Steak Inch/Time ratio

Hi! There's a lot of guidelines as to how to sous vide a perfect steak, although generally, it applies to 1 inch steaks. Right now I'm sitting with two 2,5 inch NY-strips in my fridge and don't really know when to pull them out of the bath, I usually pull the 1 inchers out after 1,5 hour like the ChefSteps chart tells you, so I'm wondering, is there an inch/time ratio when cooking steaks?

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yjohn94

No ratio necessarily, but for a steak that thick, 2 hours is plenty. I generally cook bone-in, 2" rib steaks for 1.5-2 hours and they are perfect. If you don't trust just the time, you can always use a standard ziplock bag, pull it out and check the core temp of the steak after a couple hours to make sure it has reached equilibrium, putting it back if it's not done. With sous vide, you can leave the steak in the water long after it has come up to temperature, so overestimate if you must. Just remember, it is unsafe to leave food for more than 2 hours that is not in a bath of at least 130 F.

elviswasjesus

A general rule for flat cuts is that time to temperature increases as a square of the increase in thickness, So a steak that is twice as thick takes roughly four times as long to come to temperature. This scaling starts breaking down when the thickness gets closer to its other dimensions. The temperature of the water bath is also important: keeping the bath a couple of degrees higher than the final temp you want the core to be will reduce the cooking time without really affecting the steak as a whole. And let's face it, it'll still be way more amazing than a non sous vide steak.

Douglas Baldwin has great tables which account for different geometry and thickness in various meats. http://www.douglasbaldwin.com/sous-vide.html.

A simpler method if you're an iOS user is to grab something like Sous Vide Dash in the app store. This will allow you to set a bunch of parameters and get the result you're after. There are similar apps for Android.