“It’s the best way to cook steak (or chicken, or fish). It tastes better than you can possibly imagine.”

“You can’t overcook the food. It always comes out perfect.”

“Once you try it, you can never go back.”

These promises of culinary nirvana drove me to invest in a make-shift laboratory setup to try to reproduce the cooking technique of “sous vide” (French for “under vacuum”). The concept is simple. The biggest challenge with cooking many types of foods, particularly meats, is to ensure that the food is cooked evenly and to the proper temperature. With a good meat thermometer and plenty of practice, you can do pretty well, but the idea of sous vide is to eliminate any potential barriers to perfect. The concept is simple: vacuum seal the piece of meat in food-grade, heat-tolerate plastic, then place it in a water bath at the target temperature. As long as you leave it there for long enough, the meat will equilibrate to the temperature of the water bath. You can have a medium-rare steak that’s perfectly cooked throughout. Chicken won’t dry out because it’s cooked in a sealed package.

This vision drove me to purchase the SousVide Magic, a PID controller: basically a box that can be connected to a thermometer and power a heater. Using some fancy calculations, it figures out how to turn the heater on and off at the appropriate frequency based on the measured temperature of your water bath and the desired temperature. I paired this with the FreshMeals Magic immersion heater and a tub with 10L of water. Yesterday morning, before heading to work, I vacuum sealed a tenderloin (filet mignon) and a top loin steak and dropped them in the water bath, set to 130 degrees.

About 12 hours later, I was ready to enjoy culinary perfection. Since sous vide can’t provide the nicely browned exterior on its own, the steaks need to be seared prior to eating. No problem. They looked great. I sat down and dug in to a extremely tender tenderloin that…had a mushy consistency reminiscent of tuna fish. I forced myself to eat the entire thing, but it unquestionably a step down from the traditional grill experience. It was only later I discovered that, while prolonged cooking is great for tenderizing normally tough cuts of beef, it can ruin the tender cuts I was trying to eat.

I’m still hoping that there’s something to this technique.