Sous-vide Steak in Restaurant

Hi guys,

I still don't get it how to prepare sous-vide steak in restaurant. The condition is I got 3 cuts of beef (sirloin, rib eye, tenderloin) and it will need to be prepared in different doneness (med-rare, med, med-well, and well done).

How to prepare all of it to be served within 15 mins from order? Thanks in advance.

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Afonso_Tito_de_Morais_164825

This is a question I have aswell but I'm guessing you'd prep the steaks, cook a batch of each to desired doneness, cool, store (still vacuum sealed), order comes in, you have waterbaths at their temperatures, pop them in their respective temperatures while you prep the rest of the dish, pop 'em out, give them a quick sear and serve!

This of course has the potential to be wasteful if people happen to not choose steak from the menu. How long would they hold after cooked & vacuum packed? Would the taste and texture get deteriorated after a few hours? A day? Two days? I'm guessing two days would be the maximum time you would be able to store them without losing any percievable quality in the end product, but hey, that's just me, the guy who's never cooked SV steaks on a restaurant. Maybe even @Chris Young or someone from CS would be willing to answer this better.

mike_288111

Thanks for this. I'm thinking the same thing, with that method you need to have each cuts cooked into 3 different desired doneness.

Is it better if I sous-vide all the cuts into 58C and if someone happen to order a medium-well, just pan sear the 58C steak to desired doneness?

Still looking for answer, thanks.

Afonso_Tito_de_Morais_164825

You can do that, but it will slow you down a bit during service.

It's much faster if you have a medium-well steak that just needs to be seared for 30 seconds, than to cook a medium-rare steak until it's medium-well.

You also risk charring the surface of the steak before it's actually cooked medium-well, or undercooking it to avoid charring it.

You'd have to run a few tests and see how it goes though, I'm just going with my gut here, but my best guess is it would be better to have steaks pre-cooked to their designated doneness and finished quickly in a hot pan, than to have all steaks at the same temp and further cook them in a pan if the need arises.

Afonso_Tito_de_Morais_164825

But that being said, you'd probably have more medium-rare steaks than medium-well and well-dones stored away, since most people do like their meat that way.

tangma27

I think some of the team commented on a similar question in the past! Try to find it-I wish I remembered what the title so i could help you more.

dancurren

I am not a restaurant chef, however, I can tell you a bit about the physics. It was suggested that perhaps you would cook steaks to various degrees of doneness, then chill and reheat at service. This would be pointless. Believe it it or not, it will take the same amount of time to bring the core of a steak up to temp for a steak than has been pre-cooked sousvide and then chilled as it would take to bring a raw steak to temp (assuming they are both the same temperature when you drop them - presumably at whatever temp you've set your fridge). This is because the only factors that will determine how long it takes to bring your temperature up to temp are the thickness of the steak (which will not change if cooking from raw or precooked) and the starting temperature of the steak (and if the pre-cooked or raw steak are both coming from the same fridge, will be identical). Therefore, precooking the steak is pointless in this scenario (except in the case of a tough cut that you are slowly tenderizing but that does not apply to these cuts).

I'll let a pro weigh in on what they do in practice, but how I would go about it (and how I go about it for a large dinner party or bbq) is to anticipate how many steaks I will need and bring them to at least rare in a sousvide bath - I usually know that I will need x amount of medium rare so I have those ready to go in an appropriately tempered bath (I also know that one person enjoys their steak well done - in-laws *eyeroll* so I have one well done steak ready to go). I have a couple circulaters but if I need some for other purposes, I first cook the well-done steak, bring down the temp to medium-rare and cook the ones I know I will need for sure and then bring the temp down to rare and add the remainder of the steaks.

Holding a well done and medium rare steak in a rare water bath will not over cook them so I am good to go.

For the remaining steaks that I am not 100% positive on what temp I will serve them at - usually medium rare but I don't want to assume and waste a steak - holding them at rare ensures they won't be overdone but at the same time, it speeds up the time needed to bring the steaks to completion. It will be much quicker to bring a steak from 55 to 60C than it would be to bring a steak from 5C to 60C.

If you serve steaks regularly, I would imagine you would have a good idea of roughly how many steaks you will need and you can air on the conservative side and add a a few steaks if you are getting low earlier than expected during service. Any extra, you could pull from the water bath and immediately chill in an ice bath and reuse next day. There are resources on this site and polyscience has an app that will tell you the max time something can be safely left in the water bath. So mark the bag with a date and time and just make sure it doesn't spend too much time in there.

me0969

At the restaurant I worked in a while back we had a good idea about how many steaks or whatever we would sell, adjusting with the tables reserved, plus you can tell your waiters to recommend certain dishes, but all in all you should have a rough idea how many Rare, Medium and Well Done steaks people order and have a system in each water bath, like a rack queuing up fx from right to left, the ones on the left side has been in there the longest, so don't mix em up. When you get the order you fish it up, unpack, sear, season, serve. So having three water baths is optimal.

tangma27

What Daniel said in his first paragraph is true, but I think it will take a bit less time to reheat a well done steak to 55C than to 65C or whatever. I'm not sure if the time difference is worth precooking though.