Sous vide braised beef cheeks

Serves: 2

main beef european

Ingredients

  • 26 g Olive oil
  • 1000 g Beef cheeks, trimmed, sinew and silver skin removed
  • 60 g Carrots, roughly chopped
  • 2 g Garlic, minced
  • 37 g Brown onion, sliced
  • 167 g Medium sherry
  • 167 g Red wine
  • 0.67 g Bay leaves
  • 0.83 g Thyme
  • 0.83 g Rosemary
  • 6.7 g Salt

Instructions

  1. Heat 13g olive oil in a cast iron pan over high heat.
  2. Add beef cheeks to pan. Leave the meat in one place in the pan until golden brown on one side only, about 1 minute. Remove from pan. Set aside.
  3. Add remaining 13g olive oil to pan and heat. Add carrots, garlic, and brown onion to pan and sauté until well browned, about 12 minutes.
  4. Add medium sherry, red wine, bay leaves, thyme, and rosemary to pan and simmer to reduce the liquid to 67 g.
  5. Vacuum seal the beef cheeks in pairs with equal amounts of the reduced sauce.
  6. Sous vide at 81°C / 178°F for 9 hours.
  7. Remove cheeks from bag. Reserve bag juices.
  8. Season the sauce with salt. Gently toss the reserved beef cheeks in the sauce to bring to serving temperature. Be careful not to overheat them.

Notes

We've made some small changes to Simon's original recipe. Very minor ones.

Following Kenji Lopez-Alt's research on Serious Eats Food Lab into effects of browning meat before braising, we develop colour on one side of the meat only.

Following Dave Arnold's tests on the effects of salting meat before long cooking times sous vide, we add our salt to the sauce at the last moment.

(Thanks to Marco for picking up an error in the salt quantity, which has now been fixed.)