Anyone who cooks Sous Vide knows the value of the Maillard reaction. You can cook perfectly rare meat in the water bath, but the taste is mediocre. Hit that steak with a torch, broil it briefly, or drop it on a piping hot cast iron skillet and it turns into magic. We just did some ribs last night for about 90 minutes in the sous vide and 4 minutes each side on the broiler and they were amazing.
I did sous vide steak for many years, but recently switched back to doing it the old fashioned way: Sear both sides for 30-45 seconds and then throw in the oven for several minutes at max heat (500F for me) until reaching the desired internal temp. It’s so much faster and I find the taste at least as good. Sous vide is still really interesting for certain things, but I don’t see the point for steak anymore.
If you want the perfect edge to edge doneness of sous vide, but you also want an amazing crust then I have an another approach for you.
You sear both sides for 30-45 seconds and then let the steak rest for about 2 minutes, and then repeat until you reach the internal temp you want. Usually about 3 or 4 times for a reasonably thick steak.
I can highly recommend this method and it's also good for cooking large numbers of steaks because you can do 2 or even 3 batches at the same time with the same cast iron pan.
No, but I would recommend resting on a rack rather than a plate if you want the get the best possible crust. It doesn't make a super huge difference, but the side sitting on the plate will get wet as juices come out which impedes browning slightly in the next sear until they evaporate off.
Just make sure to save those juices that drip down for your pan sauce if you are making one!
I think sous vide shines best when you are cooking tougher cuts which don’t do well with short cook times. With better cuts you have a lot more options for how you can make them shine.
No, it was just a really big plastic bag, in a big tray. We used those catering trays with the hot water, which are generally useful if you’re ever throwing a party.
The run included mustard as a base with lots of the predictable spices.
This is almost a reverse sear, which, imho, is the best way to cook a medium+ thickness steak, especially ribeye or filet.
I preheat 250-300 and watch a remote meat thermometer until the steak is 95% to desired temp. Usually takes 30-45 minutes. Then I crank up a skillet with ghee until it just starts smoking (~500F) and sear the hell out of the steaks for only a minute on each side. Perfect crust every time. Let rest for about 10 minutes.
Yes, I've had good luck without oil. Without oil, I usually wait to pepper until afterward. Pepper burns quickly and most of it will just stick to the skillet, interfering with the surface contact.
Personally, I like using butter or ghee. Aside from the taste, it increases and distributes the heat transfer more evenly across the surface which provides a more uniform sear. If you do use oil, I'd recommend using ghee or refined olive oil and make sure to "temper" it first (allow it to warm with the skillet).
Sous vide is wasted on ribeyes/filets. It is made for skirt - put the skirt steak for 4 hours at 45C then 24H at 56C - and you have perfectly beefy meat with nothing chewy. And juicy beyond comparison.
Have you done your steaks in the broiler? I usually use a torch since I find that in order to get the sear I want, I have to leave them in the broiler too long. I usually cook the steaks to 129 F, but I guess I could drop down to 122 F or something.
For steaks I heat my cast iron up and drop it on the skillet, just a few seconds each side. I use the broiler for odd shaped stuff like ribs.
I know a lot of people use a torch, but personally I like the skillet. Seems less fiddly and generally faster for a steak.
Maybe I’m just paranoid and missing out on some flavor but I don’t cook anything other than fish below 135F to kill any bacteria. https://www.amazingfoodmadeeasy.com/info/sous-vide-safety/mo... (Update) I’ve seen other reliable sources suggest 130F for 2+ hours is safe.
> but I don’t cook anything other than fish below 135 F
That's funny; fish is the one thing I'm ultra paranoid about. Many parasites survive in fish up to 145 F, and parasites are much more common than you might think. The gross out factor convinced me to switch away from wild salmon to farmed. Sushi grade fish is a bit different since it's required to be flash frozen in the U.S., but you're still eating parasite corpses (which doesn't bother some people, but personally makes me a bit squeamish).
Eating parasite corpses objectively isn't worse than any other live matter in a fish.
As a society we live bathed in feces. The fecal-oral route is the most common way in which we get food poisoning. Yet it's only when the feces is pathogen-laden that we actually get food poisoning.
Worrying about dead parasites seems a little pointless when most people don't even wash their hands correctly.
> That's funny; fish is the one thing I'm ultra paranoid about.
For me anyhow, beef at 135 is decent (pork and chicken at 145 is my goto FWIW), but lots of fish tastes rubbery and just bad when cooked above 125 or so. I don't eat a ton of fish so I gamble on that.
My main gripe with the cast iron is that it generates so much smoke (even with fancier oils like grapeseed) that I get a pretty bad headache. I guess my ventilation is just not up to par. I've been eyeing a portable induction cooktop to use outside, but my boyfriend just wants me to get a grill.
Induction cooktops are MAGIC. Since I am a lazy i used the portable ones, because having not to install them. And discovered i can flip/fold them against the wall when not in use to save space!
I think it was because the poster was specifically buying one for outdoor use (rather than the fact that it was induction).
To piggyback on this comment, one reason I love using a cast iron skillet for steaks is so I can get a nice fond and deglaze for a sauce to go over the steak/potatoes/whatever. It's like a freebie!
Careful with cook times if going lower than 130F (IIRC). I don't know the right numbers offhand, but you need to watch out at those temperatures. You might be safe under an hour but I'm not sure.
One solution to having to broil them for too long might be to finish your sous vide cook, then chill them in an ice bath, and only broil once cold. That way the lower meat temp protects against the broiler overcooking the inside.
My first introduction to the Maillard reaction was in "Cooking For Geeks", which turned me on to cooking. It was no longer (just) a chore but a science/chemistry experiment that ended up being tasty! I'm including the link here because maybe it'll do the same for others.
Thanks for the kind words! (I’m the author and also daily reader of Hacker News, but generally just lurk.) Happy to answer any questions; email is generally best.
As a chef and a geek I've been asked about your book by non chefs! Sadly I haven't read it yet, but I saw your link had the first two chapters for free so I'll give them a look tonight :-)
You can also bake baking soda to make it extra alkaline. It makes a big difference for pretzels. There's not a huge difference between baked baking soda and the traditional lye, IME.
I wonder if that'll work for nixtamalization? Normally you need lye to make e.g. hominy (and thus grits, corn tortillas, grits, tamales, grits, masa, etc... did I mention grits?), but any alkaline should theoretically work, so I might have to give this a whirl.
I like to make my pretzels with sourdough starter discard, because I think the sourness adds a lot to what’s an otherwise fairly bland bread (you could argue it’s the dips that make the pretzel, though!)
I do this (makes 3 medium pretzels, enough for my wife and I to share)
40g sourdough starter discard
85g any beer (or water)
1 tsp each salt, yeast, sugar
160gm white flour
2 tbsp butter
I warm up the beer and butter until the butter’s just melted (not too hot, don’t boil it). Add the yeast, starter, and sugar. Give it a good stir.
In a decent-sized bowl add the flour and salt, then add the liquids. Give it a good mix with a wooden spoon. The dough should be just wet enough that there are no dry bits in the bowl, and it should all glom together easily. This is not a wet dough; I find about 58% hydration to be good. If it’s sticking to your fingers it’s probably too wet.
Take the dough out of the bowl, give it a bit of a knead (a few minutes should be fine, it should be fairly stiff to start with and easy to knead).
Form it into a ball and chuck it in an oiled bowl, let it rise for at least an hour, then take it out and mercilessly squish the dough. You want the flavour of the fermentation, but not the airiness. Pretzels should be fairly dense. No prize for big air bubbles here.
Form the pretzels (youtube, it’s easy) and put them on parchment/baking paper that’s been oiled/buttered. Chuck em in the fridge or freezer, they’re easier to handle when cold.
If using lye, make a 3% mix (30gm lye per litre of water; 1 litre should be enough) and when the pretzels are cold and stiff dunk them in the lye water for a minute each. Drain them and move them back to the parchment paper (might be good to oil it again) and give them a good dabbing with a paper towel to dry off the surface a bit. If you don’t the salt flakes you’re about to sprinkle will soak into the dough. Sprinkle salt flakes (you do want flakes not normal table salt). Chuck into a 200C oven on fan bake (or just bottom element) for 6-8 minutes until just past golden brown. Be sure to check on them, all ovens are different.
That's especially effective in a pressure cooker, where the elevated pressure and increased temperature allows the Maillard reaction to proceed in water phase.
But be careful; I've noticed that if you use too much baking soda, you can get odd flavors — like squash tasting like pretzels.
Well - high temperatures, alkaline reagents and fats - this seems like a good way to get tiny amounts of something soap like. But your sauce will be emulsified to perfection.
But how do you get rid of the baking soda flavor afterward?
I've tried recipes that advocated some baking soda, but even though I followed the instructions to the letter, the end result just had the terrible flavor.
I really like The Food Lab book by one of Serious Eats authors, Kenji López-Alt. It helped me to understand the purpose of different steps in recipes and what is important about them. For example when recipe asked me to saute something for X minutes until brown fond forms on the bottom of pan, I usually continued after X minutes even if brown fond didn't form. It turned out what the recipe actually asked is to create products of Maillard reaction, and it was crucial for taste of final product while amount of minutes it would take can vary depending on type of burner, pan, frequency of stirring, etc...
"The Maillard reaction is complex. So complex, in fact, that it's only in the last few years that scientists have begun to figure out what it actually is. While they still don't entirely understand it, they do know the basics"
Well, the Maillard reaction is actually well understood. There is also early and late Maillard reaction products and not all products are necessary good for you.
"The Maillard reaction is many small, simultaneous chemical reactions that occur when proteins and sugars in and on your food are transformed by heat, producing new flavors, aromas, and colors."
...when proteins and REDUCING sugars...
Fixed that for you.
Maillard reaction also occurs in your eye, what is a bad thing in the long run...
"Instead, these proteins require "reducing sugars," which are essentially simple sugars that attract amino acids at certain moisture and temperature levels."
this article was terribly written. totally meandering, unorganized, rambling. I was desperately curious to understand it but it barely explained anything and went around in circles, with gratuitous jokes that just served to further delay the info.
The author successfully turned the Maillard reaction into a buzzword: long article without a clear explanation into what it does,saying the same thing over and over. This was a waste of time.
thanks, that was interesting. i'm still curious about why maillard reacted food is more nutritious/bioavailable, that article didn't seem to address that. the OP may have but i got exhausted scrolling
Nice. More science/engineering-minded cooks should learn about this. A close second is the Leidenfrost effect[1]; it's the secret to cooking eggs properly without non-stick. Your omelettes will float on a bed of steam.
I cook omelettes like that. I learned the technique from a friend who was a line cook at some fancy French restaurant. It works well as long as you have a very thin layer of eggs. Instead of butter, you brush a little bit of high smoke-point oil onto the pan (and mix a dash of heavy cream into the omelette batter to make up for the lost butter flavor). The eggs don't burn because they are insulated by a layer of steam.
It doesn't work for thick, American diner-style omelettes. The technique is useful because it lets you cook French-style (creamy, wet-in-the-center, made with about 100 ml of omelette batter for a 10-inch skillet) omelettes really quickly. Whereas the cooking time for a French-style omelette is typically five minutes, with this technique it is perhaps seven seconds.
Those eggs are not being levitated above the surface. I guarantee it. The pan would need be to be red hot to maintain the leidenfrost effect with a pan full of eggs. As anyone who has played around with the leidenfrost effect knows, since there is essentially no friction the little droplets of water skate around like pucks on an air hockey table. When you put your eggs in your hot pan cooking an omelette they do not float and flip out the side of the pan as they would if they were experiencing the leidenfrost effect.
The omelette does float on the pan. I see this happen every time I make the recipe.
My guess about why this happens is that, given that the omelette is a significantly large fluid droplet, the pan doesn’t actually have to be above the Leidenfrost point for the entire cooking process because it takes time for the residual steam to flow out from underneath the droplet.
If you use a carbon steel pan and season it properly, it’s just as nonstick as a nonstick pan. We don’t use Teflon or any other coated pans because we have birds and it can be lethal for them if a pan is overheated. 379+ degrees sounds way too hot to cook eggs, especially scrambled or omelette.
I've heard this assertion before, that a cast-iron or carbon-steel pan can be made just as non-stick as a teflon pan with a proper seasoning. I disagree, based on my own experience.
I have some cast iron pans that I took the care to clean an polish smooth, and season well, and they are seasoned better than most other cast iron or steel skillets I've seen in other people's kitchens. It's smooth enough to cook eggs on, _if_ I use sufficient cooking fat. And even then, even my cheap teflon-coated pans are smoother, and can get away with using less cooking fat.
Yes, a steel or iron pan, well-seasoned, can be used for several tasks that someone might think would require a teflon pan. But even then, there are some things that are just plain easier on a teflon pan than they are on well-seasoned iron or steel.
Carbon steel is stamped, cast iron is cast. Back in the day they used to polish them completely smooth but don’t anymore due to the labor involved. I used to use a seasoned cast iron pan and the carbon steel is massively more nonstick.
Yeah this is my experience too - My carbon steel pan is fine for cooking eggs if I put a dollop of butter in there - my nonstick pan is fine even without the butter. I love the carbon steel for like 90% of my cooking, but if I'm just making an egg or two the teflon is unbeatable.
I used to really like Teflon, but then I watched a lil documentary on the problems that come from manufacturing the coating. DuPont and 3M poisoned nearly the whole planet. “The Devil We Know” is the title.
They just swept the problems under the rug, switched to different chemicals when shit hit the fan, but those chemicals carry the same dangers.
It ain’t just the birds in the house that take a hit. It’s in you forever.
Do you honestly cook eggs without butter or at least some type of fat?
My carbon steel will stick certain things if I throw them in when the pan’s not fully heated and completely dry, so I concede that point to you. I don’t cook like this though and It’s not really a recommended cooking style in general to start with a cold pan and no fat.
Woks are carbon steel and have eggs cooked on them all the time commercially for fried rice and such.
Nah I always have fat in the pan regardless, but it's more that there will occasionally be something that causes egg to stick to the carbon pan which requires a whole process to clean / reseason or whatever when I can just use the teflon without a care in the world and save the carbon for steaks or veggies.
Just bought a carbon steel frying pan (remarkably inexpensive too) and curiously have the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect happen when dropping some water to see if it was hot enough. Had no idea what that effect was until I read this thread! Weird how that happens sometimes
> 379+ degrees sounds way too hot to cook eggs, especially scrambled or omelette.
It's not.
I started trusting in my pans, lifting them off the burner as necessary for heat management, and properly distributing the egg curds with a fork as they form. It's a whole new game.
Butter starts browning at 266. Most oil smoke points are below 375. You are heating your pan to the point your fats are blackening to cook eggs? Cooks illustrated even refers to 250 as an acceptable temp for omelette and 350 as “egg toughening”.
There's more to the Leidenfrost Effect's impact on the cooking eggs than just the temperature. For the TL;DR version, watch the Myth Buster's take[1] on how you can put your hand into molten lead and not get burned.
380 F is way too hot for cooking eggs. I have a Control Freak induction cooktop that directly measures the temperature of the pan, and 380 F is closer to searing than it is to cooking eggs. They would burn almost immediately.
Read the WikiPedia article I linked, or watch the MythBuster's video I posted below... the water in the eggs turns instantly to steam and causes them to be buffered from the pan.
It's not magic; I use this technique when making omelettes and scrambling, but not when I'm frying eggs.
The existence of the effect does not mean that you're using it as a technique.
I googled this and this thread comes up on the first page, and the results do not show this effect being used for cooking, only for verifying temperature.
Why would you even want to do this even if it worked the way you claim? If this worked the way you did, you would be steaming the eggs. If you wanted to control temperature, you could just...lower the temperature to the proper level.
I think of the "new" in the "news" in "hacker news" as being like a used clothing store in my home town called "New to You".
HN is for anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity. Sometimes that's news in the common sense, but often it's more obscure things, and those are also welcome.
