Recently got an immersion heater and vacuum packer and I’ve been experimenting with lots of sous-vide cooking. This ‘roast’ beef (gently cooked for 24 hours then finished on a hot griddle) was great, so smooth and rare with still a lovely browned crust.
My advice: only cook the toughest of meats for much longer than that. You can safely go longer, but the tenderness gets to be too much and you cross a line into unpleasantly soft.
Yours looks perfect though! What’d you season with?
Yes, I think the 24 hours was overkill. I’d read it on a few blogs, but I imagine that was for a bigger joint of beef. And i feel like it could have been rarer too. The texture was a bit too even, I prefer a little bit more bloody in the centre.
Didn’t really much seasoning apart from salt. But we got an eighth of a cow from a local farm, so we’ve got plenty more roasting pieces in the freezer to experiment with!
It’s less for bigger pieces and more for tougher pieces. Shoulder, chuck and bottom round roast is what I usually use for long roast beef preparations. Given enough time the connective tissue breaks down into gelatin and it becomes wonderfully tender rather than mushy.
I like to cook it to rare and then sear or oven it to midum rare ish, which I like for sandwiches.
I like to grind some black pepper, salt, minced dried garlic and onion, and some mustard seeds on mine before cooking. Leaves a good flavor on the outside and you can take the juice in the bag with the spice that fell off and cook it down with some butter to make a really good savory spread.
For those roasts in your freezer, try 4-6 hours for tender cuts and 12-36 for tough ones depnding on size - you’ll get that bloody center you want with less time in the bath.