Jay Thomas Picanha! Picanha! I’ve been wanting to sous vide a nice chunk of picanha for quite some time. A few weeks ago, I was browsing Wild Fork Foods and noticed th ey actually carried it and that they had a few different variations of it. Yes!
If you’re not familiar with Picanha, you’re not the only one. Picanha is a cut of beef that is popular in Brazil, and later also adopted in Portugal. In the United States, it is little known, but referred to as the top sirloin cap, rump cover, rump cap, or culotte. North American butchers generally divide it into other cuts like the rump, the round, and the loin. It consists of the biceps femoris muscle and its fat cap.
I smothered this beautiful cut of meat in nothing more than some Himalayan Sea Salt. I didn’t want to go with anything else as I wanted to really enjoy the flavor of this cut.
I set my Anova Precision Cooker to 131 degrees and cooked the Picanha for 3 hours.
I’m going to be honest here. Once I pulled the Picanha out of the tank, it didn’t look very appetizing. In fact, it looked kind of gross. The smell was very good! I ended up adding some additional finishing salt to it and then seared it with my weed torch. The torch did an incredible job on the fat cap and really made this look good! Mouth watering good!!
I let the meat rest for a bit while I finished up the sides. After I was done with that, I cut in to this beautiful piece of meat!
It was a little rare for some folks taste but the flavor was unbelievably good! I could have eaten this whole cut myself!
I ended up ordering a few more of these from Wild Fork Foods and I’ll probably go a bit higher for a bit longer. For the next run, I’ll do it at 135 degrees for 6 hours and see if I can get better results. It will be hard to beat as my first run at this was pretty damn good!
