Confession from the meal prep thread lady: I finally cooked steaks for my husband's birthday. Yes, the "solution looking for a problem" husband. Two enormous ribeyes, a good two inches thick, 131°F (55°C) like the guide says, and I gave them an hour, because an hour is what I always give our 1-inch strips.
Sliced in at the table and the middle was... not right. Not raw, but noticeably cooler and softer than the outer inch, definitely not the edge to edge thing. He was very gracious about it, which was somehow worse.
So what did I get wrong? I thought the whole POINT was that time doesn't matter. Does a 2-inch steak need a hotter bath, or just longer, and what are the right times for each thickness? And the opposite question, since a birthday do-over has been scheduled: could I just drop them in after lunch and hold them until dinner, call it 5 or 6 hours, so it's one less thing to time?
Nothing wrong with your temperature, everything wrong with your clock. An hour is a 1-inch number. Heat has to crawl to the middle from the outside, and the crawl time doesn't double when the steak doubles, it more like triples or quadruples. Same reason my briskets take a day and your strips take an hour: same physics, longer commute.
My working numbers, tested on more steaks than my doctor knows about: one inch, an hour to 90 minutes. Inch and a half, about two hours. Two inches, two and a half to three, and birthday-grade ones get the full three. Your middle wasn't undercooked so much as still commuting.
Grey band guy from the searing board here. Got caught exactly the same way in month one with a thick porterhouse. There is now a sticky note on my fridge with three thicknesses and three times on it. Took two ruined steaks to write that note, happy to save you the second one.
Tessa, the one sentence to keep: temperature picks the doneness, thickness picks the time. A thicker steak never needs a hotter bath, it needs a longer one, because the core has to climb all the way to bath temperature before the clock you care about even starts. Mike's numbers are where I'd put them: roughly an hour for an inch (25mm), closer to three hours for two inches (50mm), and not linear in between, because heating time grows with the square of the thickness.
Your afternoon-hold idea is really two questions. Texture first: a tender cut like ribeye is happy from the moment it's heated through up to about four hours, and past that the texture starts sliding from meaty toward soft. So 5 to 6 hours is further than I would take a good ribeye; you'd be trading the birthday steak's bite for scheduling convenience. Safety second: at 131°F (55°C) you are above the line where long holds are fine, but that trick does not transfer downward. Anything below about 130°F (54.4°C) is short-cook territory only, never an afternoon hold, that is danger-zone arithmetic and it does not care how nice the steak is. It's also why the published tables are written by thickness: a thick cut spends longer warming up, at every temperature. The site's sous vide steak guide has the doneness temperatures, the time window and the safety lines in one place.
For the do-over: in at 131 by mid afternoon, three hours, out, dried properly, short violent sear. If lunch runs long, an extra half hour inside the window costs you nothing. That, and only that, is what "time doesn't matter" was ever supposed to mean.
The phrasing that fixed this for me: time doesn't matter WITHIN THE WINDOW. Sous vide gives you slack, not immunity. I drop steaks in at 4:30 for a 6:30 dinner and that lazy hour of slack in the middle is where the whole value of the machine lives, homework meltdowns and all. Nobody sells it that way, but the slack is the actual product.
Do-over report: three hours at 131, properly dried, violent sear as instructed, and it was edge to edge right through the centre of a steak the size of a paperback. The birthday boy has officially rebranded the circulator from "the solution looking for a problem" to "the steak machine", which after a year of commentary I am choosing to frame as a full apology.
Sticky note is on the fridge, Sammy style. Thanks all.
