#gw2irl

Essential Equipment:

A sous vide setup

A medium sized frying pan (cast iron suggested, but stainless/nonstick works too)

A food processor, -OR- a spice grinder and mortar and pestle

A stove, gas range, induction cooktop, etc.

Knives, cutting board, plates, bowls, etc.

Shared Ingredients:

Steak of some sort (I used 8oz (250g) strip steaks)

A neutral oil (I used olive oil)*

Soy-Sesame Sauce Ingredients:

1/3rd cup (40g) Sesame seeds (plus extra to garnish)

2 Tbsp (30 ml) Ginger paste -OR- finely grated ginger

4 Tbsp (60 ml) Low-sodium soy sauce

Cilantro Lime Dressing Ingredients:

1 Lime

1 Bundle of cilantro (or coriander, to most of the world)

Kosher Salt

Steak Instructions:

Prepare your sous vide bath and set it to 135°F (approx. 57.3°C)

Place your steak(s) in the proper container to sous vide, be they vacuum sealed bags, resealable freezer bags you squeezed the air out of, some sort of re-useable sous vide container, etc. (I used freezer bags).

Place your sealed steaks into the water bath and secure them in order to make sure they will be submerged for their cooking time

Leave your steaks in the bath for a minimum of 1 hour. I left mine in for 4 hours. Some cuts of beef should be left for 48 hours or more, so do some research to achieve the best results!

Remove the steaks from the bath and from their container and place on a cutting board to rest for a few minutes.

Get your frying pan to as hot as you can safely get it on a stove, range, cooktop, etc.

Once your pan is up to temperature, pat the steaks dry with paper towel, lightly coat the steak with oil, and place into the pre-heated pan.

Sear the steak for 1 to 2 minutes on each side to develop a browned exterior. (NOTE: If the steak is stuck to the pan after a minute, don’t pry on it too hard! It will release from a well-seasoned pan once the browning has sufficiently completed.)

Remove from the pan after you’ve seared both/all sides and let rest for a few minutes before topping with your sauces (or properly seasoning it if you’re not a masochist who’s following a video game’s ingredient list to the letter).

Soy-Sesame Sauce Instructions:

Pour your sesame seeds into a medium frying pan and toast over medium-high heat, stirring frequently, until lightly browned

Remove the seeds from the heat and let cool before adding to a food processor or spice grinder (or mortar and pestle, if you’re looking for a workout), then blitz until the seeds are reduced to a crumbly, sticky mixture.

If using a food processor, and the ginger here and stream in the soy sauce until a smooth sauce forms. If using a spice grinder or mortar and pestle, place the sesame seed mixture into a bowl with the ginger and soy sauce, then mix until a smooth sauce forms. (I used a spice grinder and mixed it with a whisk.)

Serve with the steak when it’s ready- on the side, smeared onto the plate, poured onto the steak itself. It doesn’t really matter. Garnish with some spare sesame seeds if you have some left over!

Cilantro Lime Dressing Instructions:

Juice the lime and set aside for now. If you want a decorative wedge, get a second lime

Place a few cilantro/coriander leaves into your mortar and pestle or food processor with a pinch of kosher salt, then crush the leaves (or blitz, if you’re using a food processor), until a thin, dark green paste remains.

Add some of the paste into the reserved lime juice and stir, adding more paste or salt to taste (and if you’re following this recipe literally, make the dressing just a little too salty).

Let the dressing “steep” on the counter for a few minutes before serving with the steak- on the side, poured onto the steak, basted over the steak. It doesn’t really matter. Garnish with some spare cilantro leaves and that spare lime wedge if you’ve got it. 

That’s all for the recipes! If you wanna keep reading for the loosey-goosey foodblog narrative nonsense, keep scrolling! Otherwise, thank you for your time, and stay safe out there, my fellow Tyrians! The Loosey-Goosey Foodblog Narrative Nonsense:

Wow! You’re still here? You want to read more about why I did what I did? You want to put me on blast for not seasoning meat at any point in the process? Why did I take the in-game ingredients so literally? Well, look no further than this section!

I know that I did a lot of things while “developing” these recipes that’d make my culinary idols’ (with a couple exceptions) heads spin, but these best practices would involve utilizing ingredients that aren’t included in-game, or were things I tested and that turned out incredibly poorly. Did I mention that just lime juice alone makes a terrible pan sauce and reduces down to almost nothing? No? Did I also mention that trying to deglaze with the weirdest tahini in history is a really, really, bad idea? I have now.

When I was bouncing the idea of how to approach these off of my friends, a few of them were skeptical about me not doing anything to season the meat, either before putting it into the sous vide, before searing, after searing, etc. I absolutely agree with them in that regard! In fact, if I were to make these again in a less literal sense, you bet those steaks would be salted, peppered, and I’d throw some garlic cloves in the bag with them for good measure! Those ingredients, however, aren’t in the in-game sous vide meat recipe. It’s just meat and water. Thus, I’d say that my hands were tied on that one, but I had a technique in my back pocket to get me out of this hole! While I absolutely recognize that what I’m about to say is not a perfect solution, it was the best idea that I had. 

Youtube home cook Adam Ragussea introduced me to the idea of strategically over-seasoning sauces that are destined to land on under-seasoned bases. Thus, my strategy for handling the lack of seasoning on the steak meant adding a bit too much salt to the cilantro lime dressing, and initially using regular soy sauce in the soy-sesame and ginger sauce. You can probably guess how the latter went, given that the recipe I posted suggests low sodium soy sauce. Trust me on that one, unless you like your food so salty that it’d make Molly Baz blush.

As another idol of mine, Chef John, says- “There are two types of people in the world. Those who have to scrape out their pans after cooking, and those who know how to make pan sauces.” I am usually in the later category, however previous trial runs and tests of these recipes that included deglazing the pans with soy sauce, lime juice, and other attempts at pan-saucery without butter or other essential components just left me with dirtier pans and gross-looking final products. The sauces as they are written are honestly fine enough. The uncooked cilantro-lime dressing brought a lot of brightness and bite to an otherwise okay steak, and the sesame sauce couldn’t chance getting any drop of the liquid in it evaporated away

On to some extraneous technique stuff!

Originally, I was a bit befuddled on how I could turn sesame, soy sauce, and ginger into something you could pour over a steak. That was when a question from my brother about if hummus contains sesame (something he’s highly allergic to) reminded me that tahini exists! While tahini is traditionally milled sesame thinned into a sauce with oil, I wondered if I could get something similar using soy sauce. Sure enough, an initial test made something that was vaguely sauce-like! With a little adjusting of the quantities, I got something that tasted good enough to me. If I were making the sesame-soy sauce without the in-game ingredient restrictions in the future, I’d probably make honest-to-goodness tahini, then add the soy sauce and ginger separately, along with some garlic and maybe some black pepper. Or maybe I could use some other shoyu-style sauce. Hmm... Experimentation for another day, perhaps! The cilantro lime dressing was the main victim of my pan sauce devotion. After I ended up dumping over an entire cup of lime juice into my pan to try and get something remotely saucey, all I got was something that tasted... not bad? It wasn’t great either though. Thus, I opted to just not cook it. That left me wondering how the coriander could sufficiently get its flavors out into the lime, as finely chopping the stuff wasn’t really cutting it. That was when autoplay tossed a video about BA’s Best Pesto at me, which included using salt as an abrasive to help crush garlic into a fine paste. If it’s good enough for garlic, I thought, it’ll be good enough for coriander. Sure enough, it was quite good! If I were making the cilantro lime sauce without the in-game ingredient restrictions in the future, I’d get a little ambitious and make a gastrique, but with coriander, lime, and probably some garlic? I have no clue how that’d work out, but that’s what recipe development is all about. Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!

Now to address the footnote I’ve added. Yes, yes. I did cheat slightly by using a neutral oil for the steak. Why? Because I’ve never tried reverse-searing a steak without oil, and frankly, I’m too scared to risk the seasoning on my cast iron pan to try. Oil isn’t in the in-game recipe at all, but a neutral oil shouldn’t have impact on the flavor of the final product. I figured, if it was a loophole good enough for Brian David Gilbert, It’ll be good enough for me. Why not just skip the sear though? Well... have you seen what an un-seared sous vide steak looks like? Would you eat this?

Yeah, me neither. Thus, I allowed myself this one, single cheat. I am sorry.

Anyways, I don’t think I have anything else I want to say about this. I’ve been pondering how to make some of these ascended recipes since they dropped because of how modular they are, and these were the first that I managed to sort out. Will I try more in the future? Probably. I love Guild Wars 2 in ways words cannot describe. I’ve enjoyed trying to sort these recipes out. I’ve learned a lot trying to develop them into something workable in the real world, and this is genuinely the style of content I feel that I’m best-suited for making to contribute to the folks who enjoy this wonderful game along with me.