Yeah – lookout – double pun action in that title. One thing I’m really starting to enjoy is the concept of smoking meat for a little bit, then finishing it up in a long haul sous vide bath. You can really get some textures from especially beef that are out of this world when you go this direction. I can get a chuck roast to eat like butter. I can get top round roast beef that you can cut with a fork. Short ribs that eat like strip steak – it’s awesome, and you need to try it. Suck it up and invest – the Anova was the best addition to my kitchen in 2016. 2015 was the Shun Chef’s knife – but that’s another story.

One of the things I’ve been very successful with, like I said, is long haul Chuck Roasts. Here’s how I do it.

First thing to do is get a decent chuck roast, with nice marbling. Most of this marbling will cook down and you’ll get to make jus with it or something – or whatever. First step is to salt the holy F— out of it. Yes this is all salt:

Look at it all piling up in the bottom of that dish – TONS of salt. Beef will take as much salt as you can throw at it, especially a fatty cut like this. Then you have to pepper the heck out of it as well.

That’s not fresh cracked pepper, that’s just your basic ‘coarse ground’ that you buy all pre-granulated. I find this is better and more consistent. That’s it for seasoning – if you want to elaborate on your meat, you can, but when I’m done, I want this to be like a Texas brisket, and my sensai (Aaron Franklin) keeps his brisket rub simple, so I do as well. I guess if I wanted to, I could paint my meat up with yellow mustard like some people do in TX, but I’m good. I’m not applying olive oil to this, because we’re not doing the full cook on the smoker, and I want this thing as dry as I can get it before I vacuum pack it so I don’t fill my vacuum packer with juice.

Last step before letting it hit the smoker, is to tie a rope around it. While it helps keep everything nice and tight, it’s mainly for presentation points.

4 hours on the smoker, and it goes into a sousvide bath of 141 degrees for 36-48 hours, and then comes out looking like this:

It is so tender that I could easily plunge my index finger through the center of this piece of meat, and find the cutting board easily below. But what’s great about the sous vide is that it doesn’t become a pot-roast – it becomes ultra tender roast beef that you can cut into slices with ease. Check this out:

See how it doesn’t come apart like potroast? Crazy good smoke penetration, crazy good moisture – perfect fat rendering – So now what? Sandwiches.

Day one, we put sharp american cheese and porter-caramelized onions on top, and dropped it under the broiler.

Yes, this is not healthy, but I eat healthy the other 5.5 days of the week, I do, I swear.

The finished sandwich, with sides:

You would pay $28-32 for this meal all damn day, and keep coming back – and the meat is the cheapest cut you can by aside from Bones. Yes, the prep time and everything is something to consider, but it’s so worth it..  Check out this Weck sandwich I made the next day:

It’s a generous helping of the sliced chuck, covered in the same onions, then I used my new rotary cheese slicer to make parmesan snow all over the top, then dropped it under the broiler. After brushing with olive oil, I sprinkled caraway seeds and salt on the top of the bun to make it official ‘weck’ style, but also dropped the parmesan cheese out of the rotary on top to trap it all on there. Stuck that under the broiler as well- wow it was good. Check the cross section:

And yes- that’s some horseradish cream sauce I whipped up, that had carroway and salt inside it, so the weck experience was also inside the sandwich.

I ate that sandwich and was a happy guy.

What kind of sandwich could you make with 42 hour Chuck ?   try it!