stompah wrote:Oh the one from Mad Scientist?
My "mystery meat" is a vacio, an Argentinian cut that is typically cooked over open flame. The YouTube channel Mad Scientist BBQ special-ordered one of these recently from Porter Road, an online meat retailer, and he cooked it like a brisket:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Crrnql_lpwwAnd as part of that, Porter Road is selling them, at least temporarily:
https://porterroad.com/collections/mad- ... ucts/vacio.
So I said "what the hell" and ordered one a few weeks ago. This is a 15.6-pound roast that includes some inside skirt steak, flank steak, and bavette steak. In the YouTube video it came out incredibly juicy, so I figured that mine would come out kinda shitty, in usual fashion.
But heck no, it was VERY tender, and VERY juicy.
I cooked it in the Recteq at 250F. Because the cut is kind of uneven in shape, the meat temp varied all over the place; the thin outer areas were 20-30 degrees higher than the thick center. Here it is at roughly 160, right before I wrapped it in butcher paper with a little tallow added:
I cooked it wrapped until the internal temp was about 200 everywhere, which meant that it was well above 200 in some areas. The whole thing felt tender when I picked it up. I then vacuum-sealed the whole thing (butcher paper wrap and all):
That was Friday at 4:30 p.m. It then went into the sous vide at 145F until Saturday at 6:30 p.m., so about 26 hours:
The final product, unwrapped:
SO tender, SO juicy. Impressive. As you can see, there's plenty of fat in there, and some fairly thick membranes too that separate the individual steaks.
This was fun. This was educational. This was tasty. I'm glad I did it.
Would I do it again, at $16/lb after shipping? No, I think I'll practice on brisket at $4/lb.