Do!

I won't attempt to dictate those words again. It works fine on my web interface but not on my Google docs interface. Oh well.

There are many articles on it, I won't bother to lecture you on easily found stuff. But I was working on a series of assumptions so I'll point that out since I didn't read any of those articles until after I actually bought the device.

My goal was to cook the perfect steak consistently. And then move on to roasts and chickens. My goal was to do a bunch at once and then freeze them since I'd like to buy them bulk but I hate the process of thaw and cook. I'd rather thaw and 2 minute sear for steaks and 10 minutes for chickens and roasts.

If I can bulk cook while ignoring it satisfies my geek production mentality.

I can do 10 at once. I can parallel process and ignore it.

It is impossible for me to evenly cook large meat. If a chicken is done in the center it will be dry on the outside. If it is perfect on the outside it will be bloody in the center.

The recipe for the chicken described it as being perfectly evenly done basted in butter and herbs and spices while the exterior was perfectly golden brown and crispy. I want.

Large cuts of meat vary in temperature (size variation within the same chunk of meat, distance to heating element versus the pan or the rack, combined with hot and cold spots) and some can be perfect but it is rare. Don't you dare open that oven or your temperature will drop and you will lose a half hour. But sometimes you have to check.

Since I occasionally cooked the perfect meal I thought I was capable. I was wrong. I was lucky. I cooked many others that were terrible.

And whether or not it was perfect or terrible it cost an enormous amount in attention. I never want to baste anything again. I want to avoid this.

So to start off with I bought two of the cheapest skinny ribeyes I could and two of the worst New York strips I could find. I bought them from one of those "off brand you get what you find this week'' type of store.

Stuff arrived from Amazon, total price was about $120. I got a wAnclc. Pronounce that however you want. That is how this capitalized.

I also got an Elechomes vacuum sealer. It was incredibly cheap and I got what I paid for. It almost works and it's not worth the money to send it back. I can create sealed bags in it but the vacuum is terrible. I almost said the vacuum sucks but that's a compliment in this situation.

Part of the process of preparing is to put your meat as flat as possible in a bag and getting rid of all the air. Or at least as much as you can.

You can do this in a Ziploc freezer bag in water but then Ziploc bags are not designed for this in their top area and therefore are supposed to be clipped in place over the water level and it's a bit more hassle.

And I'm a bit paranoid about the chemical composition of Ziploc bags combined with high heat.

If you have a sealed bag that can be fully submerged that most of the air has been sucked out of, that's good enough. And the bags created by the sealers are much better. They will not get punctured in the freezer, at least not nearly as easily as a Ziploc bag.

And they are designed to be cooked in as well. So I'm not worried about the chemicals in them.

There are various methods to make sure total submersion such as weights in the bag but I did not get any, yet.

So I get a tub that is designed for this which contains a steel rack that you place your stuff in that has a bar across the top that hopefully keeps stuff from floating up. Hopefully. Hopefully.

I put the tub together with the rack. I had been spending the last couple of hours just sealing away a grocery purchase, waiting for the opportunity to prep the steaks.

Steak prep was nothing more than take it out of the package, sprinkle with salt pepper and a bit other spices, and drop it in the bag. The ribeyes and New York strips fit in the bags that came with the sealer. I will buy more of those bags rather than create them myself.

Take the unit out, clip it to the tub. Program it via a wheel and touch screen interface. Took a bit but the wheel interface is very good once you can adjust your finger control to it.

You set temperature and time.

Here's where one of my misconceptions came in. I thought chefs would set this thing up and leave and go home and come in the next day and then they just have these steaks ready for customers to order which they then can produce in about 2 minutes.

I thought they could simply be stored in the device and then used as needed. Nope.

Everything cooks according to its width, and you want to cook different meats such as beef or chicken at different temperatures. For beef anything under an inch will take about 40 minutes. Then it can stay in the device up until 4 hours. But the preference is to pull out the device and then finish it immediately or freeze it immediately. They say there is no degradation until that point but why take chances?

Oh. So the steaks I'm currently cooking that I thought I could not have until tomorrow will be done (and sear finished) in about an hour. Works for me.

So I set it for 130 degrees for an hour, heard it start up, colors on the display changed, and the water warmed. It took about 15 minutes to get the water hot. Next time I will fill it with hot water to start.

I put the meat in and had to reconfigure the rack because things floated but then I got it right.

I walked past it a few minutes later and saw that the timer had not gone down. This particular device does not have any countdown that I can find. It displays the current temperature, the desired temperature, and the set time. It does not tell you how much time you have left.

So I set my alarm on my phone and walk away and come back 40 minutes later and pull everything out.

This is some ugly meat.

I pull out a strip steak and cut off the edge fat and slice into whatever hell that thick white strip is. I just do some cuts across it so that when the steak fries any shrinkage won't cause distortion and lift the steak up while it's pulling against that ribbon. This is totally unnecessary now. Absolutely zero shrinking or distortion based on the incredibly low fry time.

I take the fat and render it into a medium hot pan for about 3 minutes just to slick it up and then I turn it max high for about 3 minutes which starts to smoke and then the smoke is gone. I originally thought about doing this in butter but I just wanted to maintain the taste and butter smokes.

Slap the steak in. Sizzle sizzle sizzle. While it sizzles I count up to 60. I grabbed a spatula thinking I might have to do a peel but the steak slid and I grabbed it with tongs and flipped. Sizzle sizzle sizzle for another 60 seconds.

I had a perfect crust. But I also had fat sides on this. So I did the same for the long edges.

I took it off. No rest time. I slice throughout. Perfectly done. A horribly oddly shaped piece of meat was perfectly done with a perfect crust.

Since the cooking time allows the spices to be absorbed and diffused through the meat every single bite whether eating the pure pink inside or the perfect crust outside was perfectly spiced.

I will cook the frozen one tonight to see if that makes a difference. No matter what I will be freezing but since most of the cell structures have already been disrupted I doubt freezing the already cooked meat will make a difference. Might make it more tender.

I highly recommend this method of cooking for any type of meat that you are looking to achieve a specific temperature. After that point you can finish with a sear or a grill or an oven roast or broil. Even if I'm not producing a large quantity at once I don't care if the process takes longer. It's total ignore time. It's perfect.

M told me I was too clean. She has an immune system that she's worried about black helicopters coming and taking her away to make her a lab rat. It's that good.

And she's right. The only reason I'm willing to speak about this is that these people have been discovered about 2 years ago and they're already the lab rats. So no one's going to just go steal her.

I finally got an environment that I can control and I will keep it clean. That means if she does something that drops s*** on the floor I'm going to tell her about it, and she's not going to be happy.

I clean up. It's nobody else's hassle. But don't make extra work for me. It's my goddamn house.

After that discussion she left two pieces of chicken to defrost on a glass-cutting board on an open counter. And this cutting board has plastic corners which means everything runs in it and gathers and I can't clean it. I have to get rid of this cutting board. It came with the house. I've got salmonella running everywhere. I was furious. I told her if I had the choice to be filthy with her versus clean and alone I would take clean.

Mr Monk? I'm just trying to survive here without explosive diarrhea.

I had it at 165 for 4 hours. Killed everything and perfectly softened it. Then I froze it to minus 40 for a couple of days.

This one's a pure political play for some of them. I haven't met any neighbors who haven't been vaccinated, at least when it comes up and almost all my neighbors wear masks just walk into their dogs.

This couple I met via them picking something off craigslist from me and I found them interesting so I invited them for dinner.

Smartest stupid people I ever met.