Short version: Sous-vide is the real fuckin' deal.

So, one day I was trawling along the information super-tubes, and I stumbled upon a video (Normal Person vs ... Gordon Ramsay) on Kamikaze Cookery. This site combines three things I love dearly: geekiness, cooking, and merciless snark, so I watched their "The Perfect Steak" episode, whose title should be sufficiently descriptive.

So, the theory of cooking steak is that you want the outside to be burned, but the inside to be as closed as possible to 55 degrees C. The obvious solution, if you think about it for more than a couple seconds, is to hold it in a 55 deg C environment for sufficient time for it to get heated through, then you quickly cook the outside with something ridiculously hot. The way they did it is by vacuum-bagging it, then immersing the bag in a pot of water held at the correct temperature. That's the sous-vide ("under vacuum" in French) bit. Then they went at it with a blowtorch.

As you would know if you thought about it more for more than a few seconds, this actually works quite well. The main downside is that it takes a long time to heat the subject. The good news is that to long shouldn't be a problem at all (what're you going to do, overcook it?). I guess the other downside is that you need to have very precise control over you stove, and it needs to go extremely low.

So, for my experiment I bought a small, cheap piece of terrible steak. I used this guide to sous-vide cooking for detailed instructions, the tables of cooking times were quite handy. I put it in a freezer bag (don't try to use a non-freezer bag, it will end poorly), sucked the air out with a vacuum, and plopped it in the water bath. I had good luck keeping track of the water temperature by hanging my thermometer across a pair of tongs that were laid (locked closed) across the top of the pot. I checked the temperature every 10 minutes or so, easy as pie. (Well, quite a bit easier, actually.) I finished it with a kitchen torch, which actually kinda sucked (stupid safety features).

The terrible steak was the best terrible steak I ever ate. It was ridiculously juicy, and perfectly cooked. Obviously, it was terrible steak, but the point is well-proved. I think next time I'll try finishing it in a hot pan, then hitting the sides with the blow torch. First off, you can fake a sauce, and secondly, it'll be easier on my hands.

I took some pics of the process, sorry I don't have anything of the finished steak, we were extremely hungry.