Hard disagree on convenience: Timing hot steaks with hot sides is virtually effortless with a circulator

I fail to see how a circulator is more convenient or effortless. For starters you need to prep a bag and a pot of water if you're using a circulator. On the other hand with reverse sear all you need to do is stick a thermometer in, throw it on a pan/rack and put it in an oven. After you're done with the circulator you have to wrangle with a wet bag full of beef liquid and dry off the steak (otherwise your sear will be impaired). With reverse sear you can take it directly from the oven to the pan. During the sear stage, the timing you need is minimal for both. You only need to get the pan as hot as you can get it, and sear both sides until it's charred to your liking.

I don't really understand how you can "fail" to see the convenience. The convenience comes from the ease of getting it right. I consistently over-cooked steaks with the reverse sear method. Maybe half the time. With sous vide, I never---literally never---overcook a steak.

That's the convenience. I don't have to worry about the temperature. I drop it in the bath and I take it out at my convenience.

I'm interested in what tended to go wrong for you with the reverse sear. One tricky thing is that the temperature increases nonlinearly, so if you take a couple readings and get a mental trajectory of when it's going to hit 115, you're likely to be wrong. The flip side though is that cooking at 250 (or, sheesh, 200, as they're doing across the thread) gives you a _real big bulls-eye_ to hit.

Nobody's gonna say that a circulator steak is bad. It's the second-best way to cook a steak. :)

>so if you take a couple readings and get a mental trajectory of when it's going to hit 115, you're likely to be wrong

I just keep a thermometer in for the entire duration of the bake time. Someone in this thread posted a screenshot of them doing the same thing with some sort of bluetooth thermometer.

It's been years since I tried it. So I don't remember precisely. I'm not a good cook. :-) It was just very easy for me to overshoot it.

If you buy whole or fractional cow, the butcher will typically hand you boxes of separately vac-sealed cuts. At that point, it's really hard to beat the convenience of "grab one, throw it in the circulator". You don't even need to defrost it.

For me, the convenience is that you can prep the bag and pot long before doing anything else. It’s not necessarily less work, just better distributed IMO

Not really. You have the same problem either way, because you've gotta sear both steaks. If you're going to need to hold the cooked reverse-sear steaks, bring them up to 120-124 (your final target temp is 128-132) instead of 115.

I get what you're saying (I've got like 4 different circulators here, I'm not against them!) but the reverse sear is forgiving and flexible enough that I don't really even get a convenience win from it.

(For calibration: my modal steak is a Whole Foods ribeye or strip, unmodified except for being salted ahead of time).

For me the convenience factor has to do with the fact that I can vacuum seal and freeze a bunch of meat at once, then it's just a matter of tossing the vacuum sealed bag in the circulator a few hours before dinner. Then I just need to pull it out, hit it with the torch, and we're ready to eat. I suspect the longer cooking time to account for the meant being frozen helps with fat rendering.

We buy half a beef every six months or so (split with my parents, so I guess it's technically 5/7th's of a half? 5/14th's of a cow?). For a few hours on a weekend doing some prep/portioning, I can dramatically reduce the workload for several week's worth of meals.

Obviously there's other tradeoffs involved and different personal circumstances to consider, but for me the circulator wins out from a convenience perspective.

Likewise, I’m 100% not against a pure reverse sear. I just prefer to focus on getting the sides prepped and done, knowing that whenever they’re ready, the meat’s only a few minutes out.