I'd offer you a picture of today's lunch, but...

In my rush to gather up my food and tote it to the office, I forgot to bring my cell phone with me (I might rush back to my place to get it), so I was unable to take a photo of today's meal, in which I basically fed my boss and coworkers the leftovers from my Saturday dinner. Steak and shrimp were fresh-cooked (tail-on this time); everything else was reheated, and the vegetable, this time around, was peas, done up with butter, salt, and pepper. The asparagus soup went over well, and everyone seemed to enjoy everything.

I'm definitely a convert to the sous-vide-and-sear method. People like my buddy Mike have a good handle on a more traditional grilling method when it comes to steaks (Mike knows his way around his proteins), but for talentless idiots like me, the sous-vide-and-sear method is pretty much foolproof. And with a smokeless grill allowing me to cook steak inside my apartment without setting off fire alarms, I think I'll be doing this again sometime soon.

What's more: I can make Saturday's meal totally keto by switching out the mashed potatoes with cauliflower mash! A win for everybody!

One minor annoyance—and a reminder of why I'm generally not a steak guy—was the presence of clumps of intramuscular fat in certain parts of the filet. Again, this is a Korean cut of beef, so it's not pure muscle the way an American filet mignon is. And the fat I'm talking about isn't just marbling, with that spiderwebbed shape: I'm talking about actual chunks of fat that didn't render down during the sous-vide phase. To be sure, the Korean filets were indeed perfectly cooked, but because they were also very fatty, I think... 

I think my next challenge will be to sous vide some eye round—what Koreans call hongdukgae-sal (홍두깨살). A cut of meat considered too tough for most dishes by Western standards, eye round is routinely used in Korean cooking, as when Koreans make jangjorim. I've slow-cooked eye round before; it takes a good eight hours to soften up, but the result is good enough to make pulled beef with (as I've also done before). This time around, I want to make big, thick eye-round steaks, and a quick look at Google shows that an eye-round sous vide takes 16-24 hours to do. That's a significant time commitment (and I don't know the upper limit on my Instant Pot timer), but it's no big deal to start cooking the day before. The point of using eye round is that, even in Korea, this cut of beef has almost no fat in it. That, to me, would make for a true steak: solid meat through and through. No fat, no gristle.

I look forward to this next project.