Under Vacuum: 52 Hour Sous Vide Beef Tri Tip

Posted by johngl

Using The Google for it’s French to English translations, “sous” equals under and “vide” equals empty. Together “sous vide” translates to simply “vaccum”.  Under vacuum sounds better than under empty and it is more informative than simply vacuum so I will just run with it.

In its basic form, sous vide is a cooking method where food is placed in a plastic bag from which the air has been evacuated. Said bag of food is then placed in a water bath of a certain temperature and the food cooks at that temperature for long periods of time.  The idea here is to cook the food at the temperature you wish to serve the food.

52 Hour Sous Vide Beef Tri Tip with a Quenelle of Quinoa

Fancy.

Yes, I cooked that meat for 52 hours. No, I didn’t hover over it for more than two days.  The beauty of this cooking method is that it is brain-dead simple if you have the proper equipment. Proper equipment varies from $1600 laboratory grade immersion circulators that are accurate to a tenth of a degree to totally hand built $50 ghetto units.

Mine is decidedly low tech. A $50 electric roaster regulated by a $150 controller.  Since I already had the roaster, I look at this at the net cost of my “sous vide machine” as the price of the controller unit.  As far as I am concerned, it has already paid for itself handily.  Just enter “sous vide” in the search bar in the upper right of my home page and you get this.

Back to brain-dead simple for a minute. People are forever saying they can’t cook. This is for them.

Apply salt and pepper to meat product.

This meat product is called a Tri Tip for some pretty obvious reasons.  It costs about $5 per pound and if you don’t cook it right you can wear out your incisors chewing through it.

It is from the bottom of the bottom sirloin:

If you feel like getting technical, it is the connective tissue covering the quadriceps of the cow. Connective tissue doesn’t even sound tender. It isn’t. In the olden days it was usually ground up and sold as hamburger.

The good news is that this roast is still relatively inexpensive and it has a wonderfully beefy flavor.

Back to brain-dead simple (again).

We’ve dosed the tri tip with salt and pepper. All that is necessary to finish is to bag it and drop it into the water bath.

The controller was set at 140°.

Would I lie to you?

Now, just leave it alone for two days. It comes out looking like this:

Cooking meat just doesn’t get any easier than that.

But, as those who know me will attest, I am rarely satisfied with simple, especially when it comes to cooking.

Those juices in that bag are amazingly flavorful so I drained them off in order to make a sauce.

From each roast, expect anywhere from six ounces to a cup of juices.

Note the rather anemic look of the beef.  That is the downfall of sous vide; things come out looking a little gray. However, you can feel free to broil, grill, or pan sear it to your delight.  Make sure whatever method you use is really hot and don’t overdo it.  All we are trying to do is add some color (which is actually completely unnecessary).

I chose a different route.

Everything tastes and looks better when hit with a blow torch.

See, I told you!

In reality, that too was a simple step given the proper equipment. Doesn’t everyone have a torch?

Was I satisfied? Surely you jest.

I cut up the meat into little steaks.  Yes, it was a roast and these little slices are steaks.

With a tri tip, you’ll always want to cut it across the grain.  Aren’t these pretty little steaks?

It’s a little tough to see, but these are in a glass bowl covered with clear poly.

Now what?

It is much easier to see the bowl now, don’t you think?

I grabbed my PolyScience Smoking Gun?, dropped in a little hickory sawdust and fired up the bowl.  I allowed the smoke to settle for a few minutes, then got ready to plate dinner.

It amazes me just how much smoky flavor can come from about two minutes of exposure.

Whilst the smoke settled, I finished up the sauce (remember that beef juice!) by bringing it up to a boil, adding some pequin chile pepper and some Bordeaux reduction I keep in my fridge. A little sprig of fresh basil, some sage leaves, and a sprig of oregano also went into the boiling beef stock.

Allowing the herbs to steep, I plated the meat and most glorious spousal unit added the quinoa she’d been working on (hydrated with beef stock with added Parmesan cheese).

I quickly strained the stock, put it back in the pan, and added a slurry of corn starch to thicken the juices ever so slightly.

Along with dinner we enjoyed the requisite wine.

This is a blend of 55% Cab Sav and 45% Touriga Nacional originating in Portugal.  The 2005 Quinta de Aveleda “Follies” Cabernet Sauvignon Touriga Nacional Bairrada earned a 92 rating from Wine Enthusiast:

The partner to Aveleda?s pure Touriga Nacional Follies, this is a finer wine, with its complexity of flavors coming from the blend. It has red berry and black plum fruit flavors, sweetened by dried prunes and held together by rich, dry tannins.” (12/15/09)

At $11 a bottle, I picked up another half case and look forward to seeing how this beauty ages.

The wine paired beautifully with the lightly smoky, full-on beefiness of the sous vide tri tip and, since we had a hunk of meat leftover…

we enjoyed the same wine again — along with some cold beef sammies topped with a tad of barbeque sauce — for lunch the following day.

All you lazy non-cooks out there, get off your lazy duffs and learn something.  This sous vide thing is right up your alley.