The passing of labor day may mean the end of grilling season for some, but that doesn’t have to mean an end to delicious steaks. Cooking an excellent steak comes down to three simple things: 1) a high quality piece of meat, 2) getting the correct internal temperature, 3) getting a good sear on the outside. We find that a good rib-eye steak passes the quality test, and sous vide solves the correct internal temperature problem. But what is the best way to get a perfect sear?
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Since it happened to be a rare sunny winter day and one of the cats that resides at the primary testing facility was enjoying the sun, I wanted to see what he thought of my radiometer.
Here at the primary testing facility we are always looking for ways to improve how we cook delicious meats. So, when vacuum sealable zip-top bags recently appeared on the market we wanted to see how well they work for sous vide cooking. In this post these bags are put up against the older style bag while cooking rib-eyes steaks.
Here at the primary testing facility, we recently acquired our first sous vide immersion circulator. Since this is a novel cooking technique for us we have many questions. In this post we seek to find out how important searing really is when cooking steaks?
Having contributed the a successful Kickstarter campaign that claimed to “harness the power of phase change to keep your beverages cold” last year, we were excited to put the product to the test. In this post we compare both versions of this new product to two other cooling mechanisms we have on hand.
In honor of the 21st amendment, without which many of the experiments we have conducted thus far would be illegal, we decided to perform an experiment involving Gin, the most popular liquor during prohibition.
Here at the primary testing facility, it’s no secret that we like red meat. So, when we found standing rib-roasts on sale shortly before Thanksgiving, we couldn’t resist doing a science to one of them (getting two for control, seemed a bit excessive).
Initial observation:
Roast recipes have always seemed to be a bit of a dark art, with mysterious temperature changes in the middle, cooking times based on mass rather than linear dimensions. These peculiar practices seem to produce delicious results, and presumably have something to do with how heat flows into the meat during cooking. In this post we hope to shed some light on how heat flows through a roast.
While some whisky aficionados may prefer to drink their high end single malt whiskys neat, here at the Doing Science to Stuff headquarters, we tend to prefer our whisky on the rocks. This unfortunately dilutes the whisky considerably. As we have previously mentioned, the shape of ice can influence both the amount of dilution, and the amount of cooling when using ice. But what about cooling methods that don’t involve the melting of ice?
Recently we acquired a set of spherical ice molds at the primary testing facility. While the idea of spherical ice is exciting all by itself, the packaging for the molds makes several bold claims about the properties of spheres. Having all of the equipment on hand to test those claims, we decided to do science to them.
As we have previously mentioned, buying frozen steaks can be much less expensive than buying fresh steaks, and the quality was nearly indistinguishable, based on our previous experiment. However neither steak in that experiment was as good as a decent rib-eye should be. There was also a serious lack of control in that experiment with regards to the starting quality of each steak. In this study we examine the effects of freezing a steak starting from two steaks that are nearly identical. The goal is to see if it makes sense to stock up on steaks when they are on sale and freeze them, or is it better to simply wait until they are on sale to enjoy them.
Doing Science To Stuff 