Tri-Tip, For Science!

[madbaker]

This week's Resolution Recipe: Sous Vide Smoked Tri Tip.

1 lb tri-tip steak
2 oz salt
2 oz pepper
1/4 oz curing salt #1

Set sous vide cooker to 131°. Rub tri-tip with salt, pepper, and curing salt. Seal steak in bag and cook for 6 hours. After 6 hours, prepare an ice bath and submerge the sealed steak for 15 minutes. This will lower the internal temperature to ensure the smoking does not overcook it.

Remove tri-tip from ice bath and bag, and dry off. Add additional seasoning if required. (!!!!) Hot-smoke tri-tip for 1 hour between 225-275°. Remove, cover with foil, and rest for 15 minutes before slicing and serving.

What worked: This did in fact produce a nicely medium-rare, tender tri-tip with smoked flavor (which we like). The curing salt kept (most) of the interior nicely pink; there was a small grey section in the thickest part where it didn't penetrate but that's not really the recipe's fault.

I could probably have used our cold-smoker instead and not worried about the ice bath and overcooking, but we have a hot-smoker that I haven't used recently. So I did that. Cold-smoking tends to infuse more smoke flavor though. (Alternatively, I suppose I could have used our Smoking Gun for much less time - although that toy isn't actually very effective, and it only imparts some smoke to the surface so it probably wouldn't have been as flavorful.)

What didn't: That spicing is way, waaaay off. I used maybe 1/3 the pepper and much less regular salt, and it was still too salty and peppery by a considerable amount - the outside was deeply coated. So no, I did not add any additional seasoning.

Will I make it again? Maybe, but if I do I will research better spice levels first.

Comments

[tshuma]

Huh. We tend to smoke the tritip first, then vacuum seal and freeze until we want it, then bring it up with the sous vide. But we're usually doing 10's or 20's of lbs of meat at a time.