Sous Vide Steak

With Things

(Chimichurri sauce, roasted potatoes, salad)

SUP DAWGS. Happy/Io/Merry whatever you celebrated this past month (Hannukah, Saturnalia, Winter Solstice, Festivus, Christmas, Kwanzaa, other assorted winter-type holidays…) and stuff.

School is out for the next three weeks and I have lots of shiny new cooking things to break in! That means some pretty steady and great blog posts. Lucky you!

First off…

Jump to Recipe

Second off…

I GOT A SOUS VIDE FOR CHRISTMAS YOU GUYS.

I love it.

My roommate Whitney is the greatest human on the planet I love her.

So of course I needed to make something with it right away so Dyami came over and we made ourselves some skirt steak with chimichurri and some other fixin’s.

Do you even need me to tell you how good it was?

Yes. Yes you do.

BUT FIRST.

Let me take a selfie

Let’s talk about what the heck “Sous-vide” means and what it is and why it’s good for doing the food thing.

So, sous-vide (pronounce it “soo-veed,” you heathens) is French for “under vacuum” which is literally what you’re doing to the food. You’re cooking it under vacuum. You toss your food into either a bag (suck out the air for that vacuum effect) or a jar (like a mason jar so that air can escape but not reenter during cooking…which produces a vacuum effect) and toss it into a water bath for 300 years or so and then you have perfectly cooked whatever.

Okay, that’s not a great explanation but honestly that’s kind of the gist of it. The point of cooking something under sous-vide is to cook your food evenly and to help it retain moisture as well as flavor. Kind of a “low and slow” idea, but with extreme precision when it comes to the heat.

Typically the best candidates for sous-vide cooking are meats (usually tough or fatty cuts), eggs, and root vegetables. Apparently. I’m still learning about this stuff and I’ve only successfully cooked one thing so far. Cut me some slack.

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So the first thing we did once we got our ingredients was set up the sous-vide in a stock pot filled with water to start getting the water to the right temperature. We set up my Anova Precision Cooker to circulate and heat the water to 160° Fahrenheit (with my phone via Bluetooth because technology is amazing and wonderful) and prepped the steak while we waited for the water to start coming up to temperature (about 15 minutes).

We bought 1.5 pounds of skirt steak and just seasoned it with salt and pepper before sealing it inside a silicone bag (you could also use a plastic food bag but I like silicone because I can use it over and over again. It’s good for my wallet AND the environment. Double win). To get the excess air out, we used the water immersion technique, which sounds fancy but it really isn’t. All you do is lower your bag of food into a pot or bucket of water right up to the opening (but don’t let water into the bag) and seal it closed while the bag is in the water. The water displaces the air and allows you to get that vacuum-like seal. Alternatively you could use a vacuum sealer if you have one. Once our water was to temperature, we chucked that bag inside the water and made sure the steak was completely covered before leaving it the hell alone for 4 hours.

While we waited for our steak to cook, we prepped the potatoes for roasting (we bought little potatoes so we just scrubbed them before cutting those lil tots in half and covering them with water so that they wouldn’t get gross) and made some saucy sauces.

The first sauce we made was the chimichurri. Chimichurri an uncooked sauce made with parsley, garlic, oregano, olive oil, red chili peppers, and red wine vinegar. I know a lot of people use it as a marinade, but chimichurri was originally used as an accompaniment to grilled meats. It originated from Argentina and Uruguay and it’s outrageously easy to make. You literally chop up/crush all your ingredients that can be chopped or crushed and mix them with the vinegar and oil. Add some salt and pepper, let it sit for a little while, and bam, chimichurri. If you want to be extra like me you can smash up your ingredients in a mortar with a pestle but it’s not a requirement.

I couldn’t find any spicy red chilis at the grocery store and didn’t want to used crushed red pepper, so I bought a Fresno chili and a Serrano pepper and it was really good! The spice wasn’t outrageously in-your-face and was more of a spicy sensation in the back of your tongue kind of deal.

The other sauce we made was for the potatoes and was 100% inspired by a last minute stop at Chic-fil-A on our way back home from getting groceries. We basically made a spicy Chic-fil-A sauce and it was a lot easier that I had anticipated. We mixed mustard, barbecue sauce, hot honey, greek yogurt (I would have use sour cream instead, but I didn’t have any and also greek yogurt is just as good), paprika, cumin and liquified brown sugar together and it came out pretty good! It wasn’t the right color, but I also used a stone-ground/dijon kind of mustard instead of honey mustard and I think they probably use a mustard-based BBQ sauce to keep it more yellow but we made this sauce on a whim so I’m still pretty happy with it.

After making the sauces, we sat down and watched Coco because we deserved a break and Dyami hadn’t seen it yet and also we needed to waste 3 more hours while we waited for the steak to finish cooking.

Watching Coco killed about two hours, which was perfect because then we were able to head back into the kitchen and discuss the Pixar theory while we made the salad and dressing (lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper, parsley, and fig jam) and roasted our potatoes.

For the potatoes, we tossed them in olive oil with salt, pepper, parsley, and a tiny bit of rosemary and baked them at 425 on the highest rack for about 30 minutes, giving them a good toss about halfway through so that they would be nice and crispy brown on the outside.

As we finished our sides, the steak finished cooking in it’s water bath and we pulled that meat baby out and gave it a quick sear on both sides on super high heat so that it would get a nice char on the outside. That’s the thing with sous-vide, your food cooks perfectly, but it looks limp and sad, so you gotta give it a little zing before you serve it. Anyway, we seared the outside and then let it rest for about 5 minutes before cutting into it.

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And well…look at it!

Ugh, my mouth is watering just thinking back on it. It was so freaking good! The meat was outrageously juicy and practically melted in your mouth. Heck, even the outer edges were perfectly tender and that came out well-done. It was seriously amazing, and that was before we even tried it with anything else.

So with all of our food done, the only thing left to do was plate our food and dig in! I tried my hand at decorating the plate with our Fake-Fil-A sauce but it was my first time and it looked ugly so I covered it with the potatoes. 🙈 It’ll be better next time. Probably. Hey, the whole thing still tasted amazing!

The brightness of the chimichurri played very well with our savory and succulent steak and tasted even better with a bite of crisp and fluffy potato with sweet and tangy Fake-Fil-A sauce. And our salad was there for us with it’s lemony and figgy goodness whenever we needed a break from all that savory steak. It was a meal match made in heaven!

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Before we get to the recipe and in case any of you were wondering why I suddenly decided to start decorating plates…it’s my cousin’s fault. He got me these ridiculous decorating spoons from Amazon (although to be fair, I did ask for them).

Honestly, I kind of love them! If you’re interested in getting a set of spoons (because why not?) to try and show me up on plate decorating or want to get your own Anova Precision Cooker you can follow the links below:

Dcrt Deco Spoon Multi-use Precision Chef Culinary Drawing Spoons for Decorating Plates, set of 2

Anova Precision Sous Vide Cooker with Wifi

You can get yourself some cool stuff and sous-vide all the steaks and eggs and things your little heart desires and then draw saucy smily faces on them with your fancy spoons.

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Well? What are you waiting for? Get cooking!