Add A Fancy Twist To Gordon Ramsay's Steak By Cooking It Sous Vide

Celebrity chefs are constantly coming up with new recipes and sharing them with the general populace since this is one way they maintain that celeb status and stay in the public eye. While these recipes are all well and good out of the box, so to speak, sometimes we here at Mashed like to unleash our recipe developers on them and see if they can come up with their own special twist.

While in many cases our developers may choose to simplify a celeb chef recipe to make it easier for home cooks who may not have access to super-specialized ingredients and equipment, other times they might choose to go the opposite direction, which is what Aušrinė Žygaitytė is doing here with one of Gordon Ramsay's steak recipes. She starts with a very basic steak recipe, one that just calls for garlic, rosemary, thyme, and butter, but instead of simply pan-searing the meat she opts to use her sous vide machine to pre-cook it. The steak must still be finished off in a frying pan, but as it's already almost done inside, Žygaitytė tells us "I strongly recommend being quick with frying the steak [so] that you wouldn't overcook it."

Sous vide steaks can be quite flavorful, but if you don't already own one of these pricey, countertop-consuming appliances, you needn't feel that you need to purchase one in order to avail yourself of this recipe. You can always try a machineless sous vide hack like using a cooler to hold your lukewarm water or simply skip the sous vide step and pan-fry the steak in the butter for a few minutes longer than it would take had you pre-cooked the meat.

As this recipe is originally one of Gordon Ramsay's, you could also take a tip from the Irascible One and employ one of his methods for the perfect pan-cooked steak. He doesn't seem to be an especially outspoken proponent of sous vide cooking, possibly due to a long-ago scandal where patrons of his restaurants felt cheated when they found out that their meals had been prepared in advance and heated up via this "boil in a bag" technique, but he does have a pretty dramatic method for elevating a simple pan-fried steak. As Ramsay demonstrates in an episode of "Masterchef," making the perfect steak involves using fire rather than water: Pour cognac into a pan, set it on fire, and cook the steak en flambé.