Steak Sous Vide - Butter or Olive Oil? - The Taste of Montana (2024)

Beef

Main

Sous Vide

April 13, 2023

“Life is too short not to have pasta, steak, and butter.”

— Iman

Do you cook your steak with butter in Northern style or with olive oil in Mediterranean style?

Sinking your teeth into a fleshy red steak is sheer pleasure, but cooking it can become worrying, especially when you’re cooking a couple of fancy steaks that cost you most of a day’s wages.

The art of preparing a good steak starts with choosing the right piece of meat from the local butcher shop, not your local watering hole if you catch my drift. At the store pick the fattier cut because good “marbling”, aka fat, in meat is an indication of high-quality and juicier, and more flavorful steak. Of course, they are not cheap, but you get what you pay for. When you get home, blot out your meat with a paper towel to get rid of excess liquid from the packaging, season it generously, and cook it. But what do you cook it with? Olive oil or butter?

Extra virgin olive oil might be the best choice for a lot of cooking, but it isn’t cut out for this job due to its low smoke point that imparts bad flavors and leaves behind toxic, and possibly carcinogenic, chemicals. So put that bottle back on the shelf and grab the butter or regular olive oil. With their higher cooking temps, they won’t trigger your smoke alarm and turn your house into a big meat smoker. As a rule of thumb, the lighter the color of the oil, the higher its smoke point.

To satisfy our curiosity we cooked two filet mignons, one with olive oil and the other with butter, with the sous vide method that ensures consistent cooking application and quality.

Much to our surprise steak cooked with olive oil brought out the natural flavors of meat and helped maintain a desirable texture much better than butter.

Try it for yourself.