The OFFICIAL Sous Vide Immersion Cooking Thread

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AWvsCBsteeeerike3
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The OFFICIAL Sous Vide Immersion Cooking Thread

Post by AWvsCBsteeeerike3 »

Cooked skirt steak for 10 hours 145 then cut it and seared it. Served with taco stuff. Phenomenal. Someone asked if it was filet. Nope... but not too far from the price of filets for some reason.

Which brings me to this question. Why the [expletive] is skirt steak so expensive. It’s like leather if you just grill it.

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Re: The OFFICIAL Sous Vide Immersion Cooking Thread

Post by lukethedrifter »

Supply/demand

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Re: The OFFICIAL Sous Vide Immersion Cooking Thread

Post by AWvsCBsteeeerike3 »

Kind of funny there's a NYT article from 1989 on the topic.

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/26/gard ... price.html
''Can you imagine, we're paying $10.58 a pound,'' she said. ''Isn't that ridiculous? When I opened two years ago it was $7.59 a pound and when I started at Cafe Marimba in 1984 it was $3.50 a pound.'' Although prices elsewhere in the nation are not as stiff as these, they have been escalating rapidly since the beginning of the decade.

Skirt steak is now the second most expensive cut of beef, wholesale, with only the tenderloin costing more. Since the early 1980's, according to Texas A & M University, which studies the beef industry, the demand for skirt steak has increased the value of cattle by about $6 a head.

The meteoric price rise coincides with the new-found popularity of fajitas, grilled strips of skirt steak served with tortillas, grilled onions, guacamole and salsa. Today's chefs are varying this formula with chicken, shrimp and other ingredients.

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Re: The OFFICIAL Sous Vide Immersion Cooking Thread

Post by AWvsCBsteeeerike3 »

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Re: The OFFICIAL Sous Vide Immersion Cooking Thread

Post by AWvsCBsteeeerike3 »

33anda3rd wrote:Mods, maybe this can be split into an Official Sous Vide Cooking Thread since we have one for smoking meat.
karp wrote:I like the act of grilling or cooking, but maybe i'll put it on my Christmas list for next year.
Me too, and when I cook a NY strip or a tenderloin it's not by sous vide, for a couple reasons. First, I can grill/stovetop cook a strip steak as well as I can sous vide it, so why bother. Second, because cooking a nice cut of meat is not what an immersion circulator is for so I'm not really getting any value out of it.

You guys with immersion circulators, try this out. Do a 145 bath and do two bone-in short ribs, one for 24 hours and one for 48. Do a 129 bath and do one for 24 hours and one for 72 hours. The 24 hour 145 degree and the 72 hours 129 degree are AMAZING. You get a strip steak texture and flavor out of a short rib. You get a $23/lb piece of meat for $7/lb. This is where buying that immersion circulator really pays off, where your'e really maximizing it's potential and cooking in a whole new way for results you can't otherwise achieve.

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Re: The OFFICIAL Sous Vide Immersion Cooking Thread

Post by 33anda3rd »

Skirt is super popular in a lot of cuisines, esp Mexican (tacos, fajitas) and Korean (bulgogi). It's best grilled, quickly over very high heat. It's from up by the diaphragm, so there's a lot of muscle fiber without much intramuscular fat. Cooked mid-rare and up, rested, and sliced against the grain it should be good. I like to cut it into little 3/4" pieces (again: against the grain, that's super important) then toss it in a ripping hot cast iron skillet with some salsa for tacos.

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Re: The OFFICIAL Sous Vide Immersion Cooking Thread

Post by 33anda3rd »

Usually I like sous vide as I described above--as a means to making a lesser cut as good as a great cut of meat. But lately, my wife has gone pescatarian and so I'm cooking a lot of fish and I've found a really great way to use sous vide for very easy fish prep.

The challenge: if you want to sear a salmon filet to get that awesome crisp skin, but you run the risk of very likely having burnt skin and undercooked fish at the fattest point. You can probably figure before I say this, but....

The solution: bag up salmon filets and sous vide at like 300 for just 10 minutes. Toss in a splash of oil, some grated lemon zest or a thin slice of lemon, some dill, whatever floats your boat for seasoning, just not a marinade which will break the fish down. Get a nonstick pan with some oil (not olive, something with a higher smoking point like canola or grapeseed) ripping hot. Remove the salmon from the bath and the bag, pat until very dry with a paper towel (water and oil over heat is a bad combo) and lightly score the skin side. Put it in the oil skin side down, the skin will be crisp in 2 minutes or less. Flip it, just to touch the flesh side, like flip it and as soon as it's turned, take it out of the pan. Let it rest a couple minutes. It's perfect.

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Re: The OFFICIAL Sous Vide Immersion Cooking Thread

Post by Swirls »

Would a Searzall work instead of the pan-searing method? It was intended for steaks, but I don't see why it wouldn't work for fish, either?

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Re: The OFFICIAL Sous Vide Immersion Cooking Thread

Post by AWvsCBsteeeerike3 »

33anda3rd wrote:Skirt is super popular in a lot of cuisines, esp Mexican (tacos, fajitas) and Korean (bulgogi). It's best grilled, quickly over very high heat. It's from up by the diaphragm, so there's a lot of muscle fiber without much intramuscular fat. Cooked mid-rare and up, rested, and sliced against the grain it should be good. I like to cut it into little 3/4" pieces (again: against the grain, that's super important) then toss it in a ripping hot cast iron skillet with some salsa for tacos.
This is what I've always heard but have NEVER, EVER, EVER, NEVER, NEVER been able to get skirt to turn out tender like you can get at restaurants grilling skirt. Bought the best meat I could in LR. Tried trimming the ever living hell out of it, trimming it moderately, trimming it hardly at all. Tried it on as hot as I can get a grill which is about 500. Tried smoking it. Tried rare, med-rare, well-done.

And, unless I don't know what grain is, always cut across it (except after sous vide it really didn't matter all that much). And it has always been tough still.

I'm not saying you're wrong. There are a million recipes on youtube and the internet in general that call for precisely that. But, I can't make it happen for whatever reason. [expletive] me.

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Re: The OFFICIAL Sous Vide Immersion Cooking Thread

Post by 33anda3rd »

That's weird, man, sorry to hear that. When you trim, you're getting all the membrane off? That's vital. Then you're resting it after it cooks for a few minutes? Then cutting with the grain to get it into little 3X3" squares, then rotating it and slicing against the grain into very thin, like 1/8", slices? I'd also say to try this: go to a local shop that sharpens knives and get yours professionally sharpened, just for trial and error sake, if you don't already do this. I'm a restaurant professional in my 40s and still bad at getting my knives razor sharp and have this done once a month or so. There's a small chance if a knife is dull and we're pressing down on the meat instead of slicing clean through it that we are not getting a good cut.

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