We recently received the Anova Precision Cooker from a fellow friend and home chef. As someone who loves to read cookbooks, food blogs, and take tons of food pics with my phone, I’m not the first person to pick up a spoon and start getting creative in the kitchen, but I’m trying. My husband on the other hand is just said person. He’s UBER creative when it comes to culinary feats and I love seeing what he comes up with. He couldn’t wait to try this little baby out. If you’ve never heard of the sous vide (pronounced “sue-veed”) method of cooking, it involves cooking vacuum-sealed food in a hot water bath. Sous vide is French for “under vacuum,” and can be applied to all kinds of food, not just meat.

As a couple of virgin “sous viders” we went from curious to skeptical to “Wow, this thing works and it’s delicious!” We had some prime New York strip steaks on hand so we dove in (no pun intended). I apologize for the low light in some of these pictures, but we function on European time on the weekends so dinner doesn’t even get started until well after 8pm.

Anova makes it super easy. Once you have the precision cooker clamped to the side of your cooking container (in our case a 12-quart Rubbermaid food storage container), just fill with water and set your temperature.

Once it reaches your goal temp, place your food into a plastic zip-top bag. Submerge your bag slowly and the water will form a vacuum seal around it. Zip it closed. The free Anova app has over 1,000 recipes and temperature suggestions so you can actually cook a steak to your desired finish. In our case we went with medium rare, so we set the temperature to 130 degrees F and let it go for 1 hour.

When you first submerge your food it should sink to the bottom. Just make sure to keep an eye on it so it doesn’t come into contact with the intake. When it is finished the steak looks gray in color, which was a little strange but we trusted the process. We finished it off in a cast iron skillet and the result was a steak thoroughly cooked through at the same finish from edge to edge, as opposed to steak that’s pink in the center but charred on the outside.

This was the juiciest steak! Every bite from outside to center was perfect. This was our first attempt so I think we will reduce the cooking time a bit. We usually like a medium rare steak to be more on the rare side. But for a newbie, this was pretty easy. And fun. Like a science experiment you get to eat. Mangia!

Served with:

• Herbed potatoes from Ina Garten’s Barefoot in Paris cookbook
• Oven roasted okra

Wine pairing: 2013 Folie a Deux Cabernet Sauvignon, Sonoma

This is not a sponsored post. Opinions expressed are my own.

This Device Will Make You Conquer Sous Vide the First Time first appeared on Cathedrals and Cafes.