Refreshing Summer Meal

Work has been crazy the past week hence the lack of posts on my part, but I finally get to post about a meal I made a week ago. I have been complaining about the difficulty of excessive heat from the kitchen combined with no ac making my apartment incredibly hot. This meal is a perfect cool, summer meal.

In the middle of the afternoon I cooked a steak on my grill pan - perfectly rare. I then let it rest and put it in my fridge and left my apartment (I had errands to do, and the place needed to cool off). When I was ready for dinner, I simply had to put together a little salad, a balsamic vinaigrette and slice the steak and was good to go.

So refreshing, so tasty.

Perfection

I think I can prepare a pretty mean steak. I've scoured the internet for a variety of methods to create the best steak indoors, as well as on the grill. I have heated my cast iron pan to scorching temperatures to get the perfect sear resulting in my smoke detectors beeping loudly.

One of the things that I have always had trouble with is getting that perfect medium rare doneness in the middle. Sometimes I reach near perfection, other times I cook it a minute too long. I think the natural progression of my cooking leads to sous vide - cooking in vacuum sealed bag in a perfectly controlled water bath. This would allow my steaks to rich that perfect medium rareness I so desire. The drawback, the cheapest sous vide machine is $450, putting out of my budgetary reach. As a result, one day soon, I am going to have to test the poor man's method of using a beer cooler and heated water. I look forward to posting about it.

In the meantime:

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/03/sous-vide-steaks-recipe.html

http://internetfoodassociation.com/2010/05/16/sous-vide/