I am currently cooking a steak sous vide

sous vide = \ su vi:d \  n., adj., adv. French for "under vacuum"—a method of cooking vacuumed-packed food (usually meat) in a temperature-controlled water bath to achieve nearly perfect edge-to-edge heat-through of the food.

I haven't mastered the smokeless grill, but figuring out the Instant Pot's sous-vide function wasn't too hard. The guy who cut up my meat basically had to guess at the relative weight of each slice he made, so some slices are much lighter than others. I chose the runtiest of the filets for this test; we'll see how it performs. I'll know in about 90 minutes.

One hitch: I don't have a vacuum sealer, so I'm using a Ziploc bag and what's called the displacement method to vacuum-pack my meat. The displacement method involves slowly sinking your open-bagged meat into the water bath, allowing the water pressure to close the bag up. Almost all bubbles should escape during this process, but the method isn't perfect, and all it takes is one bubble to keep your meat annoyingly afloat once you seal and release the bag. I took a metal "hot pad" (basically a trivet) and placed it over my floating bag of meat to keep the whole thing under water. I want everything to cook as evenly as possible.

The Instant Pot's design is such that the heating element is located at the bottom of the pot. In sous-vide mode, this makes the Instant Pot different from other sous-vide devices like the Joule. Regular sous-vide devices contain internal heaters; they suck the water from the water bath into one side, heat the water, then eject it out the other side. The effect is constantly circulating heated water that somewhat mimics the effect of circulating air in a convection oven, resulting in even heating. With the Instant Pot, such even heating isn't possible because the heat emanates relentlessly from the pot's bottom, so I'm not sure the result will be even cooking. If I end up disappointed in the pot's sous-vide function, I'll shell out, later on, for a real sous-vide device and use the Instant Pot for other things like pressure cooking, making stews, and so on (there's even a yogurt-making function).

Anyway, in an hour and a half, I'll pull the filet out and sear it in an oiled pan, adding butter and herbs at the very end (since I didn't have any fresh thyme to put in the Ziploc bag before the sous-vide process began). Expect photos.