30 replies to this topic

[MartinH]

Another eagerly anticipated book is Douglas Baldwin's SV cookbook. Any news on when it is to be published?

[DouglasBaldwin]

Another eagerly anticipated book is Douglas Baldwin's SV cookbook. Any news on when it is to be published?

That's an excellent question. I got the corrected proofs of my book last week; so I hope that it'll be headed to the printers very soon. It came out to be 271 pages and has a little over 200 recipes (not including variations). I'll post here what the official publication date is as soon as they tell me what it is.

[DouglasBaldwin]

Hello,

I just wanted to let everyone know that my cookbook, Sous Vide for the Home Cook, is finally out. At the moment, you can only get it through the SousVide Supreme site (for $24.95 plus shipping). It should be available on Amazon.com soon and Amazon.co.uk in about a month.

I spent a lot of time on it and am very happy with how it turned out. It has 272 pages with over 200 recipes (plus a giant table with sous vide cooking times and temperatures for everything I could think of).

I designed it for home cooks with straightforward recipes that don't call for any exotic ingredients or equipment (other than a temperature controlled water bath, of course ). Indeed, after I sent off my manuscript, my father (who hadn't cooked anything in decades) started cooking my recipes for my mother and they've all worked great for him. My recipes aren't designed to be tasty works of art like those of Mr. Keller or Mr. Blumenthal or Dr. Myhrvold: but I think they're delicious and hope you'll think so too.

While the text is light on math and science, I used a lot of math and science in designing my recipes: I numerically solved the heat equation to compute the heating and pasteurization times; I used network theory and the volatile flavor compounds of the ingredients to design my sauce recipes; and I applied what I learned from the 350 or so academic food science journal articles I've read in the last two years.

I look forward to hearing what you think of my cookbook once you've cooked a few of its recipes.

As soon as I finish writing two chapters on sous vide and cook-chill processing for an academic text (intended for food scientists and industrial food processors), I'll get back to work on the next major revision of my (still and always) free web guide. (There's a lot of new material I want to add to my guide; but it'll take a while now that I'm back to working on my PhD thesis 60+ hr/wk .)

[PedroG]

Hi Douglas,
unfortunately the SVS site only ships to the USA and Canada, so we Europeans and Australians will have to wait for Amazon.
Regards
Pedro

[dougal]

... It should be available on Amazon.com soon and Amazon.co.uk in about a month.
...

If Amazon UK actually had it listed, you'd probably have a couple of pre-orders already!

[nickrey]

Congratulations Douglas.

Can't wait to see the final product. As Pedro said those of us in more far flung places will have to wait until it appears on Amazon to get a copy.

[Paul Kierstead]

That is great, Douglas! I look forward to helping pay back you for all the effort you've expended to enrich my knowledge.

Push comes to shove, I'll buy the physical book. But what I'd really like to buy is an e-book. Any plans in the near future? Hell if there is an upgrade path, I'll buy both....

[PedroG]

That is great, Douglas! I look forward to helping pay back you for all the effort you've expended to enrich my knowledge.

Push comes to shove, I'll buy the physical book. But what I'd really like to buy is an e-book. Any plans in the near future? Hell if there is an upgrade path, I'll buy both....

$24.95 / 272 pages = 9.2¢/page, printing an e-book at home will cost you more.

[Paul Kierstead]

Why on earth would I print it?

[mark28209]

Heck, yes! I/we would never have come this far if it weren't for the guidance of Douglas' freebie contribution to the community. I look forward to getting the cookbook both as a resource and an act of appreciation. Thanks to Douglas, Pedro and other contributors to this community for stimulating my wander into the hot water. Cheers, Mark

[DouglasBaldwin]

Thank you for all your support and kind words; I really appreciate it.

Paul: I asked my publisher and they don't have any immediate plans to do an electronic version. (Besides, while I love my Kindle, I find the paper version to be much more convenient than the Kindle version I made for myself; but that's just my experience.)

[Paul Kierstead]

Douglas, alright, I settle for paper for now :) When using references sources such as cookbooks, the iPad works somewhat better then the kindle, having text search and very fast page turns (allowing 'flipping through'). I use mine already quite a bit for cooking, and also love to sit with my g/f while she watches dancing with the stars and I can have a library at my fingertips (well, ok working on the library). Most recently, I bought the ePub version of McGee and it is lovely to use. Veering back on topic, hope to see some results in the forum soon!

[jmolinari]

That is great, Douglas! I look forward to helping pay back you for all the effort you've expended to enrich my knowledge.

Push comes to shove, I'll buy the physical book. But what I'd really like to buy is an e-book. Any plans in the near future? Hell if there is an upgrade path, I'll buy both....

Me too...just waiting for it to come to Amazon! Thanks Douglas.

[MartinH]

Having received a copy of Douglas Baldwin's Sous Vide for the Home Cook yesterday, I must say how impressed I am with it. (Thumbs up as well to the Sous Vide Supreme people for sending it out so promptly.) We would expect there to be plenty of meat recipes, but beyond that there's also much more. For instance, there are ice cream recipes, a dish that hasn't featured much on this thread. There is not just advice on cooking various meats and fishes, but also lots of sauce recipes to accompany them. But best of all there's a considerable amount of reference material and useful food science. It is much more than just a recipe book.

Thanks Douglas, its a great success, and it deserves to sell well. It will expand the repertoire of existing sous viders as well as bring more people into the sous vide world.

[adey73]

Did I just read the words.....ice cream?

....You mean cooking the egg custard at a correct temp below coagulation?

Edited by adey73, 17 June 2010 - 12:15 AM.

[DouglasBaldwin]

adey73: Yes, that's what MartinH means. It really is very convenient to making custard ice cream bases sous vide.

MartinH: Thank you for your very nice comments, I'm very glad to hear that you like my book.

[adey73]

You discuss chocolate tempering too?

[DouglasBaldwin]

You discuss chocolate tempering too?

I don't. It was on my to-do list, but I never got around to it. I do include vegetables and dried beans though.

[Doc-G]

Hello Douglas,

I've tried purchasing your book from Amazon but it doesn't seem to want to ship to Australia. Do you know any any such restrictions? If so are there any ways that I can get a copy sent to me?

Regards,

G

[PedroG]

Hello Douglas,

I've tried purchasing your book from Amazon but it doesn't seem to want to ship to Australia. Do you know any any such restrictions? If so are there any ways that I can get a copy sent to me?

Regards,

G

Although it is listed in Amazon.com, it is not sold by Amazon but by Eades Appliance Technology LLC which is in fact http://www.sousvides...m/shop/cookbook who obviously do not sell anything outside America. Douglas was so kind to send me a copy directly (thanks a lot, Douglas, for all your work you have done for our community!).
Regards
Pedro

[Doc-G]

Thanks Pedro.

I will contact Douglas via PM.

Regards,

G

[jmolinari]

I finally got tired of waiting for this book to get to Amazon, and just bought it.

I have a question Douglas. Throughout the book you discuss the temperature and time to pasteurization, but you never discuss the item thickness, which would have a direct impact on cooking time, since pasteurization is based on the time the core is at temperature.

How did you derive your cooking times? Certainly a 1/2" pork chop will take much less time to pasteurize than a 1.5" pork chop would. I have to assume that the times you specify are for "worse case" meat thicknesses? How exactly did you arrive at your times?

Also, i was wondering why you specify a 6-8hr time for a ribeye steak, but only a couple hour for a NY strip? Isn't the ribeye a tender cut already? So why the long cook time?

thanks!

[DouglasBaldwin]

I did indeed pick worst-case pasteurization times for my recipes. (I did include pasteurization tables based on thickness on pages 256 to 258.) For the recipes, I tried to determine what the worst-case time would be for a given piece of meat constrained by weight; I was more explicit on steaks and usually give a thickness range to assure pasteurization.

Being for home cooks, I implicitly assumed that they'd be buying their beef at the supermarket. When doing my testing for my book, I found supermarket rib-eyes to be fairly tough and so specified 6--8 hours in my cookbook. If you're buying well-aged, prime-grade rib-eye steaks, then 6--8 hours is going to be too long and you'll want to cut the cooking time down to 1--1.5 hours.

I apologize for not responding sooner, but I usually don't check the "Cookbooks & References" board. If anyone has a urgent question, emailing me is your best bet.

I finally got tired of waiting for this book to get to Amazon, and just bought it.

I have a question Douglas. Throughout the book you discuss the temperature and time to pasteurization, but you never discuss the item thickness, which would have a direct impact on cooking time, since pasteurization is based on the time the core is at temperature.

How did you derive your cooking times? Certainly a 1/2" pork chop will take much less time to pasteurize than a 1.5" pork chop would. I have to assume that the times you specify are for "worse case" meat thicknesses? How exactly did you arrive at your times?

Also, i was wondering why you specify a 6-8hr time for a ribeye steak, but only a couple hour for a NY strip? Isn't the ribeye a tender cut already? So why the long cook time?

thanks!

[jmolinari]

thanks. I hadn't yet read through p.256...

[OliverB]

just added to my amazon wish list! Have to wait until next year as I'll be gone over xmas/nye, but I can't wait to cook from it! And learn, just spent some time on Douglas' site and learned quite a bit already! Looking forward to the book.

[Tatoosh]

I will buy your book this month to be sure! But I am confused about cooking sous vide at 131F while I have the FDA saying anything below 140F is in the danger zone. Above that, I understand the effect of temperature and time. But under the 140F I'm faced with "supposedly" unsafe food. I am cooking ground beef burgers sous vide and finishing them in a deep fryer. Since it is ground beef, it is more "temperatmental" about bacteria than a steak, but how do I resolve the difference between 131F (medium rare) and 140F (medium) in terms of food safety, time at temperature and o forth?

[Shalmanese]

Bacteria stops reproducing at around 120, starts dying at around 125 and dies pretty much instantly at 140. Between 125 and 140, you had to hold food at that temp for a minimum amount of time to get enough die off. Before SV, it wasn't practical to do this so the FDA didn't really talk about it.

[DouglasBaldwin]

Thank you Shalmanese for your quick response to Tatoosh's question. To add a little detail, let me quote the food safety section of my web guide:

So why were you taught that food pathogens stop multiplying at 40°F (4.4°C) and grow all the way up to 140°F (60°C)? Because it takes days for food pathogens to grow to a dangerous level at 40°F (4.4°C) (FDA, 2011) and it takes many hours for food to be made safe at just above 126.1°F (52.3°C) – compared with only about 12 minutes (for meat) and 35 minutes (for poultry) to be made safe when the coldest part is 140°F (60°C) (FSIS, 2005; FDA, 2009, 3-401.11.B.2). Indeed, the food pathogens that can multiply down to 29.7°F (-1.3°C) – Yersinia enterocolitica and Listeria monocytogenes – can only multiply about once per day at 40°F (4.4°C) and so you can hold food below 40°F (4.4°C) for five to seven days (FDA, 2011). At 126.1°F (52.3°C), when the common food pathogen Clostridium perfringens stops multiplying, it takes a very long time to reduce the food pathogens we’re worried about – namely the Salmonella species, Listeria monocytogenes, and the pathogenic strains of Escherichia coli – to a safe level; in a 130°F (54.4°C) water bath (the lowest temperature I recommend for cooking sous vide) it’ll take you about 2½ hours to reduce E. coli to a safe level in a 1 inch (25 mm) thick hamburger patty and holding a hamburger patty at 130°F (54.4°C) for 2½ hours is inconceivable with traditional cooking methods – which is why the “danger zone” conceived for traditional cooking methods doesn’t start at 130°F (54.4°C). (Note that Johnson et al. (1983) reported that Bacillus cereus could multiply at 131°F/55°C, but no one else has demonstrated growth at this temperature and so Clostridium perfringens is used instead.)

[Tatoosh]

Thank you both. I apologize for missing the food safety explination on your website, but now I have a pretty good understanding of why the temperatures are specified and how to answer questions about the lower sous vide temperatures confidently.

[PedroG]

The "danger zone"

Be aware that

The concept of the "danger zone" is based on an oversimplification of microbial growth patterns. Not all temperatures within the danger zone are equally dangerous. Most pathogens grow slowly at temperatures below 10°C/50°F. Their growth accelerates modestly with increasing temperature and is typically fastest near human body temperature, 37°C/98.6°F. Beyond this optimum, higher temperatures sharply curtail the growth of most pathogens until they stop growing completely and start to die.

(see the wikiGullet article on the Danger Zone).

So holding ground beef at 10°C/50°F is not nearly as dangerous as holding it at e.g. 40°C/104°F.
On the other hand, holding fish at 4.0°C/39°F, i.e. below the "danger zone" won't keep it fresh. Fish living in arctic seawater have (autolytic and other) enzymes and may harbor microbes adapted to temperatures down to -1.9°C/28.6°F (freezing point of seawater), so they are more susceptible to spoilage even at refrigerator temperatures of 4.4°C/40°F; it is preferable to store fish on crushed ice and eat it before it eats itself.