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Cooking With Fire: Testing the Sansaire Searing Kit for Sous Vide

Sous vide machines can make tasty fare but the technique often leaves meat gray and unappetizing. WIRED's Adam Rogers fires up the $159 Sansaire Sear home blowtorch to add a little sizzle to a steak.

Released on 10/27/2015

Transcript

(calm techno music)

You've probably heard of sous-vide.

That's the technique for cooking

where you seal the food inside a plastic bag,

then put it in low temperature of water

so that it cooks more evenly.

You can hack one of those systems together at home

or you can by this Oliso set-up.

It's about 500 bucks.

It looks like something you'd find

on the international space station

if NASA had the money to send cooking equipment into space.

You get a device that pulls the air

out of plastic bags and then this induction burner

and this beautiful tank.

But sous-vide has one little problem.

So, we did this steak, I think this is gonna be beautiful

to eat, but it looks not great.

And it looks not great because it doesn't look charred.

I didn't put this on a fire

so you don't get that beautiful Maillard reaction,

you don't get the grill marks, you don't get the burn.

Which is a bummer, but I can fix that problem with fire.

This is the $160 Sansaire Sear

and it is basically a home flame thrower.

(torch)

You've guys got a fire extinguisher right?

I love this part.

(torch)

I don't see how this could go wrong.

(heavy torch and funk music)

(sizzle)

Alright. What do we think here?

Now we'll see.

So that's beautiful.

Way more consistent than I would have got it on the grill.

Learn to use a fork.

(chewing)

It's good.

(chewing)

It's definitely a different consistency

than like if you just put it right on the grill.

It's definitely more kind of the same throughout

and you wouldn't get that effect

except from the sous-vide.

But having it on the top,

that makes a huge difference just in terms of

like how appetizing that is at the top.

It's really a good looking steak.

Well there you have it.

Cooking with fire is cooking with science.

Plus I suppose if it was underdone,

you could always just go in again.

(torch)

Starring: Adam Rogers