Sous Vide: Getting Started Class

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Digital instant-read thermometer

Large pot(s)

Baking/Cooling rack(s)

1-gallon Ziplock-style freezer bag(s)

Joule® Turbo Sous Vide

Simple Sous Vide Steak With Red Wine Sauce

Creamy Smashed Potatoes

NOTE: While steak is in the water, you can move on to Step 2 and begin preparing potatoes, which take about 30 minutes total. Cover finished potatoes to keep them warm as you finish the steak.

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Want to pull off a perfect dinner party? Try this easy recipe for elegant Sous Vide Steak with Red Wine Sauce.

Make Simple Sous Vide Steak with Red Wine Sauce

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Make Smashed Potatoes

Transfer serving plates to a warm oven. 

When plates are warm, add a portion of potatoes to each. Add servings of steak and spoon a generous amount of sauce over them. 

Serve immediately.

Assemble

Steak and potatoes. If the world could have improved on this classic culinary combination, it would have done so by now. Whether it’s steak frites at a neighborhood Parisian bistro or a hulking hunk of beef and a giant twice-baked at some swanky spot for Chicago fat cats, this is a combination that signals comfort, extravagance, and pure, indulgent joy. This version of the dish takes a steak—gently cooked and seared crispy brown, then doused in a rich red wine sauce—and partners it with an easygoing, <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/smashed-potatoes">skin-on version of mashed potatoes</a>. Simple, straightforward, spectacular—exactly how steak and potatoes should be.

Sous Vide Steak With Red Wine Sauce and Smashed Potatoes

Making a steak is easy. Making a great steak? Well that’s another matter. As any chef or grillmaster will tell you, it’s all about controlling the heat in order to reach that sweet spot where the meat is tender, juicy, and full of flavor, neither under- nor overcooked.Of course, every beef eater has a strong opinion about where, exactly, that sweet spot lies. Hardcore carnivores will tell you beef should be bright red and bloody, while more cautious types insist on a conservative medium-well. Whatever your preference, cooking steak sous vide allows you to precisely control how your meat is heated, with very little effort. The upshot: great steak is no longer the exclusive domain of professionals and obsessives.Here, we walk you through the steps to cooking a steak using an improvised sous vide setup involving nothing more than a digital thermometer, some plastic bags, and a pot on the stove. (Of course, if you’ve already invested in a <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/joule">Joule Turbo</a>, you can use that instead.) We begin by quickly searing the meat, then cooking it in water heated to [c 57], which yields the sort of pink-but-not-too-pink, medium-rare steak that tends to please a crowd. We then give the beef the French bistro treatment, finishing it in a rich red wine sauce flavored with thyme and fattened up with plenty of butter. The result: a restaurant-level meat treatment that’s simple to create and impossible to stop eating—no fancy equipment required.

Smashed potatoes are delicious and easy to make and hard to mess up: boil some spuds, mash ’em with a fork, and mix in some dairy and fat and you’ve got an excellent side dish for almost any meal. Great smashed potatoes, however, are just as easy to make, and all they require is some attention to detail. First, pick the right kind of potatoes; second, cook them with a little precision; third, incorporate some good butter and cream; finally, glam them up a bit with some finely sliced chives. The result is an everyday staple, all glowed up. We use fingerling potatoes because they taste great and have a creamy cooked texture, but they aren’t too starchy. Since their skins are relatively thin, you don’t even have to peel them; just give them a good scrub, simmer them until they’re fork tender. Once drained, all you have to do is mash them roughly with a fork, mash in the butter and cream, then fold in the sliced chives.