paulraphael

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.

I suspect the problem is that skin gets saturated when you sous-vide it, and there's no way to crisp it without burning it, unless there's some other step to get the excess moisture out of there first. I don't know if anyone's found a good sous-vide solution to bird and fish skin (besides removing it before sv and crisping it afterwards). The one exception is sous-vide in oil, which Dave Arnold does with his infamous bionic turkey. He heats gallons of oil in a circulator (which I'm not about to do at home) ... I don't know if you could duplicate the results by putting oil or butter in the sv bag. The problem with using a bag is that all the liquid expelled by the meat stays in the bag, rather than dispersing far and wide. Enough liquid may accumulate in there to saturate the skin ... but maybe not. It would be worth trying.

Is this poultry skin that's been sous-vided?

It's easy to kill campylobacter at medium-rare temperatures. I can't find a time/pasteurization curve for campylobacter, but what I've found at Douglas Baldwin's site and in this study suggest we don't have much to worry about. Campylobacter is not very heat resistant. At 45C, it dies about 12 times as fast as lysteria, which is what's typically used to determine pasteurization times in poultry. 45°C is a very rare temperature for poultry. Pasteurization time would be about 50 minutes. At 60C (I imagine most people would call this medium) pasteurization time for campylobacter is just 8 minutes). What you can do is look at the pasteurization curves for lysteria (use a table or an app like sous-vide dash) and divide the time by 10. That should get you close enough at any temperature between 45C and 60C.

I haven't seen the searzall yet. You can get an idea by watching the videos on the cookingissues site and their kickstarter page. It appears to do a much better job than any unmodified torch. If you look back to Dave Arnold's original posts on how to sear a sous-vide turkey, you'll see the limitations of a roofing torch. They work very poorly. Besides "torch taste," which is caused by all the products of incomplete combustion, they tend to scorch the skin of a bird without making it crisp. This is because part of the crisping process comes from dehydration. If a flame is too hot, the outer layers of skin will burn before the inner layers are able to desiccate enough get crisp. Arnold was unable to get crisp skin from the roofing torch. A searzall does a few things: it converts a much greater proportion of the heat of gas combustion into radiant heat, making the torch more efficient. It almost completely eliminates partial combustion products. And it defuses the radiant heat over a large area, which tempers the heat enough to allow crisping without burning. I use a plane old propane torch quite often, and can tell from watching the videos that the searzall is much better.

You probably don't need it for this project, but the SV dash app is a great resource. Takes out most of the guesswork and helps answer just about any kind of "what if" question. Playing with also helps you develop a better mental model of heat transfer ... it will help you guess better if you ever have to

It's got nothing to do with hanging out in the open. The issue is that with forcemeats, you've got meat that's been exposed to pathogens that's now at the center of a big piece of food. With whole pieces of meat, this only happens to the surface. The surface of meat reaches pasteurizing temperature very quickly with any cooking method. But the center can take a long time, and is at risk of spending too long in the temperature range where pathogens multiply very quickly. Because of this, with forcemeats, or any kind of ground meat, rolled meat, or cut and reassembled meat, you want to make sure that it's thin enough and that the cooking temperature is high enough that the center gets out of the danger zone in a reasonable amount of time.

The latter. A lot of the health concerns we attach to s.v. are really just about new-found awareness. I wonder if ramping up temperatures during smoking is about creating conditions that will get the smoke compounds to penetrate more effectively.

A probe is the most accurate way, but since you're talking about cyclinder shaped food, predictive models should work fine. MC has tables for cylinders, or you can use SV Dash and plug in the numbers. I don't know any specifics about charcuterie, but in general you want to get things up to temperature as fast as possible. Forcemeats can be presumed contaminated all the way through, so for safety you'd want to make sure the core spends as little time as possible between fridge temperatures and 54°C.. This would suggest putting it straight in the preheated bath, and making sure the diameter isn't too large.

Modernist Cuisine Vol. 1 and the following book say it reproduces up to 55°C: International Commission on Microbiological Specifications for Foods. 1996.bacillus cereus. 20-35. In Micro-Organisms in Foods. 5. Characteristics of Microbial Pathogens. Roberts, T.A., Baird Parker, A.C. and Tompkin, R.B. eds. Published by Blackie Academic & Professional, London. I don't know the source being used by MC, and have absolutely no idea how to evaluate these sources when they come to different conclusions. I'm happy to have the file you linked as another data point. It's possible that they're using different criteria or methods. Possibly even different strains of the bug. I'd love to hear from a biologist on this issue. Up til now I never payed attention to bacillus cereus, since no one seems to use it in their pasteurization calculations for s.v.

According to Modernist Cuisine, the upper limit for c. perfringens growth is 52°C, so it should be a non-issue. I would be concerned about cooking at 54C only if there was reason to think the interior of the meat was contaminated. Especially if it were a thick piece, which would lead to the interior spending a long time at dangerous temperatures. In other words, I would want meat from a trusted source, and it must be whole (not ground, not rolled, not cut and reassembled). I only worry about pasteurizing to the core if I'm doing cook/chill or if I'm serving immune-compromised guests. Lots of food served routinely at home and restaurants is unpasteurized ... any conventionally cooked medium rare meat, any fish that's still moist, etc... The only common pathogen that I can find that seems able to reproduce at 54C is bacillus cereus (its upper limit is 55C). I don't see this organism being considered in any of the SV pasteurization models, so I don't pay attention to it. Maybe someone else can say why cooking community is less worried about this one.

I don't hold it against you. It's a reasonable way to do things in the name of convenience, assuming you're cooking at a pasteurizing temperature. I don't use this method for tender cuts because I don't like the resulting texture and moisture loss. I suspect I would like it for less tender steak cuts, like hanger and skirt.

Dave Arnold makes sous-viding a whole turkey simple. Just set up two immersion circulators with cooking oil, one at 50C or so for the light meat, one at 60C or so for the dark; extract the leg bones of the bird and replace with an assembly of aluminum pipes (think of it as a couple of routine hip and knee replacement operations), immerse the bird in the lower temperature oil bath; pump oil from the higher temperature circulator through the leg pipes. Brown the bird by pour-over frying, using a stock pot of 200C oil and a ladle. Presto.

I think Keller has moved a long way from any kind of orthodoxy, just based on looking at the dishes and components he's most famous for. I don't see much orthodoxy in the restaurant world anywhere anymore, at least when it comes to sauces. There are so many different approaches, stock-based and not. Now we have whole new sets of options opened up with pressure-cooked and sous-vide stocks, which in many case cut the cooking and prep times down to a small fraction of what's traditional. I love stocks; over the last couple of years I've changed methods and now do everything in the pressure cooker or sous-vide. I keep veal stock, vegetable stock, and chicken stock in the freezer, all with aromatics, but none with such a strong complement of them that I can't bend them in any direction I want. Most of the sauces I make don't use stock ... I make pan sauces with wine (and sometimes water) and herbs and the pan fond, and with SV bag juices if I have them. But stocks are great for when I want them. Sometimes I use straight; for fancier sauces I'll use the stock as a base for a meat-specific coulis (like jus or demi-glace) which will then be the base of a more structured sauce. It's all good ... you just have to figure out what makes sense for the ways you like to work. The idea that adding aromatics at different times gives more depth of flavor sounds good, but I haven't seen (or done) and blind tests to support this. My experience with aromatics suggests that there's probably an ideal time to add each aromatic ingredient, and an ideal temperature and length of time for extraction. This would run counter to the idea that it's beneficial to add them at such different stages of cooking. The reason i do it is convenience. The aromatics in the original stock get muted by longer cooking an evaporation, but even so, they fill in the usual flavor holes a bit, so you don't have to be as thorough when seasoning the final sauce. If you don't happen to have fresh thyme or shallots around, you can get by. Some chefs (I believe Grant Achatz among them) consider aromatics in the stock to be a shortcut / compromise and don't do it. I find it helpful ... YMMV.

It gives you a foundation of brighter flavors, so you don't have to add a full complement of aromatics with each sauce. When making a sauce I like being able to add just some basics, like shallot, and maybe some parsley to brighten it up at the end, or something that will be an accent flavor (thyme, etc.).

I posted it. Look at the screen grabs I posted from SV dash. The difference in time between the core reaching temperature and Lysteria reaching 6.5D reduction is what you're looking for. At 140F it's 20 minutes; at 150F, you don't need any additional hold time. If you're seeing different answers looking at tables, it's because people base tables on different fudge factors to keep things simple. In some cases it may be that they're using different theoretical models of pathogen behavior, or different standards of pasteurization (most people use 6.5D reduction, but I AlaMoi mentioned 10D reduction, which may a different standard). All of this is modeling, which means it's just estimation.