Its not as hard as you think! This recipe is easy! Two obstacles stand in the way of the home cook trying use the sous vide technique :
1. The sous vide machine itself (at least a few hundred dollars).
2. Vacuum packing (another few hundreds)
This post shows how I overcame these two obstacles. And it didn’t involve rocket science.
My sous vide machine
….. is an electric steamboat with a long sliding scale, and an thermometer. These things are cheap! This electric steamboat has been lying around my kitchen, unearthed once a year for the Lunar New Year. One day, I took a look at the sliding scale, and I started to ponder. Filled with water and left for an hour, I found a setting that maintained 60 degree Celsius, and it stayed remarkably stable over several hours. Smiling ear to ear, I started a series of experiments, and marked out the settings that maintained 60, and 80 degrees.
Start looking. I am sure many of you have something like this lying around your kitchen.
Vacuum packing.
Vacuum sealing is needed to prevent food from oxidising over the long cooking times needed for sous vide. This can be done on the cheap with a good quality zip lock bag and…. a basin of water. Get ziplocks that have a wide seal, not one of those with a sliding “zipper”. If you can, get a good brand, some of which do state a safe temperature range for the plastic they use (its often just over 100 degree Celsius.)
The idea is this :
- fill a basin with water ( a deeper basin is better, but you need more water)
- pack the food into the ziplock bag, and close most of the seal, except one corner
- press the ziplock bag into the water, holding the open corner out of the water
- hold the bag such that the water will press all the air out of the bag
- hold the open corner just out of the water, and seal it.
Try this! You will be surprised by the quality of the vacuum sealing you get.
With these obstacles overcome, here is my recipe for sous vide skirt steak with lemon grass!
Recipe – ingredients and Mise
I use skirt steak for this recipe. A skirt steak is a beautiful, and inexpensive cut of beef. It’s in fact the diaphragm of the animal. It’s not a star cut like sirloin or tenderloin, and in Singapore its really under appreciated. It’s not the tenderest of cuts, but it is very well flavoured. It lends itself very well to the sous vide technique, as it the prolonged cooking infuses this tasty cut deeply with the fragrance of lemon grass and fish sauce.
You will need :
- One skirt steak (about 600g, serves up to four, with rice)
- Three stalks lemon grass
- Several cloves garlic
- 1 red chilli
- 1 teaspoon sesame oil
- 2 teaspoons fish sauce
Slice lemon grass, garlic, chilli finely.
Pack the steak, and the chopped stuff into a high quality ziplock bag, and put the fish sauce and sesame oil into it. Depending on you preference, other seasonings, like Szechuan peppers, are certainly possible.
Vacuum pack the beef using the basin technique shown above.
Cooking
I set my sous vide “machine” to 60 degrees centigrade and let it sit there for several hours. It can be overnight if you want. Since the temperature will not get above 60, the meat will not overcook. Since it is sealed, it will not dry out, or oxidise. It will just get more flavourful and tender! The temperature can be lower, if you want the steak rarer. I choose 60 degrees as it is right on edge of the “safe” zone to hold food, and still yields a steak that is acceptably pink.
After several hours, you will find the steaks still pink with some essence of steak in the bag. They can be held in the sous vide for hours. The beauty of sous vide its that it allows you to prep everything in neat bags ahead of time, and when guest arrive, you can have impressive courses out in minutes.
Remove the steaks from the bag, reserve the precious liquid. Allow the steak to drain while you fire up a grill.
Grill the steaks to sear the outside. You want to set the grill on pretty high heat (smoking) so that the steaks can sear without overcooking the inside. The lemongrass and fish sauce will give off an aroma that takes me right to Thailand or Vietnam!
In the meantime, you can use the liquid in the bag as the base of a sauce, In this case, I added fish sauce, garlic, chilli and corainder – much the same as what went into the marinade.
Once steaks are seared, slice finely, being sure you slice across the grain. Plate.
Eat. And think about going planning a trip to Vietnam.
