beef and whiskey

A couple of years ago, shortly after buying a big green egg grill, I started hearing about something called “hot-tubbing” a steak. It simply involved putting your steak in an airtight bag, dropping it in water as hot as you could get it from your tap, and leaving it there for while, say, an hour or so. Then you fire up your grill, get it as hot as you can and finish your steak on the grill. All you need is a couple minutes on each side and you have steak perfection.

Later on, I discovered there’s a fancy French name for this process, sous-vide. And as I described in my first ever blog post, I’ve used this technique to produce very tender and amazingly tasty grilled grass fed steaks. My methods were crude, though. All I had for a sous-vide device was a rice cooker. All I had for water temp control was… well, I didn’t have any such thing. Luckily my tap water runs about 130 plus degrees, more or less, which is a great temperature for steaks. And I usually got good results, tho not always.

I scowered the internet looking for a better sous-vide device, and didn’t find much. I read about some probe devices that you can use to control your water temps, and almost sprang for one. But then I lost the right to use my BGE on the balcony where we live, and so I sorta lost interest in sous-viding, for the most part. I still cooked the occaisional salmon that way, and the results were always amazing. Once in awhile I played around with sous-viding steaks and then finishing them off with a MAPP torch or on a very hot granite stone on my sad electric grill, but nothing came close to the taste bud exploding satisfaction of a steak grilled over charcoal.

Skip ahead a couple of years, and the Drs. Eades, whose blogs I follow obsessively, to my surprise and utter amazement, announce that they have designed and are marketing a home sous-vide machine. One with precise temperature control (something I never had with the rice cooker) and loads of other convenient features.

To my even greater surprise and amazement, an email from Michael Eades turns up in my inbox last Thursday. I almost ignored it, thinking it was just a blog post announcement. Good thing I didn’t, it was an invitation to the New York city stop of their media and chefs only promo tour for the sous-vide supreme. Taking place that very day. Would I still be interested in attending? Why hell yeah!

It was a fun afternoon. In addition to meeting Mike and Mary Dan, there was some great wine, and a demo introduced by the Drs. Eades and presided over mostly by Heston Blumenthal, of “Fat Duck” fame, with some help from Mary Dan here and there.

Before the demo, I was sure I would eventually get around to owning one of these gizmos, but was thinking it could wait awhile. It hasn’t been the best year for me, financially speaking. After tasting the food they prepared, I gotta tell ya, I gotta have one of these. As soon as possible. I joked with MD about letting me relieve them of the burden of shipping one of their demo SVS’s home, but she laughed me off. Damn.

Ok, then there was the food. Wow. They served scrambled eggs with truffles (the truffles add a lot, yeah, but you’ve never tasted eggs like this. Simply amazing.), Salmon, brined and not brined (both were fantastic, just a subtle difference in flavor and texture), some chicken (the most intense, most, flavorful chicken I’ve ever tasted), steak (I’ve had a lot of steak in my life, and even a lot of sous-vide steak; nothing compared to the samples they served.), and some eggplant and some pears (both simply amazing. I would buy a sous-vide supreme just to cook vegetables, you’ve never tasted them like this before. Never!).

(Btw, you can find a much better description of the food by this writer from seriouseats.com.)

I shot some video of the event, which I’ll post when I can find time, but for now, here’s some pics (click the pics for bigger, undistorted images):

Here’s Drs. Mike and Mary Dan, waiting for the show to start. Mike appears to be enjoying a pre-show cocktail of some sort…

Mary Dan and one of the Astor Center staff (I think?) getting things ready:

MD chatting a bit before the show:

Heston Blumenthal chatting before the show:

Fred Hahn and Richard Feinman were there:

Here’s the wine tasting room at the Astor Center, where the event took place:

The Drs. Eades getting ready to start the thing off:

A shot of those amazing scrambled eggs.

The salmon:

And the beef:

Some additional random notes:

The venue was “The Study at Astor Center”, a fairly amazing space, apparently set up for cooking and wine tasting demos.

Mike and Mary Dan are in person pretty much exactly the same nice charming folks that they seem to be on TV and in various videos you may have seen. To my amazement, Mary Dan somehow actually remembered a comment I had made 3 years ago in response to her blog about steak tartare at Les Halles in NYC.

I asked Heston Blumenthal if he’d ever heard the term “hot-tubbing” a steak. He told me to remind him of that question if he didn’t bring it up during his talk. He didn’t need reminding, he told a story about sous-viding an entire pig, haha.. The wine was starting to hit me by that point, all I remember was that his story involved a full sized Jacuzzi, tubes up the pigs butt, and the Martha Stewart show rejecting his video of all the above (go figure!).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.