paulraphael

Interesting! I didn't know you could liberate collagen from hard bone. Does this suggest mean that bones of any type will eventually break down in a pressure cooker? What's left from that matrix if you render all the collagen? P.S. when I see $1.99/lb at whole foods, I worry that those are the neck bones of employees who asked for time off.

I very much like SV for tender cuts. I think these cuts have to be cooked with precision, to avoid over softening and drying out, but I like the perfection of the cook, and the lack of overcooked meat around the edges. It's also the only way I have of serving a lot of people simultaneously. Takes all the guesswork and panic out of the equation. I agree with gfweb that a higher temperature will help. I used to think of myself as a rare meat guy, but SV experiments have shown me that I like medium rare beef much more. Part of this is that when you conventionally cook a steak to rare (say 127) only the center will be cooked that low. Everything out to the edge will be progressively more done. The part of that steak you like the most is probably in the 130s. I generally set my circulator to 55C / 131F, in order to cook the meat to 54C / 129F. A few degrees higher is still plenty pink. Yes to what everyone else said about searing. Your last two steaks had trouble because the first two cooled the pan. Cleaning the pan and taking more time to reheat would fix this. A big fat griddle also works great.

Also worth considering that grain, by definition, is from grass. We're making a distinction between the seeds and the leaves, but cattle living in the wild would be eating a certain amount of both. There is some truth that cattle have health problems when they eat too much of the wrong types of grains. This happens, but is universally considered bad farming practice. Good farmers can raise very healthy cattle, whether they're finished on greens, silage, dried grass, grain, or on combinations. The best beef I've had has been finished on a combination of green grass and grains.

I use a combination of methods like the ones mentioned here, depending on how refined a sauce I'm going for and how much time I want to spend. The simplest / most rustic is just to deglaze the searing pan with the bag juices, and reduce all the way, until the goopy proteins dehydrate and turn a dark mahogany color. Then just deglaze with wine or stock (or even water), season however you like, and strain. The disadvantage to this method is you'll lose all the lighter aromatic flavors from the juices while you amplify the savory and roasted flavors.

Sorry, I haven't re-read that thread in a long time. The other stovetop methods mentioned in the thread are less dependent on a hugely thick piece of meat (but I find that at least 1.25" is helpful). I'm still curious about your SV results. They're not typical.

What are the advantages of SV over a pressure cooker for this kind of intense maillard effect?

The stovetop-to-oven method works well, but can take a while to dial in (you can't see what's going on in an oven). I believe this method evolved to make best use of the limited burner space at restaurants. If you don't face those recommendations, there are ways to get results that are at least as good on the stove. Heston's method should work well. So does the Ducasse method (at the beginning of the thread I linked above). Easiest of all is to start in a blazing pan with high heat oil and sear both sides. Then pour off the oil, and turn the heat very low. Add butter. Flip the steak every minute or two, and keep basting it with the browning butter. The temperature gradient won't be as minute as with a sous-vide steak, but it should be pretty unintrusive.

T-bone is still a tender cut ... part strip and part fillet. It likewise doesn't need to be tenderized with long cooking times. I suspect you'd be happier if the cook times were under 4 hours.

And the punchline ... I got a WS gift certificate for Xmas. Anyone want to buy it at a discount? It's got $85 value on it. Yours for $65.

Has anyone done this kind of before / after weighing with a traditional braise? I have trouble believing you'd actually lose more moisture with SV than with a dutch oven. The differences should lie primarily in temperature control.

Even if it did, the price you'd pay in the texture of the meat wouldn't be worth it. Tender meat shouldn't be cooked longer than necessary. A half hour extra won't do any harm, but if you start adding hours, you'll get a texture that's both mushy and dry.

I use ziplocs and routinely keep stuff 2 weeks. I haven't encountered evidence that ziplocs are less safe for cook / store than vacuum bags, although they're not as good at preventing spoilage (ziploc bags are more oxygen-permeable, but they don't let pathogens sneak in). I kept some chicken once for 3 weeks and it spoiled. Which is to say, it smelled nasty when I opened the bag and we threw it out. Spoilage bacteria are much less well studied than pathogens. You're much more likely to have spoilage surprises with SV than pathogen surprises. It's a good idea to keep your fridge as close to 32F/0C as you can without stuff freezing. Most fridges have a pretty big gradient from the coldest to the warmest spots. It's helpful to figure these out and store your SVd food where it's really cold.

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.