paulraphael

By the way, if you like a thermal gradient, you can accomplish this with sous-vide, also. I'd argue you can do a better job than with conventional cooking, because you can be more precise. You can have your gradient go from rare to medium (I don't believe anyone actually likes well-done steak). There will always be a minute well-done layer from the searing process, but you can make make it a fraction the thickness of what you'd get from high temperature cooking. You could try cooking SV at 53°C for 1 hour 50 minutes, removing the bags, turning up the circulator to 60°C, and putting the bags in for another 10 minutes.

For a ribeye, I set the circulator to 55°C. Target temperature for the meat is 54°C (129F). But meat temperatures up to 56C are quite good. 1.5" is the perfect thickness for SV ... thick enough to be easy to sear without overcooking, thin enough to cook quickly without drying out. 1.75 hours should be plenty if you start at fridge temperature. I agree with everyone that you should salt after unbagging. With these short cooking times you don't have to worry about the meat getting cured by salt, but I don't like salt getting into the bag juices. Salty bag juices are usually useless for incorporating into a pan sauce. You might consider pre-searing in addition to post-searing. It's unnecessary, and its utility is debated. However, blind tests by Dave Arnold's crew at cookingissues.com suggested that searing before and after gave the tastiest crust. A pre-sear also makes the final sear go a bit faster. If you sear on a grill, get it stupid hot. Ideally you want to brown each side in a minute or less. I'd skip the "char crust." A nice steak doesn't need a commercial seasoning product. Besides, the company claims their product "seals in the juices," which is a lie. So I wouldn't trust them on anything. If you want to aid the formation of a crust, you can try a very light dusting of baking soda and dextrose (as I've discussed elsewhere). If you get the grill insanely hot it's not necessary.

yes, baking soda. I got my dextrose on amazon. You might also find it at a baking supply store. Baking stores often also have a product called "atomized glucose," which for this purpose will be interchangeable—but it's not interchangeable in other more precise uses, including pastry and ice cream. Atomized glucose is glucose syrup that's been dehydrated, but it still has significant water content. Dextrose powder is just pure glucose. For goosing maillard reactions, precision is unimportant, and you can use any reducing sugar. Some other possibilities include glucose syrup, corn syrup, hfcs, fructose, trimoline, and honey. You just can't use table sugar (fructose).

How about just not overcooking them? Even broth isn't the same as jus.

Fish is just about the only thing I brine. Part of the reason that it keeps it from oozing slime in the s.v. bag. Oil in the bag looks like just another approach.

I would strongly advise against presalting, since the meat is in danger of curing on the surface with the long cooking times you're dealing with. You don't want to serve corned beef. There aren't any advantages to presalting a piece of long-cooked beef. You can do it before searing. But long cooking really isn't advisable for this cut in the first the place. I would cut it into 1.5" thick rib steaks. A whole rib roast will take a very long time to cook to the center. These long cooking times are no friend to tender cuts of beef. Very likely the meat near the surface will get both mushy and dried out. With moderately thick steaks, you can s.v. them at 55°C for just a couple of hours.

Oils can add flavor, but it's been pretty well shown to be a superficial phenomenon. Just like with traditional confit. You get the same effect by adding the oil after cooking.

That looks like a good method in a lot of ways, but for all the work it makes compromises I doubt I'd be happy with. It neglects—entirely—the real challenge of roasting a whole bird, which is that the dark meat ideally cooks to a higher temperature (5°–7°F) than the white meat. This is difficult to accomplish, especially considering geometry of a bird, which makes the white meat cook faster. Trussing exacerbates the problem, despite what some people write about it. ChefSteps implicitly acknowledges that they're going to overcook the white meat, so they inject brine (so we won't notice). Brine denatures the proteins a bit so they don't don't expel as much liquid upon cooking. But most of what's going on is just adding water. This gives a juicy sensation in the mouth, but it also dilutes the flavors of the chicken juices. This is a problem I have with most brined poultry, fwiw ... it seems juicy, but is bland. The cool thing about this method is the uniformly browned skin. I've never bothered trying for that, since I'm not serving the meat from the back. But it does look nice. This is a best-in-show chicken from an esthetic perspective. In terms of cooking / flavor / texture, the method should be modified to slow the cooking of the white meat. Selective barding (with fat, or just with several layers of foil) is an ideal way to do this. You'd probably have to leave foil over the breasts for the entire low-temp portion of the cook. Getting this right would take some experimenting. You'd also need to invent an effective way to hold the foil in place on a vertically hanging bird. I think if you did this, you could dispense with the brine. Get a good, air-dried chicken, salt it and leave it overnight in the fridge and it will brown up just fine. If you want to give the browning action a kick, brush the bird lightly with something containing a reducing sugar (honey, or just a tiny bit of dextrose).

I've never heard the claim made by someone who cited evidence, experience, or even a theory. Really doesn't make sense to me. Oil won't enter the meat (molecules are too large). And juices will leave the meat (whether there's oil there or not). The only things I can think of that will effect the travel of anything in or out of the meat are ones that work osmotically, like aqueous solutions. Brine is an example. For obvious reasons I don't put brine in sous-vide bags. I often put in a bit of stock, because I use ziploc bags and need to push out air. But increasingly I've just used water, and really can't tell a difference in the meat, or even in the bag juices after they're reduced and browned.

We'll need another thread on how to calibrate your altimeter / barometer. Maybe with a thermapen?

First time through I missed that the kick is gluten-free. I'm stealing that.

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the-2014-haters-guide-to-the-williams-sonoma-catalog-1667452305 Sample ... Item #66-5832014 – Hot Chocolate Pot ($60) Copy: "New & exclusive! Award-winning mid-century design from the Dansk Kobenstyle collection. Engineered for uniform heating in heavy-gauge steel with a stay-cool teak handle." Drew Says: Yes, a hot chocolate pot. Because a fondue pot wasn't quite useless enough. Hey, you know what other kind of pot is good for making hot chocolate? A POT. Like, any regular pot that you already have. I know sometimes it dribbles down the side when you pour the chocolate out, making you want to kill God. But if you use a ladle, you'll be fine...

If the question is about All Clad, then no question, cast iron will make searing easier. The bigger the piece of meat, and the weaker the burner, the more difference it will make. If you're on a 2200 btu/hr restaurant burner, I doubt the difference would matter. The key is that all clad stainless pans, structurally, are lightweight aluminum. They're very responsive, but don't store a lot of energy. FWIW, I have a 10" AC stainless pan and relatively weak stove, and I use them in concert to sear stuff all the time. But if I'm dealing with a bigger piece of meat, or something I want to sear very quickly without risk of overcooking what's underneath, I turn to other choices. These include cast iron, 2.5mm copper (stainless lined), or stainless with a fat aluminum disk bottom.

Hardly any stainless steel pans use stainless for more than the cooking surface, so there's no way to generalize. A thin aluminum pan with stainless cladding won't sear as well as most cast iron pans. A heavy copper pan with stainless cladding will sear better than most. Searing ability comes down to two factors: heat capacity (which is the specific heat of the material multiplied by its mass), and conduction. High heat capacity means the pan can store a lot of energy, and high conduction means it can deliver it quickly to the food. Cast iron has fairly low specific heat, but since cast iron pans are usually massive, they have very high heat capacity. Iron is a moderately good conductor of heat. Cast iron pans sear better than most others, although heavy copper or very heavy aluminum can be even better. I like stainless steel better than other surfaces, partly because the bright color makes it easy to see how browned the pan drippings are. As much as I like my cast iron pans, they're my least favorite for searing when I want to make a pan sauce.

It's pretty safe to sear things by eye. IME, there are too many variables (temperatures of the pan, of the food, dryness of the food, proteins and sugars available on the surface etc.) to be able to pinpoint a time that will always give the results you want. One thing that can help is to prepare a concoction that accelerates the Maillard reactions. I used to make a solution in water, but find it's easier and probably better to just use dry powders. Mix 2:3 (by weight) baking soda and dextrose. Sprinkle a dusting onto the surfaces you'll sear. you can do this along with salting. Browning will take off much faster than without. If you have a very high output range, and are able to sear with your pans at restaurant temperatures, this may lead to charred pan drippings. But I find it helpful most of the time on my typical home stove.

You're a little confused here. Spores don't reproduce. They activate, and in doing so, become bacteria, which do all the reproducing and toxin production. The bacteria in question here are clostridium botulinum, which are mostly of concern to us because they reproduce on food in anaerobic, low-acid environments. In doing so, they contaminate the food with botulinum toxin. The thing to understand about spores is that they are produced by certain bacteria as soon as conditions become inhospitable to the active form of the bacteria. And they are designed to survive. They just hang out, like inert little concrete bunkers, until conditions become favorable. Then they wake up, becoming active bacteria, reproducing at rates determined by temperature, pH, and available nutrients. Shalmanese is right that the risk of botulism from garlic-infused oil is low. The trouble is that if botulinum spores are present on the garlic (certainly possible) the anaerobic environment of the oil at room temperature is a perfect environment for botulinum to do its thing. Odds may be low, but stakes are very high. The refrigerator is obviously much better, but fridge temps just slow down the reproduction. You'd ideally want to use refrigerated oil within a couple of weeks.

Last week it was duck jus used as a foundation for the turkey sauce. Last night, two bags of chicken thighs to give us some quick and easy protein for a busy week.

Yeah, me too. I like cinnamon, but my girlfriend hates it. I've found cardamom substitutes well in every context, and I often like the new version better than the original.

I've just blogged about this method in some depth here, and posted an updated recipe.

All good advice from everyone here. In general you can expect to get wildly different time/temperature recommendations for long-cooked sous-vide dishes, because there's a range of effects people might like. The 10-hour times at high temperatures are going to give results like a traditional braise. The longer times at lower temperatures are going to give results that are more steak-like ... pink and tender, but cohesive. And there's everything in between. It's important to understand the effect someone was striving for before taking their recommendation.

I pre-salt the turkey with 3-5 grams salt / kg turkey, about 24 hours before cooking. If it's an air-dried bird (greatly preferred, I'll do this with the bird loosely covered in the fridge. If it's not air dried, I'll leave it completely uncovered. I don't go as far as calling this dry-brining, because the salt levels aren't really high enough. With high enough salt levels to truly brine a large bird, this process would take well over a week. If you calculate the diffusion rate of salt though flesh you'll see why. You also risk curing the meat, because, the salt concentrations will be very high at first, and will stay high until the salt has diffused a ways (a long time). In general I think unbrined poultry is better. But you have you have to cook it well, which is a challenge. Brining provides insurance against overcooking, but comes at a cost. Not just the time required (which is also time during which the bird is becoming less fresh) but also in the dilution of the natural juices. You get more liquid in a brined bird, but the flavors aren't as concentrated.

I'll be doing the Turkey and sauce and stuffing at my girlfriend's family's place. It's a few hours away, so dinner will depend on my not forgetting anything important back in Brooklyn. The turkey will be poached and roasted, with a sauce made from a duck coulis, and stuffing made with wild mushrooms. Blog bost with turkey theory and recipe here.

And of course what's on the outside. The bones I use are roughly trimmed carcasses from birds I've roasted. Quite a bit of meat on each one. If you buy bones from a butcher they're always roughly trimmed as well. I care about the meat more than the marrow. Agree that clean bones don't contribute flavor unless the marrow gets out (and then it's marrow flavor, nothing else). This is pretty well established now.

Interesting about the glaze. However, my general sense is that if a living creature can be raised, slaughtered, processed, shipped, and sold at retail in the developed world for under $4/lb, something's probably amiss.

Thighs often cost less per pound than wings and have much more meat on them. Great flavor. They're my favorite supplement to bones. If you want even more gelatin you can add some feet ... tons of gelatin and cheap.