Rib eye steak sous vide - leftovers edition

I only ate half of my steak yesterday , and I was curious to see how sous vide leftovers would work. The answer is: quite well!

I re-froze the steak then vacuum sealed it. I put the frozen bag directly into the sous vide machine which had been pre-heated to 132°F and heated for one hour.

The main problem with this technique is that you must be very careful with the amount of time the food stays in the danger zone (40°F to 140°F). Because cooking (1.5 hours), resting and cooling (1 hour) and reheating (1 hour) were all done in the danger zone, there's not a lot of room left in the four hour window.

It really works much better to sear the steak and then freeze it uncooked, since it takes about the same amount of time to cook as it does to reheat. But I've never had a reheated steak that was still a perfect medium rare before. It was pretty amazing!

I also froze and reheated the mashed potatoes. This turns out to be surprisingly tricky, though after some experimentation it's not the freezing that causes mashed potatoes to turn weird - it's the reheating. Microwave reheating: very bad. Vacuum sealing the potatoes and dropping a frozen bag into a pot of boiling water, bringing back to a boil, then reducing to a simmer for 30 minutes: excellent. This solves one of the major problems with making mashed potatoes for one, which is just way too much work. Being able to freeze and successfully reconstitute them will be nice.