. It makes no difference to use garlic before cooking it in the pan. When putting it into the pan, the garlic burns black within the first minute. No arome or taste was left, only salt and pepper survived. I used a smashed claw (quite a big one) on both sides before putting it into the oven.