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?
Continue reading
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?
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.
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.
We saw how slow cooking beef affected the mass loss and temperature over time, but how does this relate to qualitative noms?
When it comes to cooking certain cuts of meat, low and slow is definitely the way to go. Done properly this will melt collagen into mouth watering gelatin, which is absolutely amazing! A slow cooker can be an excellent way to do this, however for some reason meats cooked in a slow cooker can come out dry even when there is plenty of liquid surrounding the meat. To explore this phenomenon we did science to meat.
For some reason, we ended up with a large number of chicken breasts in the house over the weekend. Not to waste the opportunity, we did additional science to them.
In honour of my co-blogger finishing her dissertation we’re doing science to delicious steaks.
Initial observation:
Grocery stores sell both frozen and fresh versions of some cuts of meat with the frozen versions often being much cheaper than the same cuts fresh. For this study we will focus on rib-eye steaks.
Question:
Is there a difference between fresh and frozen meat?
Doing Science To Stuff 