Steak experiment: deep frying

I've cooked some great steaks using pretty much every method you can think of but lately I've gotten bored of doing the same thing and was looking for something new.

I'd heard of other people trying to deep fry their steaks with mixed results so I'd try my hand at it. I didn't find any reliable guides so I winged it based on a few other people's experiences.

Method:

– 1 in NY strip, dry brined in the fridge overnight.

– Sous vide @ 132F for 2.5 hours

– Rested in the freezer until 37F internal.

– Deep fried in 400F peanut oil for ~2 minutes.

Results:

– Extremely crispy golden brown crust

– Zero grey band

– Even medium-rare edge to edge

– Fat cap under-rendered

Conclusion:

Two things stand out about this method. 1) The crust is absolutely phenomenal. This makes the most even and beautiful crust with no chance of charring your steak. It's so insanely crispy, it's now ruined every other method for me in this regard. 2) I've gotten pretty good at minimizing grey band but this method drives that to essentially zero. I don't think improvement beyond this is possible.

It is possible to cook a steak from raw by deep frying only, but given the extremely fast cook times it's wildly unreliable. 15 seconds can be the difference between medium-rare and medium-well with deep frying. I chose the sous vide route for the perfect eveness and scientific precision and used deep frying as a way to develop robust crust.

Because hot oil imparts so much heat so quickly, the steak needed to chill quite a bit in order to keep it submerged long enough to form a crust and not become overdone. I placed it in the freezer for as long as I could. When I pulled it out it read 37F internally. Even starting from such a low temp, my 1 inch steak came up to about 120F internal after just under 2 minutes in the oil. I could see fully freezing steaks being even better as it allows more time in the oil before reaching serving temp. This might actually be convenient as you could sous vide and freeze a lot of steaks at once and pull them out for a quick fry as needed.

This doesn't work for every cut. Cuts with a large fat cap (like my NY strip) need extra heat applied only to that fat. Normally I'd just balance it on edge in a pan but since I'm submerging the entire steak in oil it's not possible to selectively heat the fat cap. This means the fat cap wasn't rendered as much as I would've liked. I would not use this method for cuts with large bands of subcutaneous fat such as the NY strip or picanha. I plan to try this again with a ribeye.

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