Hey there,
I have a sous vide for a few months now – and for some reason, steaks always turn out dry 🙁
I tried various temps, 129f, 130f, 135f, 137f –
As I understand, the higher the temp, more fat renders, but at the cost of doneness.
What I do is pretty straightforward – I vacuum seal it, put it in the water, take it out after 1-2h, pat it dry, season it, put it in the fridge for 10ish minutes over a wire rack, and sear it with a blow torch, a few seconds each side then flip and repeat.
I also tried seasoning before I put in the bag,
I also tried searing on the pan.
Am I doing something wrong?
When i watch sous vide YouTube videos – they always seem a lot juicier.
I attached a picanha steak, 137f. Looks and tastes great, but very dry (hope it's noticeable in the pic)
by ParticularOk8527
14 Comments
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Everything you mentioned is totally fine. Are you buying low quality meat?
You overcooked it and you’re wondering why it’s dry? Lol.
not sure if this is the issue, but if the steak is hot when you put it in the frig, the frig can quickly pull moisture out of it.
again, not sure if this is right, but i just dunk the bag in an ice bag to stop the cooking process.
Just a thought, have you verified the water temperature with a secondary thermometer? My SV seems to have gotten uncalibrated and is 3° off. Tho you say you tried different temps, so I’m puzzled
you might be expecting a mouthfeel that sous vide doesnt provide. it should be “silky” more so than juicy. the moisture will be contained within the meat, not dribbling out. everything that would dribble (including rendered fat) is already in the bag.
one thing you can try is to dry brine well in advance of cooking. the proteins will hold significantly more water.
I gave up on blow torch finish i also gave up with the fat because no matter what i tried the fat would not cook out to be delicious. So I switched to different steaks (fatless) and now I only buy flat-irons, hangers & occasionally fillet. 1hr30mins @135* then pat dry, salt and fry off in butter ghee it never fails.. Picanha I trim the fat down as much as is possible, salt in bag, 9hrs @135*, pat dry then 10 minutes in airfryer @230* then slice….
Read up on dry brining. Not sure it will solve it for you, but why not?! The only thing I do any different than you is I skip the fridge step. After using the torch I wrap in foil for ten minutes. I use the auto functions of my sous vide unit and it takes it to 140 for 2.5 hours…this is on the cheapo 1.5″ steaks from Costco.
Edit: After dry brining and vacuum sealing I freeze the steaks. When I sous vide, they go in frozen. I read all this somewhere, years ago, don’t recall where.
It is a you problem. Which is good, because it is easily fixed.
Here is why. A refrigerator is a type of dehumidifier. So when you place the meat into the fridge, it will condense the moisture, which is part of what a fridge does. Said fridge also circulates the air inside to maintain a consistent temperature, further drying. Not to mention, you are salting (I assume you use salt during “seasoning”), which salt is a desiccant. Not just salting, but salting warm meat, that then cools, which contracts to squeeze even more moisture from the meat. Which could be left on the outside of the meat when you pull it out, but then you are actually blow torching any remaining moisture from the outside.
In fact, if I had meat that I wanted to dry out without increasing overall temp, I would salt it while warm, and place in the fridge on a wire rack. Because I can’t think of a more efficient way to dry meat out than that.
I love sous vide steak, but I don’t do the cooling step at all. I know that it partially cooks the last millimeter of meat to a grey medium well. It kind of goes against all of the “perfect cook to the very edge” that sous vide is known for, but honestly I don’t care.
Bag it, temp it and sear the shit out of it. The beauty to me, is the ability to park the temp at the correct doneness without fail, not the ability to dial up some magical 133.926530002* temperature of balanced doneness and fat rendering perfection. I sous vide because I can live my normal life, forget and then remember that I am cooking steaks, go sear them, and not accidentally have charcoal briquettes.
Also, where’s the sauce? Why does everyone hate sauce? Somewhere along the way, somebody said “good steak doesn’t need sauce” and everyone just bought in? Au poivre, béarnaise, chimichurri, balsamic reduction, creamy horseradish and mushroom gravy are all over here wondering what they did to hurt everyone. Make a freaking sauce people. Good steak doesn’t need a sauce, but great steak doesn’t exist without it.
I season before I freeze in a vacuum bag. Then I can go straight from the freezer to the sous vide. Help me understand putting in the fridge for 10 mins. As cold air holds less moisture the fridge could be extracting moisture from the steak. Likes other said doing get the juicy fats as much.
skip the fridge step. it does nothing.
you think you’re cooling it down, letting you sear it longer and better.
you’re ***actually*** cooling it down, forcing you to sear it longer for the same result.
on top of that, you’re essentially trying to dry brine it after sous vide, but not giving it enough time. like when you dry brine normally, 10 minutes is a terrible time to stop the process cuz all the water is on the surface, vs like an hour later, the surface has dried out, but that water (and salt) has been reabsorbed into the meat. you could argue to leave it in the fridge longer, like an hour instead of 10minutes, or….just skip the fridge step. it does nothing.
No one asked how thick the steak was. I buy the Picanha roast typically. When SV steak, anything thinner than 1.5 inches it is a waste of time in my opinion.
Shouldn’t be dry after 2 hours. Maybe it’s the 10 minutes in the fridge
Sometimes a steak looks good but isnt lol.
Last sous vide steak i did came out dryish like you describe, the one before that was the best I’ve ever done by far… Same source (at different times), same cut, same exact process, temp etc.
If youre consistently getting bad results, change up the cut and/or the shop.