I’ve encountered the exact same problem but with Strip Loin Steaks. Cooked @129F for 60 minutes along with a rib eye steak, the rib eye comes out perfectly pink edge to edge, but the Strip loin comes out well done through and through. Steaks are equal thickness. Tenderness, flavor, juiciness and texture of Strip Loin underwhelming, just like a well done steak should be. 
@SonjaR cooking at 129F your strip steaks should never come out “well done”. The only way it should become well done after cooking sous vide at 129F would be doing a sear on it that increased the temp to a well done temp. Was the strip loin a thin cut that might have allowed this to occur?
Check to insure that your vacuum is actually sealed and the bag under vacuum.
Prepare the steak for ous vide, refrigerate until two hours from serving time. Before cooking, allow steak to come to room temp for two hours. Allow vat to come to temp. Drop the sous vide steak in the vat and cook to time and temp scale.
It will look like this:
Bliss, what is the actual cut of beef? That looks to be more of a high moisture, high fat, roast. It will have a bit of a difference in texture and color than a chop or steak cut.
I’m sorry, but the idea of leaving steak out of fridge for 2 hours before cooking is simply not good food safety. The 4 hours in the danger zone is a cumulative time. 2 hours on the bench before putting it in to the bath to cook is NOT recommended.
Have to agree with that. Even if bacterial growth weren’t a risk, I don’t see the point of having the food on the bench for two hours before starting to cook it. Whether the meat is at 4 ºC or 20 ºC before getting dropped into the bath makes little to no difference, in the grand scheme of things.
For what purpose?
There is no practical purpose to leave your cut of meaty setting on the counter to come up to room temp. Your circulator will still need to work a little extra to compensate from going to room temperature to the desired cook temperature, but the extra work to go from refrigerator temperature to room temperature is almost negligible. I don’t even adjust my cook time when i have a steak in the fridge, because it’s completely unnecessary. Best case scenario: you save a fraction of a cent in electricity. Worst case scenario: you have allowed any bacteria that may be on the surface of the meat to stay gaining a foothold which could lead to a food borne illness/food borne intoxication.
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verify the temp
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verify your water flow is all around the steak and make sure part of the steak is NOT resting up against the APC.
I like this rack:
https://smile.amazon.com/EVERIE-Sous-Vide-Divider-Heating/dp/B0772VTP5Z/ref=sr_1_2_sspa?s=kitchen&ie=UTF8&qid=1526255409&sr=1-2-spons&keywords=sous+vide+rack&psc=1 -
In general I cook thicker steaks, I buy 1.25-1.5" thick (3.2-3.7 cm). If you read Serious eats, I think they recommend thicker steaks than you’re cooking for best results. Befriend your butcher…
Not that you asked…
My preference is med rare: 132.5 is my sweet spot for thick (as above) NY strips, ribeyes, shell steaks (AKA Kansas city strip or bone=in NY strip). I do about 90 mins, dry it, spray with canola cooking spray, coat both sides with Montreal seasoning, then grill on a hot grill 2 mins each side. (If I’m feeling particularly decadent, I’ll top it with garlic butter). Post sear on the grill, they still have edge to edge pink (med rare) except for the crust.
Oh, and one last thing, whenever possible, try to cook steaks that have never been frozen. I think they come out a little less pink and less moist/unctuous due to intracellular fluid loss from freeze/thaw. (Beef primarily, pork and chicken are way more forgiving of freezing.
@gastrognome, just curious - I notice that you said you sear for 2 minutes on each side. I just wondered if you ice bath your steaks before you sear them to keep them from overcooking.
We overcooked some steaks when searing last Christmas when my brother seared steaks straight out of the bath (dried then seasoned of course!) for a couple minutes each side. They were still good, but not the medium rare clear through that we desired.
The original post by Bliss.
“They have all come out medium well - well done.”
Bliss has a problem that indicates a variance somewhere in the formula. Temperatures and times indicate results A but Bliss is repeatedly finding results B.
Is the vat too hot? Using an external thermometer to verify water temperature, as Bliss has, indicates “No”.
A cold spot in the refer, chiller, nitrogen dewar, cooler, snow bank (what ever refrigeration device) may play a factor. The starting temperature of the steak is an unknown element.
I am attempting to achieve a solution to the consistent undesirable results.
And a completely irrelevant one. The final temperature for all parts of the steak will be the same (that of the bath water), regardless of what temperature they started out at. If you drop a room temperature steak into a 130°F bath for 3 hours it will come out medium-rare. If you do the same with a frozen steak it will come out medium-rare. The same is true for any starting temperature in between.
So guys, I’ve been making steaks everyday since my last post and they have all turned out brown / close to well done. Today’s steak surprised me. I had almost finished my steak and then it started seeing medium rare, it was so much softer and juicer. It was really amazing. 130F for 2 hours and somehow the steak is cooked unevenly, and even well done just baffles me.
Well, that’s certainly an improvement. But you’ve still got quite a temperature gradient going there. Previously you said:
The brownish band near the surface on both sides suggest that you’re pan-searing for significantly longer than 10 seconds per side. I sear for 30-45 seconds per side in a 500ºF cast iron skillet and don’t get anywhere near that much over-done meat under the surface:
Todays steak at 126F for 90 minutes. My steaks are now resting on a rack so water circulation is 100%. And even if it wasn’t there is no reason for it to be well done at 126F. I think I will try to get a new unit, this is just odd.
I still don’t get it. If your unit has a defective temperature sensor and runs too hot, you should see the entire steak being overcooked, not just one end of it.
I can’t work out what might cause the uneven cooking, unless your impeller isn’t working. Have you checked that water is actually being pumped around?
Yep. I have, I can also see the water being pushed out so it’s quite powerful
I’m with @michihenning on this one - and I don’t see how a new unit would help as from your descriptions the one you have is doing what it should. It’s heating the water to a given temp (as you’ve verified with a separate thermometer) and it’s circulating the water. There’s simply nothing else that it, or any immersion sous vide device, does.
If it were simply a case of the whole steak always being overcooked then I’d say that maybe the temperature spiked some time in the cook - which would explain why you could check the temp at the start of the cook but still have an overcooked end result. This would not explain a steak cooked well on one side but medium rare on the other. There’s just no way I can see how that happens.
I’m stumped.
This was yesterdays steak at 126F - Imgur: The magic of the Internet
This is todays steak at 124F - Imgur: The magic of the Internet
Although pink throughout I could still see that it was unevenly cooked, also 124F seems to be a very low temperature but I thought I’d give it a try.