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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

I was a professional chef for many years before I got into coding and I very rarely use a sous vide at home.

The practical advantages of it have a lot more to do with timing, prep dynamics, and consistency than they do with final quality.

There are some things that it makes possible or easy that are otherwise nearly inaccessible to home cooks and that is cool if you want to play around with it. Or if I'm cooking 6 steaks for guests or whatever but that's not a problem I've been having recently. But otherwise I don't find too much value in it personally.

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Definitely agree with the "cooking 6 steaks for guests". This is my secret trick at barbecues: I pre-cook a bunch of steaks that I keep warn in an ice-chest (with no ice, obviously), then as guest comes and goes, I sear them, which takes a few minutes only. Every group of arriving guest gets to eat a nice perfectly cooked steak, straight out of the fire.

My other secret trick is to sous-vide chicken wings, so I don't have to fear about contamination of my tools, people being like "is it cooked enough? It looks pink". After sous-viding, I leave them on a cold side of the barbecue until they turn golden brown: the meat is soft, moist and almost candied. It's fool proof as they'll never really have a chance to burn and they always come up perfect.

Non-chef but fairly advanced home cook here. When it comes to steaks I agree about the sous vide use. I have yet to be wowed by a sous vide steak I've made versus non sous vide. However when it comes to pork - sous vide is AMAZING. Pork chops come out better than non sous vide. You want a simple/easy/magical enternaining dish? Sous vide a pork tenderloin - your serving windows is 1-4 hours. You can't mess it up. Just put it in the water bath an hour before people arrive then whenever you want to eat - just pull it out, pat it dry and quick sear for a minute on all 4 side and voilla!

Yes that is exactly the sort of thing I mean by timing, consistency and prep dynamics.

Weirdly, while I totally get what people love about circulator steak, I have never had a good circulator pork chop experience. The two tricks to pork chops I've discovered are to dust them with sugar and salt as far ahead of time as possible, and then to treat them precisely as you would a mid-rare steak. There's something about sugar and pork, I don't pretend to understand what it is, but it's pretty miraculous.

The one routine thing I make that the circulator is unimpeachably excellent for is sausage. Bring sausage up to 145-150 or so, and then toaster oven on the broiler setting for like 7 minutes.

Not a chef but I also found sous vide to cause more problems than it solves for cooking steaks. The biggest problem I have with it is that the fatty marbling does not render to the extent it does on a grill, because I can't afford to sear it as long as on the grill to avoid overcooking it. So I end up with a nice brown sear only on the surface, but then as soon as you bite into it you're met with almost raw fat. It's gross :)

There's a very simple fix for this problem, which is just to hold the steak for an hour or so to lower the temp (and give more breathing room for the sear) before you sear it off --- which also dries the exterior of the steak and improves the sear.

That's an interesting idea, thanks. I can see continuing to SV for cuts of meat that really need it, e.g. a whole tenderloin. Otherwise I still find it more work for less result than a charcoal grill.

Speaking of which it's annoying to reverse sear on a grill because covering it first for 10 or so minutes cools it down enough that the sear is not as nice as when it's done on the higher heat achieved without a cover.

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