Sous Vide Ultimate Challenge

It is time to really test my Sous Vide setup.  My lovely wife was talking about cooking an outside round roast the way we had usually done it before: in the slow cooker.  Now the thing about a roast like this is that it is very lean.  While healthy, this translates into a meat that often ends up on the plate as tough and dry.

I would have none of this.  I have the technology, and I'm going to make use of it.  So we began by taking the roast and cutting the fat away from it.  After that we sliced it in half to give us a couple of very thick 2" steaks.  Those were patted down with a paper towel and then coated with just a sheen of vegetable oil.  To each we applied a different rub.  One was a fabulous homemade rub that you can get here.  The other was a "Tuscan" style rub given to me by my mom on a recent trip she made.  It is mostly fennel, salt, pepper, and garlic powder.

The two steaks were each put into a quart-sized zip-loc bag.  I sucked the air out of them with a straw and dropped them into my rig set to 56.5C.  They'll cook at this temperature for over 24 hours, after which I'll bump up the temperature a bit to 61C for a perfect medium.  I'm expecting this to turn out pretty good.  We'll see...