I’ve cooked roasting meats to 16, 24, and 48 hour sous vide, and after a number of these experiments, tend to the following rules of thumb:
- 12 hour range for softer steak-like roasts (round roasts).
- 24 hours or so for cuts with more connective tissue, such as chuck roast.
- Tri tip roast, lacking connective tissue of any kind, optimal around 2 hours
This one was an experiment in overnight cooking, and times were more or less set by when I started one evening (I had an afternoon appointment) and when I normally would get up in the morning. The span of cooking was 11 hours, the technique more or less identical to this link. The meat used was a supermarket eye of round. All the spicing was dry spicing this time, though I added a touch of ground cumin to this one.
Eye of round, dry spiced and later placed in a vacuum seal bag.
After I woke up, I fished out the meat and cut. The meat was, by this point, notably tender.
A lot of the color of these roasts bleeds into the bag juices, thus they tend to be pinker than steaks cooked by the same method.
I taste tested with my daughter. She thought it a little too soft, I thought it was fine. 8 hours wouldn’t hurt this meat, and the 8-10 range, I would guess, seems about right.
