With my wife and daughter scheduled to go out of town for a week, I thought I might experiment with vegetarianism.
Sometimes I do that thing where you look around and wonder what common everyday element will seem unthinkable in fifty years, the one I keep coming up with is walking into a grocery store where there are parts of dead animals wrapped in plastic.
Which weirds me out because the Dead Animal Parts section is my favorite area of the Stuff You Can Eat store. I mean, to the point where I like just looking at it. But I'm at the point where I have to consciously weigh health benefits into what I consume. The ancient, ancestral part of my brain that kicks up the appetite at the sight of raw meat is also indifferent to my survival past the age of viable reproduction. Evolution is sort of a dick that way.
I stayed vegetarian for a few days, although not in a row. My work days were long that week and it was as easy to just veg out (in every sense) and then shuffle off to bed. As the weekend approached, though, I had a carnivorous revelation.
A real upside to being alone in the house for a whole week is that I was free to prepare a steak which was as rare as I like without suffering the criticism of the women I live with, both of whom prefer their meat well done.
I've had to defend my steaks to my family with professionally photographed food in a little booklet showing thick cuts of beef with gleaming pink interiors and little parcels of tied asparagus. But they won't have it. They, being ardent fans of reality shows about trauma units, prefer that their food not be the color of a stabbing victim's abdominal wall.
On the surface, we've reached an inadvertent compromise. The unevenly grilled steaks that I prepare will often have regions that are cooked to their preference and others that are cooked to mine. I'm more willing to acquiesce than they are, because their primary arbiter is botulism.
I've grilled a lot, and I enjoy it, but any success I've had with it has come without understanding what I'm doing as I've never gotten the core temperature of anything into the safety zone without wrecking the tenderness of the meat. Then, a month ago, I found a game changer. I watched a video about sous vide cooking.
Sous vide is French phrase that means "I'm not afraid to eat you."* It's a process wherein you put your steak, your burgers, your chicken, your ribs... in a vacuum sealed bag and submerge it in a tub of hot water at a specific temperature for an amazingly non-specific amount of time. The beauty of it is that it's really hard to overcook your food. The window for ideal cooking is hours long, rather than minutes.
The difference between preparing different styles of meat is dependant on the temperature of the water. With steak, medium rare happens at 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Well done takes 158 degrees at the same length of time, by which I mean at least 90 minutes and up to three hours.
There are devices that will regulate the temperature for you, and they cost upwards of 170 dollars, but if you're a tinkerer, you can kitchen-science yourself along with a cooler and a meat thermometer. In the video that introduced me to the process, they were using a digital thermometer with its remote probe tucked away in an Igloo cooler, but I've managed to lowball them by getting one of those three buck styrofoam jobs** and stabbing a meat thermometer that I already had through one of the walls. I hot glued it in place, making it waterproof, and just like that, I had a ghetto-tech sous vide apparatus.
You can also skirt the vacuum sealing by using a zip lock freezer bag and allowing the pressure of the water to displace the air as you submerge it, so long as you seal the last inch or so of the bag before you allow it to sink completely.
My water is about 122 degrees Fahrenheit at the tap, and I was able to maintain that temperature within a few degrees by adding a small pot of boiling water halfway through the process.
The steak that you pull out of the baggie at the end of this process is not THE most delicious looking thing you've ever seen, but it's not done. All that remains is to grill it for a few minutes on each side. Knowing full well that every steak is thoroughly cooked and safe to eat, you can just do it until it looks nice. The result is a grilled steak that seems to have been prepared by someone who knows what he's doing.
The week after my wife returned, I was anxious to bring her onboard with this method, so I got another cooler and prepared identical steaks at two different temperatures. She liked hers. She didn't criticize mine. You're never too far into a relationship to snuff out a little contention.
I like this process enough that I'd eat vegetarian all week to justify a weekend splurge. The net effect may be that I eat less meat and enjoy it more.
Sometimes I do that thing where you look around and wonder what common everyday element will seem unthinkable in fifty years, the one I keep coming up with is walking into a grocery store where there are parts of dead animals wrapped in plastic.
Which weirds me out because the Dead Animal Parts section is my favorite area of the Stuff You Can Eat store. I mean, to the point where I like just looking at it. But I'm at the point where I have to consciously weigh health benefits into what I consume. The ancient, ancestral part of my brain that kicks up the appetite at the sight of raw meat is also indifferent to my survival past the age of viable reproduction. Evolution is sort of a dick that way.
I stayed vegetarian for a few days, although not in a row. My work days were long that week and it was as easy to just veg out (in every sense) and then shuffle off to bed. As the weekend approached, though, I had a carnivorous revelation.
A real upside to being alone in the house for a whole week is that I was free to prepare a steak which was as rare as I like without suffering the criticism of the women I live with, both of whom prefer their meat well done.
I've had to defend my steaks to my family with professionally photographed food in a little booklet showing thick cuts of beef with gleaming pink interiors and little parcels of tied asparagus. But they won't have it. They, being ardent fans of reality shows about trauma units, prefer that their food not be the color of a stabbing victim's abdominal wall.
On the surface, we've reached an inadvertent compromise. The unevenly grilled steaks that I prepare will often have regions that are cooked to their preference and others that are cooked to mine. I'm more willing to acquiesce than they are, because their primary arbiter is botulism.
I've grilled a lot, and I enjoy it, but any success I've had with it has come without understanding what I'm doing as I've never gotten the core temperature of anything into the safety zone without wrecking the tenderness of the meat. Then, a month ago, I found a game changer. I watched a video about sous vide cooking.
Sous vide is French phrase that means "I'm not afraid to eat you."* It's a process wherein you put your steak, your burgers, your chicken, your ribs... in a vacuum sealed bag and submerge it in a tub of hot water at a specific temperature for an amazingly non-specific amount of time. The beauty of it is that it's really hard to overcook your food. The window for ideal cooking is hours long, rather than minutes.
The difference between preparing different styles of meat is dependant on the temperature of the water. With steak, medium rare happens at 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Well done takes 158 degrees at the same length of time, by which I mean at least 90 minutes and up to three hours.
There are devices that will regulate the temperature for you, and they cost upwards of 170 dollars, but if you're a tinkerer, you can kitchen-science yourself along with a cooler and a meat thermometer. In the video that introduced me to the process, they were using a digital thermometer with its remote probe tucked away in an Igloo cooler, but I've managed to lowball them by getting one of those three buck styrofoam jobs** and stabbing a meat thermometer that I already had through one of the walls. I hot glued it in place, making it waterproof, and just like that, I had a ghetto-tech sous vide apparatus.
You can also skirt the vacuum sealing by using a zip lock freezer bag and allowing the pressure of the water to displace the air as you submerge it, so long as you seal the last inch or so of the bag before you allow it to sink completely.
My water is about 122 degrees Fahrenheit at the tap, and I was able to maintain that temperature within a few degrees by adding a small pot of boiling water halfway through the process.
The steak that you pull out of the baggie at the end of this process is not THE most delicious looking thing you've ever seen, but it's not done. All that remains is to grill it for a few minutes on each side. Knowing full well that every steak is thoroughly cooked and safe to eat, you can just do it until it looks nice. The result is a grilled steak that seems to have been prepared by someone who knows what he's doing.
The week after my wife returned, I was anxious to bring her onboard with this method, so I got another cooler and prepared identical steaks at two different temperatures. She liked hers. She didn't criticize mine. You're never too far into a relationship to snuff out a little contention.
I like this process enough that I'd eat vegetarian all week to justify a weekend splurge. The net effect may be that I eat less meat and enjoy it more.
 |
| My first rare sous vide steak, served with a generous helping of French cut green beans. To the left, a couple of leaner and less expensive steaks that I prepared for my dog as gratitude for being my faithful companion during my week-long stint as The Omega Man, and which he had finished completely by the time I pulled my chair up to the table. |
*No it isn't.
**A note about these cheap-ass coolers.
I don't suspect that a three dollar styrofoam box is intended for, or capable of, holding the weight of the water that fills it -- water which also happens to have been heated with the intention of cooking flesh. To that point, I placed mine in the sink.
While using two at the same time, I didn't want to use both sides of the sink, so I took the extra precaution of wrapping the exterior of the ice chests with duct tape, which may have made them marginally safer but definitely made me feel less like a culinary adventurer exploring some fancy-pants, French-named epicurean pursuit, and much more like a tightwad hillbilly who was "gitten...'er...dun" with substandard equipment, a vibe my wife must have picked up much earlier when I called up the stairs, "I'm going to start dinner... so where's the hot glue gun?"
**A note about these cheap-ass coolers.
I don't suspect that a three dollar styrofoam box is intended for, or capable of, holding the weight of the water that fills it -- water which also happens to have been heated with the intention of cooking flesh. To that point, I placed mine in the sink.
While using two at the same time, I didn't want to use both sides of the sink, so I took the extra precaution of wrapping the exterior of the ice chests with duct tape, which may have made them marginally safer but definitely made me feel less like a culinary adventurer exploring some fancy-pants, French-named epicurean pursuit, and much more like a tightwad hillbilly who was "gitten...'er...dun" with substandard equipment, a vibe my wife must have picked up much earlier when I called up the stairs, "I'm going to start dinner... so where's the hot glue gun?"
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