nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

My SV BBQ plan

richard.fine

I'm going to a friend's BBQ on Thursday evening, and it's a bring-your-own-meat affair. I thought I'd try and wow people by showing up with a 'magic cooler' full of perfectly-cooked SV steak...

It's complicated by the fact that I have to be at work during the day, and then I'm going directly to the BBQ afterwards. I can fill the cooler with hot+cold water at work, and I'll bring a thermometer so I can get it to the right temperature, but all other prep is going to have to be done beforehand. I also don't have a proper vacuum sealer - everything I've done so far has just been using the submerging technique.

So what I'm presently thinking is:

Tenderize and presear the steaks in the morning before going to work (night before would be even better if they'll keep that long)
Package them with the submerging technique, using clips to seal the bags shut
Pack them into the cooler with a bit of ice/cold water, to effectively refrigerate them
Take the cooler to work - let the steaks sit in it all day.
At the end of the day, when I'm ready to leave work, dump the ice out of the cooler and replace it with water set to ~8C above the target temperature (so I guess that'll be around 62C).
Drive to the BBQ (will take about 50 minutes). Steaks should be pretty much cooked by the time I get there, I think.
Pull steaks from the cooler as needed and finish them off on the (charcoal) grill for 1-2mins to give them a bit of that BBQ flavour.

Does this sound like a viable plan?

The main things I'm wondering are:

Is refrigerating the steaks (overnight in the fridge, or in the cooler) after presearing going to mess with the Maillard Reaction?
Presearing will kill bacteria on the outside of the steak to start with, refrigerating should slow anything trying to grow back, and finishing them off on the grill for a couple of minutes should take out anything that makes it past the refrigeration. Are there any food safety issues I've not accounted for?
Would using my Jaccard tenderizer be a bad idea from a food safety point of view in this circumstance? Maybe I should sterilize it and then use it *after* presearing, so I'm not pushing bacteria inside the food?
How quickly do the steaks need to get eaten once I'm at the BBQ? MC@H's description of the cooler technique says the steaks shouldn't sit in the (warm) cooler for more than 4 hours otherwise they're no longer safe to eat, but it doesn't explain what happens after 4 hours. Obviously I'm hoping they'll go pretty quickly, but...
It'd be cool to bring more than just steak. Is there anything else you folks could recommend that would work well cooked to the same temperature (around 54-56C)? Looks like that's too low for chicken, but might work well for fish?

Any advice appreciated...

Find more posts tagged with

Everything Else

Comments

richard.fine

@ParkerCook, @Brendan: it just makes total sense, right? It's not like the food knows you put it into different water. Other than a slight heat dip when transferring it from one container to another, chemically there's no difference between immersing the food in 54C water in a circulator and immersing it in 54C water in a cooler - packaging the food is explicitly intended to eliminate the water's influence as anything but a heat source. Biggest change IMO is just psychological - getting yourself to stop thinking about the food as if cooking somehow magically stops the moment it leaves the kitchen. Where there's heat, there's the opportunity to cook. Maybe in the middle of summer I'll see if I can cook salmon on a sunbeam!

BTW, I SVed those steaks that I'd seared a-la-@Brendan for dinner tonight - gave them a little refresh in the pan before plating (~10secs on each side) and they came out beautifully. Looking at the cross-section, I could see the searing had only cooked a couple of millimeters into the steak on each side. So this is definitely the approach I'll be taking going forward. (Has put me in mind of a couple of questions about freezing+thawing meat, but I'll start a new thread for that).

Brendan_Lee_56950

@parkercook I did that the other night for the inlaws with some pork chops. Cooked them here and then threw them in a home depot bucket lined with two trash bags filled with the water from the circulator (I couldn't find our cooler) and it worked fine.

ParkerCook_66639

Awesome description! My in-laws live about 20 minutes away from us and I've wanted to get some sous vide ribs to them without leaving my circulator at their house. I'll steal your technique and cook the ribs for a few days and just transport them in a cooler full of hot water. My father in law has a much larger grill than my Weber Jumbo Joe and would be much more efficient at finishing off a few slabs of ribs!

Using hot water out of the tap definitely saves a good chunk of time. I used the same method you described by measuring the temp of the tap and filling my cooler most of the way using hot water and finishing it off with boiling to get it to the temperature. I can have my circulator ready to go in less than 5 minutes using hot water from the get go instead of using cold and waiting for the circulator to heat it up.

richard.fine

Thanks guys. And sure, Chris, there's always room for improvement

First thing would be to fix the searing - un-seared, the steaks did look a little weirdly monochromatic on the BBQ.

I've actually just tried out @Brendan's tips tonight and they look to have worked a charm - thank you! Three beef steaks, in the freezer for a couple of hours, then brushed with oil and popped in a pan of shallow but smoking-hot olive oil, 20-30 seconds on each side. These steaks are at least twice as thick as the ones I took to the BBQ, so it's not the strongest possible test of the approach, but it looks very promising. Only two things I need to watch out for, I think: one, making sure that the steaks are flattened out when I freeze them - tonight mine had a slight 'curve' to them when I froze them, and I didn't want to try 'unbending' and possibly breaking them when frozen, so it made it a bit difficult to get good contact between all the surfaces and the hot oil in some places. And two, ideally I should be using an oil more neutral-tasting than olive, though I don't think it's going to be too bad in this case.

(I'm curious as to the effect that freezing the meat will have on the tenderness. In theory it ought to break up the collagen strands a bit, right? Surface-freezing is something I guess I'll have to leave until I get my hands on some liquid nitrogen...)

Second thing, bringing the cooler up to temperature - it should not take 40 minutes to fill a cooler with 61C water. As noted, I should have used the hot tap to get reasonably hot water (like 45C or whatever) and then just used the kettle to go the last mile; I should also have taken the bags out of the refrigerated cooler a half-hour earlier, and let them just return to room temperature on the side, to reduce the temperature drop when adding them back to the water.

Third thing - I think I managed to puncture one of the bags with my Thermapen when I was testing the temperature of the water! So I should, uh, not do that ;-)

Fourth thing: be more organised about my bagging. For example I should have used colour-coding of my bag clips to indicate which things were pork and which were beef. If I'd had this sorted, I could have maybe started doing even more variations - marinades for some of the steaks etc. Rummaging around in the cooler isn't so pleasant when it's at 50+ degrees, so being able to find the right stuff at a glance would be handy.

That's all I can spot for now, if I stay within the confines of my brief. Oh, also, I should have taken some pictures

(I was thinking about some of the extra pork steaks I've got, and wondering if I could spend the money to buy a siphon already, as it would be interesting to try creating some kind of 'applesauce' foam to go with them. But that's getting away from the original intention a bit...)

Chris_Young_80640

@Richard — Great job and really appreciate you sharing the detailed feedback with the community. Anything you'd do different next time?

Tim_Sutherland_52834

@Richard well done on producing a meal that blew people away under less than ideal conditions.

Brendan_Lee_56950

Glad it worked out for you. 1cm steaks are definitely going to give you some troubles when searing though.

Couple points about searing from my experience:

oil the pan slightly but oil the meat as well
preheat the pan very well, you want it about as hot as you feel comfortable using on your stove IMO
if you have time a partially frozen top layer will be super dry and also prevent overcooking when you sear
pork, in my experience, isn't going to color like a typical steak so look for a lighter brown to signify a good sear as opposed to the dark brown associated with steaks.

richard.fine

Thanks for the help guys. A little after-action report, if you're interested:

Got home very late yesterday, stopping on the way at the supermarket: spent about £9 total to buy 6 pork steaks and 4 beef sirlon steaks. Didn't get premium-quality or fresh-meat-counter stuff, just the prepacked midrange off-the-shelf ones. The result was not as good, of course, but part of my interest here has been to see how far I can take 'ordinary' steaks and boost their quality through modernist techniques.

Due to the lateness, I didn't want to stay up and pre-SV everything, but I had a go at searing. This didn't really work out. The beef steaks turned out to be far too thin to really sear properly - less than 1cm thick, holding them in the pan long enough to sear them would have basically cooked them. The pork steaks didn't have the same problem, but after holding them in the pan for 20-30 seconds, while they'd turned from pink to white they showed no signs of beginning to brown. I think there is something wrong with my searing technique - too much oil in the pan, oil not hot enough, pan not flat, or something - but in any case I decided to skip searing all the remaining steaks and just bagged each one individually, then submersion-evacuated each bag, clipped it shut and fridged them all overnight. (Skipped the tenderizing, too, in the end).

Packed the cooler in the morning, drove (carefully) to work, then brought it in from my car and checked on it a couple of times during the day. All fine - thermapen said 0.5C when I first packed it, 3C by the end of the working day.

Took all the bags out of the cooler, removed the ice and most of the water, and then started topping it up with hot water to reach a target temperature of 62C. Bearing in mind @Tim's point about the tap temperature being too low, and the tap being kinda awkward to use to fill the cooler anyway, I used the kettle to boil 2 liters of water at a time and then mix with the cold water in the cooler. It took about 4 full cycles of the kettle to get the water up to temperature, which took half an hour or so; in retrospect I think I should have used the hot tap (via the kettle as a vessel if necessary) to get most of the way up to temperature, and then only use the kettle for the final 'push.' Once the water was at about 60C I added the steaks, stirred, waited a few minutes, and then measured the temperature again - as predicted, adding the steaks caused the temperature to drop to around 54-56C, so one last kettle cycle brought it back up to 62C.

Loaded the (heavy!) cooler back into my car. The lid has a locking mechanism, but a colleague suggested that to make it even more secure I should put it down in the footwell in front of the passenger seat, and adjust the seat to brace against it. This both kept the cooler completely secure, and also would have allowed me to keep an eye on it in case I did hit a bumpy patch of road or something.

Arrived at the BBQ about 45mins after putting the steaks into the cooler - thin as they were, the beef steaks were probably up to temperature even by the halfway time, and I'm assuming that the pork steaks have similar heat characteristics to beef steaks so they should have been ready pretty much the time at which I arrived. Checked the temperature - 56C, so only 6C temperature loss the whole time I was on the road. Then I just kept the cooler open near the grill, and grabbed bags out whenever people wanted one, to open up and finish off on the grill for a minute or so on each side. The cooler will have lost heat a little more quickly with its lid off, but all the bags were pulled within an hour of arriving, and the temperature of the water when I pulled the last bag was still something like 45C.

All in all it was very well received, and people were blown away by the very idea of cooking stuff in a cooler Those who managed to lay claim to a steak also, without exception, found it very good - the host in particular said he usually avoids BBQ pork steak because it's almost always completely dried out, and so when he tried this super-moist, not-overcooked SV pork steak he could hardly believe he was eating the same thing.

Tim_Sutherland_52834

@Richard Fine, jaccarding the meat is fine, if you watch this video with Nathan Myhrvold he does it all the time. If you have food safety concerns I would sear the meat then jaccard it - note if your steaks are cheap already cut supermarket steaks, the tenderisation has most likely already happened.

If I was in this situation, I would tenderise, sear and SV at home the night before. You will have much better control in a kitchen than in the back seat of a car. SV the steaks until they are pasteurised then chill and fridge overnight. Load the esky with steaks and ice and go to work. Either retherm your steak on the drive to the BBQ or do this on the cooktop at the BBQ place then toss on the grill.

Your issue will be getting water hotter than 50C at work. In the US you are unlikely to see water hotter than 49C come out of a tap unless you work in a kitchen. Boiling enough water in the microwave (assuming you have one) will take time.

The Maillard Reaction will occur when you toss the steaks in the hot pan to sear them. Chilling the steaks down and SV them will cause the brown crust to get a bit limp, but the time on the grill will make everything good again.

The 4 hour window is to do with food safety. Time/temperature control for safety (TCS) food (steak been one) that spends time in the Danger Zone (FDA, 5C to 57C/41F-135F) increases the risk that microorganisms will grow on the food. Consumption of this food may cause foodborne illnesses.

Your ~54C temp is fine for red meat, too low for poultry and too high for fish. I think it is in the same lecture linked above that Nathan Myhrvold discusses the optimum cooking temp for proteins based on the body temp of the protein when alive. Basically it is fish have a lower body temp than mammals so they do not need to be cooked to as high a temp as mammal meat to be "cooked". Birds have a higher body temp than mammals so their meat needs to be cooked to a higher temp to be "cooked".

Maillard Reaction

seijoed

Go 24h with a top round steak per @Grant's comment a while back, insanely good and you don't need to do anything

besides a pre-sear, finish in blazing hot flames and serve the best cheap steak anyone ever had.

richard.fine

Re tenderizer: I was planning on just getting regular supermarket steaks, rather than going to my butcher - partly for cost reasons, and partly because it's more impressive to use 'normal' ingredients and have them come out amazing. I was thinking I'd use the tenderizer just to improve the quality a little. But you know what, what I'll do is I'll go out today and get some supermarket steaks and try them out - it might simply not be necessary.

Good thinking re Murphy's law and the cooler

I think the cooler I've got is one of those ones where you push the handle over and it locks the top down securely, so I'm not too worried about it opening up, but it'd be worth strapping it in place with a seatbelt instead of just sitting it in the boot.

Re the number of steaks - I see your point. The biggest temperature drop should be at the beginning, right? Like, the bigger the differential, the faster the change. So maybe I can get compensate for the worst of it by getting the water to temperature, adding the steaks, stirring for a couple of minutes, and then bringing the water *back* to temperature.

Brendan_Lee_56950

Is there a particular reason you would want to use a tenderizer? If they're decent steaks that will be an unnecessary step that can, as you say, introduce a lot of bacteria into the equation. Presearing and then chilling won't have any effect, I presear and freeze and cook from frozen all the time and it really makes no difference. The part for me that I am worried about is the tenderizing + non-vacuum sealed + uncontrolled water temp. I have used the cooler method before and while it's nice, there are a lot of things that could go wrong if your lugging it around in a car (hit a bump, top cracks open, lose water + heat, spoil the process, etc. Murphy's law will be in full effect).

Something else to consider is the size of the cooler vs. the number of steaks your throwing in. Since there is no heat source to keep the water hot the water is going to lose a lot of heat as the number of steaks increases. I would personally skip the tenderizing and presear, bag, keep on ice and then cook 2 hours before the BBQ. Worse comes to worse you can finish them on the grill if they are a bit underdone.