Unless we’re actively sailing somewhere, our day invariably revolves around the evening meal. I generally try and make a nice sit down meal for the AmyUnit and myself and as a confirmed carnivore living with a veggie lover, I often have to be somewhat creative in my planning. I’m always on the lookout for new ideas and recently I read a book entitled “The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science” where the author turned me on to the concept of sous vide cooking.

Sous vide is French for under vacuum and usually it entails some high dollar kitchen appliances that allow you to vacuum seal food and then slow cook it while immersed in a hot water bath. Go to Amazon or Google and search for “Sous Vide” and you’ll see what I mean.

The science behind the technique is really impressive, but it seemed to be a little impossible to try on our little sailboat until the book I read talked about doing the same sort of cooking with a beer cooler instead of thousands of dollars of kit. Basically what we did was heat up 2 liters of water to 135 degrees, which if you’re interested, takes 8 minutes on our stove.

Once the water was at the appropriate temperature, we poured it into our 6 pack Coleman cooler that we normally use for Megabrella outings. in the cooler, I had a cheap, locally acquired rib-eye that we thawed earlier in the day. The steak was still in its foil pack and I weighed it down with a small stainless steel grate to keep it from floating.

Now, we’ve had these steaks before and they suck mega-ass as a rule of thumb. Typically they are only good for things like stir fry or tacos or quesadillas. I tried eating one like a normal steak and it was sort of like chewing on a Goodyear tire. Not a good time.

You can imagine my surprise when after 40 minutes in the 130 degree bath, out emerged the most tender, juicy – fall apart when you look at it, steak of the Gods. Wow!

For those interested, I used my instant read IR thermal gun to test the temperature of the cooler at ten minute intervals during the cooking process. At zero minutes, we were at 131; 10 minutes 130; 20 minutes 129; 30 minutes 128; 40 minutes 126. According to science a perfect medium rare steak has an internal temp of 130 degrees. Because the water was never above 130, there is no chance for the steak to overcook. Also, because the steak is completely immersed, the entire entity cooks at the same rate. Gone are the hotspots or overdone outer edges of a grilled steak. The entire beast was a perfect uniform pink.

Unfortunately, without bringing flame into the picture, the steak fails to exhibit the “Maillard” effect, which is the sizzled char and browning on the outside. To reproduce this you can throw the steak on a hot grill or pan for 1 minute per side, but we opted to go medieval on its ass and break out the propane fired torch to get the same place.

Let me just say, there is something inherently awesome about torching your dinner. Fire! Fire!

We’ve tried this both last night and tonight and the results have been spectacular. So much so, that I’m thinking of ways I can enhance the insulation of my little beer cooler to further stabilize temperature falloff. It looks like just about any meat can be cooked low and slow this way. Vegetables are probably not going to work with our setup as they require a much higher (180+) temperature which may be difficult so sustain without some of the aforementioned (expensive) kitchen gadgets.

For people trying this without a vacuum pump, a Ziploc immersed in water almost to the top gets you the same place, plus this way you can season your meat before you cook it.

Anyway, this has almost nothing to do with cruising, but there you have it. More to follow, end of line ….

P.S. – Today’s picture is from last week’s vet clinic hours. I’m afraid he arrived DOA.