Dry sous vide steak

Sous vide not only keeps the proteins (main component) at a lower temperature, but also the spices/oils/flavorings. Heat helps release the taste and aroma of all the ingredients, and the sous vide might not be hot enough to do that.

So, while it kind of kills the simplicity, you could always sautee the seasonings in oil before adding them to the sous vide bag (not until cooler though). Or just keep them separate and recombine for serving. Sous vide itself (not the vacuum part) is mainly for maintaining/achieving a controlled internal temperature, and skilled cooks don't only sous vide a dish; they might sous vide and then finish under a broiler for texture, or with a torch. If the sauce isn't working inside the bag, make it work outside the bag.

Alternately, put the ingredients in the bag the day before, and let them marinate overnight in the fridge. The vacuum action is essentially just a speeded up marinade, so this should do the same.

Also, make sure you're using enough (but not too much) SALT.

Finally, call the Sous Vide Supreme company. They know their product's capabilities and limitations and might have some good recommendations.

Just my guesses.

It depends on what is to be pasteurized. If one aims for pasteurizing the surface only, then the shape is more or less unimportant. If however one wants to pasteurize the core, then the shape will affect the times.

To be on the safe size, measure the thickness where the meat is thickest.

Myhrwold writes in http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?/topic/116617-sous-vide-recipes-techniques-equipment-2004-2010/page_st_120_p_982720#entry982720 about cooking times (not pasteurization times):

This is true for any kind of cooking actually. Most of what we are taught about cooking is actually wrong. For example, anytime somebody tells you it is “10 minutes per pound” they are saying something that cannot possibly be accurate, because this would imply that cooking time is proportional to the weight. If you take something like a whole bird and scale it up you will find that cooking time is actually proportional to something like (weight)^(2/3) – weight to the 2/3 power. This is because increasing the weight scales up the thickness by the cube root. Since most people are not accustomed to taking things to fractional powers, people substitute a linear relationship. That might work out OK in practice over a small range, but it can’t be accurate over a large range. For example, if you double the weight, the linear relationship would tell you that you double the cooking time. The 2/3 power would tell you to increase it by 59% - that is a pretty big difference.

As a general rule of thumb heat diffusion times go as the square of the thickness increase. So, doubling the thickness results in FOUR TIMES the cooking time. That is a rough general rule of thumb, which is not perfect but it illustrates the nonlinearity of the system. I don’t know why this isn’t taught to chefs more often because it is a fairly easy thing to grasp and use.

A side note:

If you have an iPad or iPhone then I can recommend SousVideDash. One must enter meat type, shape and size, initial and final temparature. Then graphs are drawn that shows pasteurization times for both surface and core (or more precisely graphs of the reduction of salmonella and listeria).

See the website:

http://www.sousvidedash.com/