I cooked tri-tip with my Raspberry Pi controlled sous vide water bath today. It came out brilliantly – on a par with the best Chateaubriand I’ve had (which for the record was at Casa Ferlin in Zurich – well worth a visit if you’re ever in that neck of the woods).

The meat

I got my tri-tip from Donald Russell, where they call it Tafelspitz (though Wikipedia tells me that Tafelspitz is actually a dish made with this cut of meat).

The cooking

The temperature control went a little awry. I’m guessing that at some stage the system sent an off signal to the remote controlled socket that wasn’t received, and so the temperature went up much higher than my 56C target. Luckily everything came out well. Here’s the temperature profile (over around 5.5hrs):

I will add a check to the code to make sure that off commands are sent every loop so this doesn’t happen again. Next time I cook tri-tip I’ll set a target temperature of 60C, so that things should come out the same.

The result

The title for this post probably gave it away, but the result was outstanding. The meat texture was like best quality fillet steak, the taste was rich and beefy; even the fat tasted great. I’m looking forward to more tri-tip in the future, and trying out some other cuts in the water bath.