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.
We’ve previous subjected beef to 8 (sometimes tortuous) hours in a slow cooker; but what happens after 8 hours via a temperature controlled, sous-vide method?
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?
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.
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 