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Originally Posted by Skybird
Wowh, I am just done with my steak today, and it was - wayyyy better than how I did it in the past. I used the method with baking it in the oven, which indeed worked wonders. I absolutely recommend to experiment with that.
It was a bit too bloody for my taste, which may be due to the piece of meat I had being bigger than the 200 gr the original recipe was scaled for. But by principle - hot, short roasting, then baking - that tip is worth pure gold.
I wonder if one can help the second stage by adding 1 minute of microwave treatement?
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Bake it in the oven longer.
And the reason why I recommend doing it the other way around - bake, THEN sear - is that you end up with the same amount of "done-ness" from end to end in your steak. If you do pan then oven, I've found that you get a brown crust, a pink center, and a band of overcooked meat in between. By doing it in the oven first, you get your pink center, and then you develop your brown crust on the outside with a short amount of time in the pan. Too short to let that overcooked band develop.
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Joe, thnaks for the explanation of "sous vide". Never heared of that, but it sounds interesting. I just doubt that I am willing to make that the method of choice, since it takes quite some time in advance preparation. But i will at least try it out.
But I wonder about the hygienic aspect. If the meat never gets warmed above 60°C in the inside, then this makes me think.
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Sous vide is a great way of doing it. You don't need a real sous-vide machine to do it either. You can do it with just a plastic zip top baggie and an ice chest.
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Fill up your beer cooler with water just a couple degrees higher than the temperature you'd like to cook your food at (to account for temperature loss when you add cold food to it), seal your food in a plastic Ziplock bag*, drop it in, and close your beer cooler until your food is cooked. It's as simple as that.
*FYI: The air in a plastic bag can be removed by slowly dipping the open bag with your food in it into the water, sealing it just before the water starts to pour inside. It's not as air-free an environment as a vacuum-sealed bag, but it's enough to keep the food submerged, and in contact with the water, which is all that's really important.
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For a medium rare steak, you're looking at 140 degrees. Just get your water a couple degrees hotter than that, put it in your ice chest, throw your steak in a baggie in, weight it down with a plate or something, and close the lid. It only takes about 45 minutes to do. I finish it off with a quick sear on the stove. It's wonderful. The best part about sous vide cooking is that it's literally impossible to overcook something. It's only going to get as hot as your water is.
You don't have to worry about bacteria inside the middle of your steak. Steak just doesn't have the parasites like pork or chicken does - its too acidic of an environment for them. Bacteria can only live on the outside of a steak, and those are killed off when you cook it, no matter what level of done-ness it is on the inside.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3743657.stm