Sous vide pepper steak and scallops with hollandaise sauce

So, it’s another week and another non-recipe post. This post is more like a status update of what I cooked on Saturday night.

My weight loss motivation has got a bit stagnant, so trying new things has also suffered a little.

I wanted a moderate dinner, but still something special for a Saturday night. I went with eye fillet steak again because it cooks without a lot of fuss, and if you treat it well, it will be tender and moist.

I wanted something with a little kick too so I tied up the meat and pressed in some freshly ground black whole peppercorns, iodised salt, and garlic powder. As always, I pulverise my spices and salt together in a heavy mortar with a nicely weighted pestle. 

Because the temperature of the water bath would never exceed 55 °C, there was no chance of the pepper burning, so I was happy to coat the steak in pepper before cooking.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever burnt pepper, but it has an unpleasant, acrid odour and you never want to sear a pepper-coated steak for too long.

While I was shopping, I saw there was scallop meat in the delicatessen display. The scallop meat with roe and the alimentary tract was $29 per kilogram while the scallop meat sans roe and the alimentary tract was $34 per kilogram. The roe adds a lovely coral colour to the dish, so I went with the cheaper option. For those readers who don’t know me, I never remove the alimentary canal from an invertebrate, and I wasn’t going to start. Life’s too short for that palaver.

I’ve described how to make hollandaise sauce elsewhere. It’s hard to go past a hollandaise sauce with steak and scallops. Rather than pour or spoon the sauce over the steak and scallops, I decided to serve it in a small bowl and use it as a dipping sauce. The dipping sauce approach was fantastic. As I loaded my fork with a little sweet broccolini, scallop, and steak, I dipped that meaty lollipop into the hollandaise sauce and got a good coating over everything the tines of my fork had penetrated.

The scallops were just seared in the skillet as I was caramelising the surface of the steak after it had finished cooking in the water bath (55 °C for 2 hours). The heat barely licked the scallops.

The broccolini was dead easy. After washing the broccolini in a large mixing bowl, I let the broccolini drain and then doused the green vegetables with some olive oil. I then added a squirt of golden syrup and ground over some iodised salt. With my hands, I massaged the sweet, salty, oiliness into the heads of the broccolini being gentle with the broccolini heads so as not to be too rough with the delicate end.

I then arranged the broccolini on a lined baking sheet and put them into a hot oven for 15 minutes. 

Plating up was dead easy, after allowing the steak to rest I cut off the bindings and then with a sharp knife (I used a cooking knife my middle daughter gave me as a father’s day gift last year) I sliced into the soft tender moist flesh to reveal blushing joy. There’s nothing like a nicely cooked piece of muscle meat, red, moist but not running with its juices.

Sous vide pepper steak

I put the steak onto a dinner plate which I had warmed on top of the water bath and then arranged the scallops. I poured the freshly made hollandaise sauce into a small bowl and put it onto the plate. The last thing to be added was the oven-cooked broccolini. The heads looked limp rather than the tumescence they once had, but I knew those flowery heads would taste sweet and salty, and when coated with the creaminess of the hollandaise, the taste would be unique and so delicious. 

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