…and not a single thing in need of a recipe…
Sometimes you just need a simple meal, and with a sous vide setup steak is very, very simple.
Black vinegar and beer marinade
Ingredients
Instructions
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Combine all ingredients in a zip-top bag. Add meat of choice. Remove as much air as possible and close the bag. Place in the refrigerator for 8 hours (or overnight).
This recipe1 was inspired by a post on Grillax. I used my version of the marinade in order to flavor three New York steaks (they were strip steaks, but they were not labeled as New York Strips. Don’t start ME lying). I put the steaks in the marinade and let them soak overnight, then patted the steaks dry and put them into a fresh freezer bag in the water bath with the immersion circulator set to 136.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
The beauty of sous vide is that it’s not realistically possible to overcook2 something3 in the time frame of a day. I put them in the water back before starting work, then pulled it out after work. I heated up my cast-iron griddle rocket hot and cooked each of the steaks for about 45 seconds on each side, turning once in order to get the cross-hatched grill marks.
The asparagus was simple as well. I cut about an inch off each of the spears, then sprayed the griddle with olive oil and cooked until they were slightly charred. I topped the spears with a little bit of lemon juice, and it was delicious.
The starch…well, it was supposed to be risotto. It was cooked like risotto, with beer in place of the traditional white wine. However, it was just…off. The texture wasn’t right…and it finally dawned on me what was wrong:
I had used Calrose rice. Traditional risotto is made with Arborio or Carnaroli rice. Calrose, Carnaroli…po-tay-to, po-tah-to…
Mexican rice (sopa seca)
Description
From the thirteenth edition of the Fredricksburg Home Kitchen Cook Book, published by the Fredricksburg Parent-Teacher Association’s Cook Book Committee in 1996. Recipe is attributed to the first edition of the book (1916) and to Mrs. Herm. Goldschmidt.
Ingredients
Instructions
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Place lard in a pan and heat to the smoking point. Add rice (dry) and stir until it browns gently. Add tomatoes and other ingredients and stir until tomatoes soften, then cover with enough water to swell rice and cook until soft on a slow fire.
Note
Serve with chili and beans, or fried sausage.
Since I didn’t really give you a starch recipe, I dug into my archives and found an interesting one. Michelle and I were in Fredricksburg, TX in the second week of October 20174 for a quick vacation. We stopped at an antique store and found a copy of this cookbook, which I just had to have as a souvenir of this trip. I pulled this off my bookshelf because it looked interesting, but little did I know that the recipes in this book were provided with the original edition they were printed in. The recipes aren’t indexed by ingredient, but as far as I can tell this is one of only a couple rice recipes, so it seemed appropriate to include this one5.
Thoughts:
1) I thought it was pretty good, though I wasn’t particularly happy with the “risotto”.
2) My tasting panel compatriots disagreed, however. They thought it was quite good.
3) I did not tag the marinade as “gluten-friendly” because of the beer, and I would not have tagged the “risotto” recipe either, but the member of the tasting panel with gluten sensitivities did not have any issues with it.
Verdict:
Taste: 8/10. It’s REALLY hard to mess up this steak preparation, and the asparagus came out well. I’m probably being too hard on myself regarding the starch.
Availability: 7/10. I don’t keep strip steaks and asparagus in the fridge on the regular, but they’re not hard to find at the store.
Story: 8.5/10. Save my brain fart confusing Calrose rice and Carnaroli rice, there wasn’t much of a story to be had. Finding the Mexican rice recipe from 1916 was amazing though.
Administrivia:
Still behind on blogging. I’ll try to get one more meal posted today, and then I’ll only be two behind. One of those two will be something that isn’t complicated enough to get a recipe, so I’ll just need to find something with the key ingredients in one of my pile of cookbooks.
- https://grillax.com/ultimate-beer-marinade/ ↩︎
- In before someone from the peanut gallery says that I overcooked the steaks by taking them to that temperature. ↩︎
- Of course Serious Eats would have something to say about that. See https://www.seriouseats.com/food-lab-complete-guide-to-sous-vide-steak ↩︎
- Bonus points if anyone can guess why I know for SURE that’s when we were there on vacation. ↩︎
- This is one recipe I feel compelled to convert to the rice cooker and try out. ↩︎