I've never cooked sous vide before, but am now equipped to try thanks to the holidays.
We have a 3 pound chuck roast -- I'm not sure what the exact cut shape is, but it's vaguely cube shaped. If we cut the roast into steaks (1-2 inches thick) before bagging and cooking, what effect would this have on the cooking time and/or quality?
Sous vide cooking is a function of temperature and the surface area to volume ratio of the food in question.
If you have a high surface area to volume the cooking time will be shorter. Steaks would have a higher ratio than the roast so they would take less time than the roast. The amount of the time difference is difficult to predict exactly over such a long time scale, but a rough calculation of the ratio I spoke of would be a good starting point for a compensation factor.
If you have the time and your water bath can accommodate, I'd suggest keeping the roast whole and finishing in a skillet. It's much more impressive than a steak.
That's the first thing I did with my Anova circulator.
It turns chuck into ribeye! (so to speak) Notice no grey border? And the perfect medium rare?!
I don't know about sous-vide cooking chuck as a roast (although I do have a recipe), because I haven't done it (yet). It turned out so great as a steak that I'll probably do at least one more as steaks before I do a roast. I live alone so I'd rather have 5 steaks vacuum packed in the freezer than 1 beautifully cooked roast.
That is chuck, circulated for 60 hours (no joke, although I did one for 36 hours that was almost as good) at 131F. The long time is necessary to break down all of that delicious connective tissue.
Then I seared in a NASA hot cast iron skillet.
It was so good! I sprinkled with salt and pepper just before I seared, that was all the seasoning I used. Great steak for the price of hamburger :)
Good luck! Enjoy!
