I’m looking to cook 7-9lbs of steak. Each steak is a rib eye about an inch thick. I plan on using a cooler to hold the water. So my question is how much time is required for this quantity? Thanks.
The quantity of steaks you plan to cook should not affect your cook time. If placing multiple steaks in one bag, just be sure to lay them side-by-side, rather than stacking them. Stacking them will increase your cook time. For ribeye about an inch thick, I typically go for around 1 hour.
1 Like
As Alyssa says, don’t stack them, but rather lay them side by side. If you keep this in mind then there is no difference between doing 1 steak and doing many.
An hour will be enough time for the middle of the steaks to reach the temperature of your water bath. You can leave them in for up to 2 -3 hours without any worry about overcooking if it isn’t convenient for your to finish them off after an hour.
Because the steaks are only an inch thick, you’re going to have to be careful with your finishing process. Whether you choose to finish on a grill or in a pan or some other way, it might be an idea to give those steaks a dunk in an ice bath to cool them down and give you a bit of a barrier against over cooking when you use your preferred finishing method. Remember the steaks will already be cooked to perfection, so any finishing you do is concentrating on the surface for presentation and flavour. Hot and quick is the rule.
Thanks for the help. I’m still confused as to why the number of steaks doesn’t matter. In my mind, the more steaks, the more mass that needs to be heated.
I plan on finishing them on the gas grill. I’ll be sure to cool them off before ‘searing’ them.
You have to remember that your steaks are surrounded by the cooking medium, warm water. Sure there’s a barrier of plastic, but that’s negligible. Water is an efficient way to transfer heat, unlike air in an oven. And unlike cooking in a pan over a flame you’re getting heat from all sides, not just one.
Rely on the efficiency of the Anova circulator. As long as there is room for water to flow around your packaged steaks it doesn’t matter if it’s 1 or 20 pieces.
It is thickness not weight that matters when calculating the time needed to cook something, at least to bring the product up to temperature equilibrium. Though, honestly, even with traditional methods it’s the thickness of an item that has an impact on how long it will take to get heat into the centre of it. We are simply used to references to weight and volume because that’s the way we’re used to seeing amounts quoted in recipes.
The number of steaks doesn’t matter because the temperature change when your food is added into the water bath is taken into account by the anova’s preheat function where it senses the temperature of the overall system. If you keep the meat as a single layer, the penetration time will be the same regardless.
Some days i think it would be useful for the good Anova people to make the Yoda Master available to the community here just to impress members of the significant importance of breaking with old ways and old thinking before adopting this new technique. Every new post wants to deal with food weight.
As Ember points out, the superior efficiency of water’s heat transfer capability and the large mass of water available to your food are the effective factors in SV cooking.
Just as in Christmas, believing in it helps a lot to make it more enjoyable.
Make it a great one.
In terms of your question about why the number of steaks doesn’t change the time, think of it like baking potatoes in the oven. Whether you bake one or ten takes the same time. But if you have a huge potato it will take longer than a small one.
As others have said, be sure to package your steaks so they are only one layer in the bag.
1 Like