paulraphael

I just made SV'd short ribs for the first time, and holy wow did they exceed my expectations. I thought this was going to take a few trials to get right. When I warm up the rest of them I'll try to take some pics. The ribs are pink, juicy, and fork-tender. I didn't use a knife on them at all. the meat fell off the bone when I unbagged them, but held its shape and could be cut into little blocks. The meat itself was pedestrian stuff from the local supermarket ... black canyon angus, which seems a couple of notches up from bargain basement. It was $6-something a pound in NYC. I browned them lightly, packaged in ziplocks with the deglazing liquid and a bit of stock, and then blanched each bag for a minute in simmering water. Then I pre-cooked in a 40°C/104°F water bath for 3.5 hours to speed up enzymatic reactions, and then turned up to 60C/140F for the remainder of the 72 hours. I made sauce from a beef coulis, which was made from ground shin meat and browned bones and mirepoix vegetables sous-vided with some beef stock, thickened with a bit of xanthan and lambda carrageenan (the stock was pressure cooked from roasted oxtail and ground shin and chuck and all the usual other stuff). The sauce had reduced red wine and shallots, porcini mushrooms, a bit of port, and thyme and rosemary. I cooked pearl onions on the side, sv. with a little beef stock. This is only one trial, so no way to say for sure. I think the pre-cook at 40°C does a lot of tenderizing, and may even enhance flavors. Many of the relevant enzymes become inactive above 40 or 45C.

When I cooked burgers in a 56C bath and finished on a friend's gas grill, they didn't look raw inside. Just a nice medium rare. The grill took a while to brown them, so they ended up with a temperature gradient. But it was more like medium-rare to medium-well (with very little of the latter. There still wasn't any dry, gray meat anywhere. They looked really great. Some of the pictures I see surprise me; people will say they cooked at 55C, but the meat looks horror-movie red. I wonder if this is a photography issue and not a cooking one.

Hmmm, I haven't experienced this. The only thing I've noticed is that I could get away with salting the meat before grinding when cooking conventionally, but not when cooking s.v. ... the salt would lead to a firmer, overly cohesive texture for my tastes. Are you using a vacuum machine?

I don't know about shellfish in the shell, but try scallops in 50C/122F bath for 30 to 90 minutes (depending on size). lightly brine first and sear afterwards.

Blanching before sautéing is a restaurant technique. It's not required, and it's more work than cooking in one step, but it off-loads the work from service to prep. In general there is unlimited time for prep, but at service everything hits the fan at once, and so the fewer steps (and the less attention required for each one) the better. Having your greens properly blanched and the colors "set" means you can sauté and season at the last minute, quickly, and with very little to worry about. These techniques also work well for dinner parties ... another situation where it helps to cut down on things to do at service. You may not be cooking a la carte for 200 people, but you probably want to hurry up and join the party, and if you're doing it right you already have a glass of wine in one hand.

Rotus, I've thought about that. I suspect it would work well, but hasn't been my first choice, since it's usually sold at boutique butchers and farmer's markets and is priced higher than what I usually put in stock. But it may be worth considering for ecological reasons. I'd still have to pick a cut.

I just made my first batch using new methods (pressure cooked stock, sous-vide jus). I'm sold on the method and am now back to tweaking the flavors. I made the stock with a combination of roasted oxtail and ground shin meat, and then the jus/coulis more ground shin meat, and some browned chuck (a piece of 7-bone steak I had in the fridge) The result is good, but the flavor is a roasted beefiness that emphasizes the deeper, darker beef flavors. I'm interested in balancing things a bit. Maybe I can do a bit with aromatics (I didn't put any celery in this batch ... a bit might help). But I'm also interested in other beef cuts for the jus. Any thoughts on what cuts might emphasize brighter, grassier, iron-y kinds of flavors? Helpful if they're also relatively lean, cheap, and available. I'm open to other ways of balancing the flavors as well. Edited to add: I didn't get a chance to experiment with cheeks. How would you describe the flavor?

The issues you could conceivably face with long pasteurization time are with bacterial toxins (which can be heat tolerant) and with spoilage bacteria (which are much less understood than pathogens). Suppose, for example, you had rolled meat to a cylinder several inches thick, and there were portions from the outside that would take 6 hours to pasteurize. Those could easily spend enough time in a high-growth temperature range to create nasty stuff. There are some threads about noxious green goo in sous-vide bags, which is probably the result of spoilage bacteria. I haven't heard of pathogenic toxins building up in this situation. But it could happen. I can't see the scale of the roll you made. I'm guessing it's around 3" diameter, which is perfectly safe. Much bigger and you could be inviting problems.

It should. I calculated with SV Dash that a 3" diameter cylinder would pasteurize at that temperature in 3 hours, 20 minutes. At 3.5", you start getting into times greater than 4 hours.

I'm questioning the tool and procedure, not the ingredient.

I'm no expert on paella, but I'm suspicious of definitions that depend on a particular tool or procedure. For years traditionalists like Marcella Hazan said that risotto was only possible if one followed a very strict set of procedures in an open pan with constant stirring. Now almost everyone who's tried it in a pressure cooker has kept doing so, including some prominent Italian chefs. We've come to our senses and defined risotto by the result, not by what the wizard is doing behind the curtain.

Sounds like an engineered and improved fillet. I'm also curious about the sanitation issues with this kind of rolled meat.

One non-stainless thing I love is bamboo flat spatulas. I have ones like these in a couple of sizes, and haven't had a wooden spoon (something I don't understand) in about 10 years. These spatulas are great for stirring and are the best things I've ever used for scraping a pan while deglazing. I also like the Matfer plastic fish spatula, which is handy about once a month when I use a nonstick pan.

Stainless. Because it works, is low-maintenance, can handle any temperature it's going to encounter, and lasts forever.

Collagen breaks down faster above 160F. Not better. But as Nickrey says, choose whatever temperature you like. The juices will indeed have less body because they haven't been reduced. This has upsides and downsides. I depend a lot less on reduction than I did ten years ago, because I've become aware of all the flavors lost through the process, but you can certainly reduce bag juices to any degree you like. As you said, using ziplock bags isn't "bonafide SV." We call it SV because we're stuck with an inaccurate name for the process, and because the proposed alternatives have been clumsy. Technically speaking, what I do is not SV, while making pickles in a vacuum bag in the fridge is. I use ziplocks for a lot of reasons (in addition to the price and size of a vacuum machine). As do the chefs / researchers at the International Culinary Center. What we're all really talking about is cooking with a low temperature delta in a sealed, humid environment. Vacuum bags may or may not be part of this. A circulator may or may not be part of this. For many things you can get the same effect with a combi oven, and while this is even farther removed from SV, it's really the same cooking technique.

Yes, that would be possible. I think I won't have to do this, though. The temperature the manufacturer gave me is probably as low as I need to go. There's egg custard in my recipe as well, and that needs cooking.

I don't understand this. Collagen breaks down according to time and temperature; not according to anyone's liking. An immersion circulator simply lets you control the environment to achieve whatever your liking happens to be. You're also free to check on what's going on inside. I use ziplock bags instead of a vacuum machine; one of the advantages is I can check on the textures during a long cook. And holy wow, do you ever get the makings of a sauce. To such a degree that I've incorporated an SV element in most of my stocks and all my jus/coulis making. Bag juices are like gold, because you lose none of the aromatic compounds. The techniques involved are not the same as with a braise, and that's kind of the point. You have to figure out how to work with the strengths of a technology. Technically yes, SV cooking is poaching (or in some cases is a close cousin). While I love braising, I find myself doing my old braised dishes in parts, typically with a S.V. step because the advantages of the oven (the combination of radiant and moist heat, for example) are outweighed by the disadvantages (inadequate thermostat). I can't get the oven as low as I want. A combi or cvap oven would be a totally different story ... If I had an oven that was reasonably accurate and that could hold temperature down below 150F, I'd probably do more traditional braising. These ovens aren't terribly stable, but a heavy braising pot events out the bumps well enough. Unfortunately, as of this writing, such ovens are way out of my reach (as S.V. was a few years ago). Re: ovens with thermostats ... my point is that this is a 20th century invention. Considering that people have been cooking for thousands of years, it's not significantly more new-fangled than an immersion circulator. Not that this distinction matters to me. But it might matter to people who make appeals to tradition or worse ... "authenticity."

Finally got a scientist on the phone. She said 80°C. I asked what happens at lower temps and she said that fractionally smaller amounts of the gum would hydrate. So, at 75°C, maybe only 80% or so of the gum would disolve and contribute to thickening. And she said this was independent of the time spent at temperature. She said this had to do with normal organic variation from one molecule to the next.

I don't think silicon is the answer. In every restaurant kitchen I've seen a cotton side towel was draped over every pan handle. No pot holders to be seen. This is on ranges spewing many times the BTUs of any home range. I've got some scorched towels around here, but nothing dramatic. There may be something funny with the burners on that stove that's setting things on fire.

I've been experimenting with stabilizer blends for ice cream, and am currently using a variation on one recommended by Francisco Migoya: xanthan, locust bean gum, and guar gum in a ratio of about 1 : 1.4 : 1.4. My one hesitation with this blend is that LCB requires a lot of heat (according to some sources) to hydrate fully. Modernist Cuisine and a couple of other sources say it needs to go above 90°C. I'd like to not have to cook the dairy this high. Some other sources say LCB only needs 80°C, and others say 47°C. This is a lot of variation, and I'm curious if it's because of actual variation in versions of the product, different standards of solubility (including different amounts of time), or because someone's misinformed. If it's just a question of time, I'm wondering if I can get away with lower temperatures, because my base has some egg custard and needs to be cooked anyhow (I cook in a water bath for about 30 minutes but could go longer ... temperature of at least 79°C) and the mix then ages at least 8 hours in the fridge. Any thoughts? Edited to add: I've been trying to get information from the manufacturer, with no success. My LCB comes from CP Kelco, who were nice enough to send a sample, but I can't get them to return email or phone calls.

I assume anyone rejecting sous-vide for anti-technology reasons would also reject thermostat-controlled ovens.

Do you know what wolf range it is? I wonder if it's a really old commercial one.

This one from Zojirushi. A friend of mine has it and won't shut up out it.

There's overlap, since some rice cookers are themselves pressure cookers. I use a pressure cooker for rice, and like the results a lot. I also the stovetop, especially when Im not sure how much water the rice is going to need. Being able to see what's going on helps to adapt if I've guessed wrong. I've used my girlfriend's rice cooker several times, and have a hard time with it. It's not a good one ... kind of the worst of all worlds. It's nothing like the high-end, fuzzy logic rice cookers that people say give them perfect rice every time. These seem ideal if you make rice often enough to justify a dedicated appliance. My favorite use of the pressure cooker for rice is risotto. It cooks in 7 to 9 minutes without stirring and is as good as anything I've made traditionally. I think the method for Japanese sticky rice would be similar, except you rinse the sticky rice for a long time first.

Regarding Migoya's using an 85°C water bath ... this may have to do with the hydration temperature of the gums he uses.