Cook a Perfect Medium-Rare Steak in a Beer Cooler

We've shown you how to get started with sous-vide cooking before, and even how to do it on the cheap, but this video and guide from The Food Lab's J Kenji Lopez-Alt shows you how to get a perfect medium rare steak by cooking it in a beer cooler and then finishing it on the stove—and why you'd want to.

The "steak in a beer cooler" technique isn't new in itself, Kenji explained how to do it at Serious Eats back in 2010, and our primer to sous vide cooking followed their example pretty closely. Still, it can be tricky to get right, and Kenji walks you through the process in the video above in great fashion. If you have the money or the desire to pick up a real water oven like the $300+ Sous Vide Supreme, it can take some of the guesswork out of this for you, and it'll maintain your water temperature without you having to check on it or adjust it, but the beautiful thing about using a beer cooler is that it's insulated enough to hold your water temperature for a few hours without you doing anything to it.

As long as you get the water to the right temp first—by adding either boiling (to bring it up) or cold (to bring it down) water to a large volume of it—you can cook a few steaks with no problem, and hold them at the perfect temperature for hours before serving. Once your steak is up to temp, you can sear it in a hot skillet for a couple of seconds to get that delicious crust on the outside—just don't sear it too long or you risk overcooking the interior. When you're all finished, you'll have a steak with a great crust on the outside and that's perfectly medium rare from edge to edge, without that ugly strip of well-done ringed around a tasty center. Hit the link below for Kenji's full guide.

How to Cook Your Steak Sous Vide in a Cooler | Serious Eats

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