How to cook chuck steak (sous vide)

You know , spending a lot of time in places like tiktok and youtube and Instagram .

You see a lot of people work with Wau and Kobe beef a lot .

And if that stuff is available to you , to the point where you can make like a wau steak to Hulu , get at work more power to you .

The fact of the matter is most of us don't have access to hundreds of dollars to throw at one steak .

And I don't see a lot of people talk about how it is possible to , in my opinion , make a cheaper cut of beef just as enjoyable as a steak that will set you back a couple $100 .

Some might call me crazy .

But my preferred cut of choice is the humble chuck roast , which around here is $5 a pound at Costco and $6 a pound just about everywhere else .

That is enough steak to feed easily a family of four or five no sides , just steak .

In this video .

I'm gonna cook it using a method known as sous vide .

A method that oftentimes does come with a little bit of investment on equipment and I'll give you a better cost rundown of how much of that investment would be in a later part of this video .

But for now , I'm just going to talk about why I love preparing chuck steak .

Now I have a bias towards more simple and less pretentious ingredients .

I'm more interested in making something that is cheap and accessible .

Tastes like a million bucks rather than work with an ingredient that is already a million bucks .

You can see me seasoning these steaks with just some salt and some pepper doing the clean hand thing , making sure that one hand that touches all my seasonings is not the hen that touches the steaks .

And when it comes to steak , especially more expensive cuts of steak , you'll have those people that say salt and pepper is all you need the purists and there is nothing wrong with that .

If salt and pepper is all you need good for you , but sometimes salt and pepper is not all I want .

And the beauty of chuck steak is that it is very beefy in flavor , flavorful enough that it can withstand most types of seasoning without losing any of that beefy goodness .

So I'm not just hitting this with salt and pepper .

I'm gonna hit one of the lobes with Thai red curry and then hit the other one with some smoky honey habanero .

Oh , that's nice because when you take the price and by extension , a lot of the pretense away from steaks you find that you can have a lot of fun with flavoring them .

Otherwise , the downfall of chuck is that even though it is a very flavorful cut of beef , it is very tough compared to some of the steak cuts to counteract that we're going to use time as our tenderizer .

First .

I'm gonna vacuum seal these cuts of beef .

My sealer , you don't need to get a chamber vacuum sealer .

You don't even need to get a regular vacuum sealer .

You can just toss these steaks into a gallon sized freezer , saved Ziploc bag and then carefully submerge that bag with the opening facing outwards into a filled sink full of water .

The water will force out all the air from the bag out of the opening and then you can seal the opening and that is known as the water displacement method .

There are also some companies such as willing that sell handheld automatic vacuum pumps along with dishwasher safe sous vide bags for under 100 bucks .

That being said freezer bag is still your cheapest bed .

Great part about using a vacuum sealer though is that you could seal up any of the excess and then put it in the freezer for later .

And one of my favorite parts of sous vide is that you can cook meat straight from frozen .

You don't have to take any time thawing it .

You can just put it straight into the water .

My preferred time and temperature for Chuck steak is 131 degrees for 24 hours when you , so any steak , you are gonna have some moisture come out of the bag .

The important thing is before you sear it .

You have to make sure that you pat dry every part of your steak .

All steaks coming out of the Soviet bag after they've been cooked .

Look a little mad , but you can see it's very , very tender .

Now , what would happen if you didn't pat dry your steak ?

Well , that moisture would form a barrier against the heat of the pan .

So the water on the steak will have to cook first , which only gets so hot , which means that you actually end up steaming the surface of your steak instead of searing it .

If you like your steaks medium well or well done , this is not as much of an issue , but the whole point is the entire steak is already cooked .

So , what we want to do is just char it at this point and making sure to do it as quickly as possible .

Pan frying a steak on a stainless steel pan is not as scary as it looks .

Just add a tiny , little bit of oil to a hot pan .

And once it has , has little shimmery effect , a little bit of wisps of white smoke , you can just set your steak right on the pan .

It 60 seconds on either side .

Remember the steak is already fully cooked .

So we're not trying to cook it all the way through .

We're just trying to get a sear .

Now , the beauty of a stainless steel pan actually comes from the fact that it is kind of grippy because when you cook a steak on a stainless steel pan , it will actually let go .

When it's done , you'll notice that once the chuck gets really tender parts of it starts to come apart and get a little floppy .

Don't worry about that .

After you've done the first flip , you can also butter based your steak .

Something that I'm not choosing to do today because Chuck steak for us is like a couple of times a month thing and I am watching my excess calories .

Normally , I wouldn't even use oil in the pan to sear it .

I would just put it straight in and take it off once it's ready .

I just use oil for the demonstration today .

Now , a chuck roast is made up of a few smaller lobes of beef .

That's why when you cook them low and slow for a long time , the connective tissue that keeps them together tends to break down .

So they get a little floppy .

That also makes finding the grain of all the lobes to cut against a little bit of a challenge .

But once you get used to it , it's not that big of a deal .

Also , the steak is so tender that not cutting exactly against the grain is not going to be that big of an issue .

It's always going to be delicious and it's super forgiving at this point .

And now when presenting a cooked chuck steak , the best way to do so , in my opinion , is to do it pre sliced this way , it makes sharing with people a whole lot easier .

Plus you can put the extras away in the fridge right away .

This is a lot of beef that you're dealing with .

So generally there's oftentimes a lot left over .

Now for a chuck roast , the sous vide temperature range depending on how well you like it is between 131 148 degrees .

And then the time to cook range ranges between 18 to 48 hours .

I like 24 hours because it still has a bit of that beefy steak .

Y bite to it .

By that time , I don't want it to be too tender .

I'm going to give the steak a little hit of flake salt over here .

And I saw in the comments in another video that I did that people were calling flaky salt a fad that they were getting sick of which to me is like kind of calling a screwdriver a fad .

It's just a tool to make your experience all around better .

In this case , it's adding a salty crunchy element to a delicious tender steak .

Now , if you don't have a sous vide set up , there is a technique called the reverse sear that you can do this kind of like using a meat thermometer and a really accurate oven .

If you would like to see that , let me know I'd be more than happy to show it to you .