Showing posts with label microwave. Show all posts
Showing posts with label microwave. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Reheating Sous Vide Beef

Because I've been using sous vide to cook a lot of meat lately, invariably there are leftovers.  So I asked myself, what's the best way to reheat the meat?

Probably the absolute best way would be to bring it back to serving temperature in a water bath.  But that seems like it would take too long.  And waste too many of my plastic bags.

Instead, I decided to try out 3 different methods:
  1. Microwave - quick and dirty method normally used for reheating a variety of foods.
  2. Pan fry - reheat and get some more crust, but will it overcook it?
  3. Blowtorch - reheat the outside very quickly and create additional crust, but will it warm the whole thing?
Here we have 3 pieces of meat straight out of the refrigerator.  You can see the congealed fat (yum!).


Here are those same 3 pieces after each has been reheated according to one of the methods above.  Can you guess which piece was reheated in which manner?


The microwave method took about a minute.  I was afraid of overcooking the meat before heating it to a good temperature since the slices weren't that thick to begin with.  After 30 seconds in a rotating microwave, some of the congealed fat still hadn't melted, so I did an additional 30 seconds.  I heard it pop the second time, so I'm thinking maybe 20 seconds, rest, 20 seconds might be a good amount in the future.


The pan fry method took about a minute on each side once the pan with some butter had been heated to medium low.  I actively pressed down on the meat a bit to create some extra crust.  It certainly smelled delicious.


The blowtorch method took all of 30 seconds.  I torched each side for a little while until it looked like the fat on the outside had all melted and the piece browned a little.


Which method did I like the best?  Surprisingly, it was a tie between the pan fry method and the microwave method.  The pan fry method had an amazing crust but the meat was a bit tougher on the inside.  The microwave method was super tender and definitely the juiciest of the three, but with no crust.

Sadly, the blowtorch method failed to produce a better crust than the pan fry method and also failed to reheat the meat entirely through.