pounce

Well, sous vide translates to "under vacuum". Not many bladder cooking nomads were hooking their bags up to any kind of suction that I am aware of....

Think of it from the creativity point of view. If the Chef was a musician that found a new instrument to reveal a different expression wouldn't they want people to expereince this? If you haven't enjoyed your sous vide meals it may be they weren't good. If you had expectations on tasting the *sous vidieness* of the meal and did not, but enjoyed the meal..no crime there, but I understand where you are coming from. I'm honestly not aware of all the hype you are describing. Where do you live if you don't mind sharing? Are you reading about it or are you seeing it everywhere when dining?

Food is subjective. If you don't like something it's ok. More than just being something new in the biz to use for marketting etc the method can acheive taste and texture not found in many other methods. It's another tool for chef creativity. Why not chicken or pork? Last time I checked there weren't any rules on what people like to eat. No food snobbery on this end. I'll eat anything. And I'll eat it twice just to be sure. Read though the main sous vide thread on this site for more insight. If your issue is just with the plastic bag then you are not having an issue with the method exactly, just the common material used. I've cooked in glass jars with good results.

I think that if you put a cooling condenser between your vacuum jar and your hydro aspirator you could capture your extraction before it got sucked out. A simple condensor could be built with vacuum hose a second vacuum jar and a container to hold ice. You would just want to cool the extraction down lower than your source by enough to keep the extraction from boiling as well. I wonder if this would work. If you want to capture the steam off a boiling pot on the stove this is pretty easy. You could just build a basic condensor with tubing running fitted to a pot lid then through some some loops in a cold bath. This is a basic stovetop still. Made one of these when I was a kid. I had this crazy idea I wanted to be a moonshiner.

Now I really want to try this vacuum reduction technique. When Shalmanese mentioned watermellon reduction I was sold. I think the key to trying this at home is a proper vacuum pump that can handle the moisture. Nathan points out using a hydro aspirator which would work perfectly in this case if it can pull enough vacuum. Basically this is a venturi vacuum pump that uses water to create the draw. One issue I have with using a hydro aspirator is that it can use a lot of water. Maybe 1.5 gallons a minute or more. The other option is to use compressed air instead of water. Obviously, this is not as convenient for most people since they may not have an air compressor handy. Also, not many people want to run a noisy compressor (and venturi pump) in their kitchen. I'm ok with dooing experimental cooking in the garage so I'm looking at something like this compressed air powered pump. For the container I'm going to try using a Food Saver storage container. I already have some from when I bought my vacuum sealer. I'm assuming they can handle a fair amount of vacuum without imploding and they are foodsafe. I may also be able to sink it into my water bath if needed to raise a temp slightly. Heavy mason jars like the freezer versions with a vacuum fitting screwed into a lid may also work. Lab vacuum glass just seems so expensive and even though I think having a lab on my kitchen island is about the coolest thing I can think of my girlfiend is already afraid of my water bath ...heh.

I've only seen commercial equipment for vacuum frying. If you do an image search on google you can find a few pics. I assume that if you have a constant draw during cooking you could compensate for the expanding gasses. I imagine that you could rig up a pressure cooker with a high power vacuum pump and try it at home

There is also a very interesting advantage to frying in a vacuum. Acrylamide is a harmful chemical (known to cause cancer) found in fried starchy foods like potato chips. The chemical is increased with high frying temeratures. By putting the cooking under a vacuum you can lower the fry temperature and reduce the amount of acrylamide you generate duing the cooking by up to 90+%. An interesting bit of information is that there are a lot of chips out there that far exceed the proposed safe levels of acrylamide in the state of California. Cape Cod Robust Russet: 910 times Kettle Chips (lightly salted): 505 times Kettle Chips (honey dijon): 495 times Pringles Snack Stacks (pizza-flavored): 170 times Lay's Baked: 150 times For those interested there is information about prop 65 here: http://www.oehha.ca.gov/prop65/acrylamide.html

A po-man's vacuum pack can be done by doing the bag like Nathan explains, but instead of using your hands to sqeeze out the air fill a sink with water then submerge most of the bag in the water. The water pressure will push the air out and you can zip the bag up. You can go one step further and put the zip bag in another larger bag that will allow you to completely submerge the ziplock bag to create more pressure to push the air out.

Yes, this is getting interesting. The difference between Google and the Open Content Alliance is that it appears that the later is geared toward multiple uses and Yahoo! isn't going to own the scanned data, but rather index it. Google owns the db they are using for thier Print service. Here is a link to the OCA's FAQ: http://www.opencontentalliance.org/faq.html I think this new alliance is a pretty clever strategy and has the potential of making Google look "evil" in their nonchalant attitude toward copyrights.

I'm sure the two items have different effects, but I can say that I have never had a chicken made with Spanek (or Spanek knockoff) where the whitemeat was overcooked. I'd encourage you to try it yourself. The results are very moist and juicy. Spanek Roaster History I like the looks of the cocorico. Is the center spike solid or is it hollow? Is this a traditional style cooker? I haven't seen one before.

If you are going to cook vertical use the original. http://www.spanek.com/ . The Spanek family is amazing and definately deserves recognition for the vertical roaster. I was involved with a member of the family and tried everything cooked this way. I can say that there is no doubt that cooking this way improves the food. I do chicken and game hens this way.

FYI: I found the Delonghi Model AD1099 on Overstock refurbished for $199. Not bad if you aren't afraid of refurbed items. For anyone that has this kind of cooker how much venting does this unit have when you are doing a rotiserie chicken? Does it fill the house with chicken vapor?

Nathan, I have to say that I appreciate all of your effort in this thread. You have provided so much useful info. I'm curious about temperatures and read back to your posts and tables. I have an immersion unit that can be operated by a computer. I can log water temps and contro the temp using some profiles if needed. What I can't do at the moment is log the temp of the item sous vide. I would like to do some experiments and correlate the bath temps with internal temps. I'm curious about your technique with closed cell foam. How does this work exacly? Is this the stuff that has a sticky side? Do you just punch a hole in the bag before vacuum packing and then stick a piece of foam tape over the hole and seal the bag? I've found a food temperature data logging probe what looks perfect for what I would like to do, but the solution is around $400. See the data logger. The advantage here would be I could seal the probe in the bag and fetch it later. The probe logs data at defined intervals within the unit so you can hook it back up to the computer and correlate the temp data. What I'm curious about is how temp curves effect the cooking time. I wonder if starting with a cold bath then bringing up to temperature can effect the results in some way. I also wonder if starting at a higher temp and letting the temp drop to the desired temp is avantageous. Any thoughts?

The publisher categorizes the book as "Biography & Autobiography". See the publishers page: Random House (Broadway) Truth is key to the category, but all authors of biographies need to balance truth, objectivity and interpretation. I think that we have the brother as biographer makes a big difference in how we can view the content. We don't know who wrote what using what interpretation of what truth. Good strategy really.

Pam, Yes, your book can be read cover to cover on amazon.com using the "search inside" functionality. There is a slight difference between what Amazon does and what Google does. Amazon sells your book and your Publisher opted in before your book was even scanned. Google does not sell books, but makes money off your content by selling ads that will be presented to the person viewing your book, if it was on Google. It's not. Google also may scan your book and index it without your or your publishers permission and will make money off your content by selling ads. If you do opt into the Google Print project after they begin scanning books again you can have a link to the locations where your book is for sale and you can restrict how many pages etc are available to the public. It's interesting to point out that on Amazon you or your publisher cannot specify that some pages would not be available so in some ways Amazon is giving out more than Google might. I am sure my viewing is tracked on Amazon, but I could not find anything on Amazon telling me I couldn't print your content or save it to my computer. (I haven't).

Yes, I agree. Very nice recipe. I have made it myself. You can also find it here: Wolfert's Canele recipe The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is useful in finding old content.

I work with computers all day. The very last thing that I want to do when I get home is turn on another computer. I sincerely hope that we never go to electronics books in my lifetime or, god forbid, online cookbooks. I wouldn't be able to do it. Physically. But I love my paper cookbooks and scanning their pages for recipes is restful after a long work day. ← I also agree. An older used copy of Larousse Gastronomique is on the coffee table at my house. The question was really rhetorical. But honesly I am finding that being able to search within book for certain ingredients and not others etc etc is pretty useful. Another tip for those skimming through books. The page numbers are also indexed so if you get to page 30 and you can no longer arrow forward you can search for "31" and usually get the next few pages. I've found Google print very useful in finding info on "sous vide". Not much on the web but there is a good amount in books in Google Print. These books mainly cover many topics and aren't geared toward leisure (food safety and industrial techniques) so just getting the bits I need quickly is pretty useful.

It's trivial to enable prining of the Google Print pages. If you run Firefox for your browser installing an extension like GreaseMonkey along with a user script like Google Butler (which is useful in removing adds and whatnot from Google search results) enables printing of the pages. I was already running this so I didn't notice the printing was disabled for other browsers. One has to wonder about what precident publishers are setting by making the pages of their books available this way. If 85-90% of a books scanned pages are viewable and generally printable (nothing is secure on the web once you have it on the client), what claim might these same publishers have for copyright if I start handing out the pages or putting them on MY website? Because Google is large they are the only ones to reap the benifits of being able to publish copyrited material without paying? I suppose Google will say they are providing a service to the publishers that opted in for full book scans and search results. If there was truely a way to secure the pages when viewing on the web that would be no different say than viewing a book at the book store. You can sit in a book store all day and read the book if you wanted. But Google is not completely protecting the works from duplication like a book store or library does by not allowing duplication. Kinko's even enforces copyrite a lot of the time. One of the reason people aren't copying a lot of book is that it's expensive and time consuming to make a few hundred copies. Now that Google has taken the care to do the scanning and put a useful interface on the content how easy is it for a person to duplicate a fair amount of useful content without paying? Easy. Am I violating the copyrite of a work if I store the image of book page on my computer? If I view a page on Google print the file goes into my browser cache and lives on my computer. If I view all the available pages of book on Google print these pages are on my computer. Did I violate the copyrite of the book by duplicating the book to my computer by simply viewing the pages? If I print the pages is that a violation? I don't know. I haven't found where Google is telling the user they can't print or don't have the right to print what they are viewing. I applogize if this is getting off the topic of food etc. I really think that cooking books are impacted due to the nature of having a recipe in only a few pages that are returned by the search..

There are many agurments going on right now on the Google Print topic. There are a number of lawsuits as well. The Authors Guild representing 8000 authors is suing Google for copyrite infringement. I think there is a lot of grey area personally. I like the feature. I like being able to read the recipes or portions of books. I personally don't know if it will effect my buying habbits or not. I buy used most of the time anyway But take for instance the rules on this site. We can post ingedients, but cannot post the methods verbatim. Google is showing you enough information that many authors think it's a copyrite infringment. The biggest issue I have with it is that you don't opt into the program. You have to tell Google you don't want your books in the database. They force you to go to the effort to request removal. For the record you can also sign up to have your books added to the search index so like Jackal10 says if you are an author that wants your books available in all detail you can do that too..... I'll keep scraping the recipes

I wanted to share something cool and interesting, but also sort of disturbing. The new Google Print search is very cool. This search engine allows you to seach through thousands of books for certain words or phrases and then presents the info in page fomat. A cool thing you can do is search by ISBN number to get a specific book. Once you have the book you can search the specific book for words or phrases. Now the disturbing part...If you are an author of say "Cooking books" and your books are indexed by Google people can very easily read your entire recipe's. Here is how you do it... Go to http://print.google.com Enter an ISBN number. For this example lets use "0898159970" - Kitchen Sessions With Charlie Trotter (I had to pick a victim) Click the search button. Now that you have the search result (the book) click on the link. On the next page look for the "Search within this book" box and enter "salt" and click the GO button. Now what you have is a list of links to pages. Pick "Page 28" and click on it. What do you see? You see the pages from the book for "Warm asparagus soup with goat cheese" including ingredients and instructions. Scary or cool depending on who you are. If you are an author of cooking books you should be concerned and your publishers should be concerned. If you want to do something about your book being searchable go here: Google Print Library Project Exclusion Registration and Information for Publishers about the Library Project Why buy a book if you can easily scrape the contents from Google Print?

I was doing some poking around ont he internet today and I found a new site from polyscience specificaly for souse vide. www.cuisinetechnology.com They are specifically marketing immersion and bath units for sous vide. Cool. They also have one of those "anti griddles" where you can make frozen items on a griddle. A quote form the site:

I use a slow cooker a lot to make lunches for work. My current favorite slow lunch is a very basic beef and paprika dish. 5 lbs. beef stew meat (browned) 4-5 tablespoons HOT paprika 1 large sautéed onion 2 lbs. of sliced mushrooms 2 cups stock 1/4 cup veg oil ..some wine if there is an open bottle around ...sometimes garlic ..sometimes parsley I put this on low for 8 hours. After it's finished I remove the meat and other solids, pour off the fat and reduce the liquid adding salt and more HOT paprika to taste. I then mix the solids back in and set in the fridge. The next day I mix in sour cream or Greek style yogurt and pair with egg noodles or schpetzle. I'm a big fan of vacuum packing so I portion everything along with the noodles and freeze. I grab a pack on the way out the door and by lunch time the meal is slightly thawed, but still cold, ready for a little radar love.

Samuel, I've done exactly as you have illustrated. I'm almost ready to upgrade to a more professional vac machine than the tilla...almost. I make my own bags and find it sort of tedious with the Tilla with it's recommended wait time between seals and the fact that the vac runs whenever you want to make a seal effectively running it 100% more than really needed. I'm looking at buying another item just to seal bags. You can find them everywhere and are used in retail to seal poly bags. Most are called impulse sealers. There are some cheap ones on ebay also. I found some really cheap ones at my favorite cheap tool store Harbor Freight. I'm thinking of getting a 15" model. Impulse Sealer at Harbor Freight With something like this I think it would be easier to sculpt your bag size after the initial vac and seal. For those who don't know costco has a pretty good deal on Tilla bags. There is a box of 4 12" rolls and 2 8" rolls for around $38. I use the sealer for a lot of things other than sous vide hijinks so I'm always looking for a deal on the bags. Has anyone found good alternatives to the tilla bags for use with the foodsaver?

Having moved to Chicago I discoved an interesting take on eggs. Saturday nights between midnight and 2:30am the Twisted Spoke bar in Chicago features "Smut & Eggs". At midight they shout "It's time for smut" and serve anything from the brunch menu and show Porn...and not the softcore stuff. www.twistedspoke.com "What a Country!" - Yakov Smirnoff

I'm wondering if the "mushy" or "meat paste" textures people are expereincing is due to holding meat below the temperature that kills any present enzymes to long thus having the effect of partially liquifying the meat. I wonder what the level of natural (or introduced through processing) enzymes are present in meat that has no extra preperation? I know the meat aging/tenderizing process involved holding the meat at a cool (higher than long term storgage) temperature for between 10 and 28 days to the let the enzymes work on the meat. If we don't raise the temp to the enzyme death zone for long cooking times are we really in effect "cooking with enzymes"? Acids are also a factor so putting an acidic liquid in a bag with meat for a long period of time will likely also effects the texture. Think ceviche. What do people think?