i love sous vide meat cooking. i have been working with it since my early learning in various famous restaurants in paris. the results are astonishing if you can control temperature and if you proceed good.
the only goal for me in this type of heating process is to keep the temperature regular across all the product to make protein change state slowly, keeping all (well... most of) water naturally present in the product (less weight loss, better texture), and forcing flavours in (you can use a non salted glace or "get coloured" the meat to force the taste). Also, sous vide gives total control on stopping a thing from continuing cooking, being somehow at the limits all the time.
a steak should be doable if you heat it around 50°c to 60° regularly, and then, without letting him cool down, make a crust in some hot butter or other grease (and use salt at this point only) just before serving it.
i've been myself head barman (as restaurants complex manager i had to learn what i didn't know) in brussels for a while. beer coolers water bath move in temperature in function of the charge (the more beer you serve within a limited time, the more hot it gets, and at a certain point beer too) making the temperature impossible to control, unless you want to drink al lot of beer
. the water there is also contaminated and not food friendly, so you should avoid the contact with food (even in closed sous vide bags) because except if you wash them carefully with some bactericide, crap around the bag is gonna touch inside by the tool you open it with. i wouldn't either.
sous vide is a nice mean to control the uniformity of the heat treatment, no point if you have no control on heat.
Mucho Bocho, what a nice mastery of sous vided meat!!! i just dined, but i'm willing to eat that too, just how i like meat
sorry if if i m hard to understand, english is not my native language and i've never worked in english speaking country so i lack technical terms in english :s
PS:i understand pittsburg style is black (brown i hope) and blue (i love that) but has it to be warm on the inside like french "bleu" meat cooking?