Sous Vide Rare Beef Jus

One day in a meet­ing, Nathan Myhrvold came up with an idea for a beef jus cooked rare. By cook­ing the meat sous vide at a low tem­per­a­ture, he rea­soned, one ought to be able to cre­ate a jus that is just as tasty as tra­di­tional brown beef jus, but much brighter and more appe­tiz­ing in color.

Figuring out the tem­per­a­ture to cook the meat was easy enough: we knew that tough beef comes out nice and rare when cooked to 53 °C / 127 °F. But it took a bit of exper­i­ment­ing to work out the best way to pre­pare the meat for the water bath. We tried grind­ing it, puree­ing it, and cut­ting it to var­i­ous size, but we found that when we cut the beef very finely, too much myosin came out, and the meat actu­ally con­gealed into a sausage-like tex­ture, at which point it became next to impos­si­ble to extract any juice. On the other hand, when we left the meat in large cubes, we couldn’t extract much of the jus from the cen­ter of the cubes. The opti­mal size seems to be cubes about 1 cm on a side.

–Grant Crilly, Culinary Research Assistant, The Cooking Lab

We cook the meat sous vide because this method yields a bright, rare jus, which is deli­cious. But it occurred to us that we could apply another Modernist method–centrifuging–to refine the recipe even fur­ther. We found it works well to trans­fer the meat and extracted jus from the sous vide bag into cen­trifuge vials after the cook­ing is com­plete. (Divide the weight evenly into at least two vials, so that the rotor is bal­anced.) Spinning the mix­ture in the cen­trifuge for about 1 h at 27,500g enables the fat to con­geal, as shown in the video below. If you don’t hap­pen to have a cen­trifuge in your kitchen, a grape press, fine sieve, or even a strong kitchen towel works well, too. Press the meat and jus and shake the sieve for opti­mal results. While this won’t yield quite as much jus as using a cen­trifuge, you should be able to press out most of the jus. Even after you cen­trifuge, you will still want to strain away any bits of meat and fat.

 

Tips:

  • The jus will keep in the refrig­er­a­tor for a day, and in the freezer for about a month if you vac­uum seal it before freezing.
  • To reheat chilled or frozen jus, make sure it has thawed com­pletely, and then reheat it in a water bath. But take care sure to keep it below 53 °C / 127 °F, or it will no longer be rare!
  • Trim all fat from the meat before cut­ting it into cubes. Fat just takes up space in the bag, and you’ll have to strain it out later anyway.
  • Allow the jus to “bloom” before strain­ing, siev­ing, or centrifuging.
  • If you don’t have a cen­trifuge, we rec­om­mend using a wine press, fine sieve, or even strong kitchen tow­els to sep­a­rate the meat and fat from the jus.
  • Spread the cubes of beef in a sin­gle layer inside the bag before you seal it. If the cubes clump together, the heat won’t pen­e­trate the inner­most cubes.
  • Save any left­over suet, and use it for cook­ing or even as a spread on toast.
  • You can use the left­over meat cubes to make a stock like pho, which is rein­forced with spices other spices or fla­vor­ings. Other stocks that rely solely on the beef for fla­vor may not work as well, as you have already extracted as much fla­vor as possible.
  • We used the eye of an aged rib eye steak (also called Spencer steak), which yields an excel­lent fla­vor and lots of liq­uid. For a less expen­sive jus, buy a cheap rib eye and age it yourself!
  • Because the jus is so potent, dilute it with water at a ratio of about 3:1, depend­ing on your preference.
  • When dilut­ing the jus, avoid using faucet water or other water with addi­tives, which can change the color.

In vol­ume 5 of Modernist Cuisine, where this recipe appears, we sug­gest serv­ing the jus as a sim­ple accom­pa­ni­ment to steak. But there are many uses for this ver­sa­tile liquor.

 

Use it as the base of a rare beef stew, for exam­ple. It goes well with pota­toes and other veg­eta­bles cooked sous vide, plus a bit of rare-cooked beef. Be care­ful what you add, how­ever, so as not to over­power the jus itself.

Here is another pos­si­ble use: our Modernist take on the clas­sic mix of steak tartare with oys­ters. Whether you leave the raw oys­ter in the shell or serve it  swim­ming in a pool of jus in an appe­tizer spoon, these oys­ter shoot­ers are delicious!

 

Equipment You’ll Need: