Steak with Red Wine Sauce

Making a steak is easy. Making a great steak? Well, that's another matter. As any chef or grill master will tell you, it's all about controlling the heat in order to reach that sweet spot where the meat is tender, juicy, and full of flavor, neither under- nor overcooked. 

Of course, every beef eater has a strong opinion about where, exactly, that sweet spot lies. Hardcore carnivores will tell you beef should be bright red and bloody, while more cautious types insist on a conservative medium-well. Whatever your preference, cooking steak sous vide allows you to precisely control how your meat is heated, with very little effort. The upshot: great steak is no longer the exclusive domain of professionals and obsessives.

Here, we walk you through the steps to cooking a steak using an improvised sous vide setup involving nothing more than a digital thermometer, some plastic bags, and a pot on the stove. (Of course, if you've already invested in a circulator or Sous Vide Supreme bath, you can use that instead.) We begin by quickly searing the meat, then cook it in a water bath set to 135 °F / 57 °C, which yields the sort of pink-but-not-too-pink, medium-rare steak that tends to please a crowd. 

We then give the beef the French bistro treatment, finishing it in a rich red wine sauce flavored with thyme and fattened up with plenty of butter. The result: a restaurant-level meat treatment that's simple to create and impossible to stop eating, no fancy equipment required.