24-Hour Sous Vide Venison Roast Recipe

If you aren't familiar with sous vide cooking, seeing a 24-hour cook time in a recipe might cause a raised eyebrow or two. But that is the beauty of this cooking method. Since the food is sealed in bags and immersed in temperature-controlled water, it never gets above the desired doneness level. All that changes over the long cooking process is the texture of the meat itself.

The words Sous Vide are French for under vacuum and that is exactly how you could describe the food being cooked. We vacuum seal the roasts in standard bags, just like we are preparing them for the freezer. The roasts are then submerged in a large pot of water and the sous vide unit is turned on and set to the desired temperature. The unit contains a heating element and will heat the water to the set temperature. A small propeller circulates the water around the food being cooked.

Since adding salt to meat before a long cook can actually begin to cure the meat, causing it to be a little tough on the surface, I prefer to do the bulk of my seasoning after the cook and before searing the surface of the meat. But that doesn't mean you can't add some flavor during those long hours under vacuum. For this recipe, we sprinkled the meat well with dried rosemary. The juice from the meat softens the rosemary and the flavor works its way deep into the meat.

The results from the long cook time exceeded expectations. The meat was done to a perfect medium-rare, but the texture was fork-tender, even for the sirloin tip. We sliced the roast thin and served it with roasted potatoes and a nice salad. Leftovers made for a fine sandwich the next day.