paulraphael

Basqucook, if you gave me your method, and a pile of data— like the starting temperature of the meat, its thickness, and the radiant temperature of your grill, I could probably calculate an approximation of all that. And you'd have to trust my methodology and math—a dubious proposition. If you're really curious about this, why don't you grill up the best burger you can, cut in half, and post a picture? I could do the same with a burger cooked s.v. and finished on a grill (or some other way). Or you can find any of the million such pictures of s.v. burgers already online.

Mitch, what are the results you're looking for?

And that's totally reasonable. For that matter I doubt everyone who likes to cook burgers s.v. wants to do it every time (Rotus just got seduced by that pic of the burger in the pan ...) I'll do it the traditional way any time I don't have time. Or access to the tools. Just as food for thought, there are a few situations when s.v. burgers are attractiveeven if you don't care about the cooking precision. One is if you want to serve medium rare burgers and there may be immune-compromised people (someone pregnant, etc.). Another is if you have to serve a lot of people and want to minimize last-minute work. It's much faster and takes less attention to sear a bunch of things before serving than to try to cook them all the way through. In the restaurant world this is called shifting the burden from service to prep. Anything you can do ahead of time makes life easier. With s.v. cook-chill techniques, you can actually do the cook portion days ahead, and not lose freshness the way you would by trying to hold onto the raw meat.

My previous favorites ca I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you've never had a burger cooked s.v. and seared on a grill.

Before making that analogy, maybe consider that most of the top contemporary chefs cook their proteins sous-vide. They still break eggs by hand. If the process doesn't appeal to you, no one's going to twist your arm. You asked why anyone would cook a burger like this. I've given a lot of reasons. This is old, old news by now. Chefs have been cooking their proteins SV for over 30 years. If it seems like a fad, it's only because us rabble haven't been able to afford the tools until recently.

Actually, I do. I promise. However, in many cases in a social setting, grilling a burger well requires more attention than I'm interested in giving it. Especially when it's some else's grill, being managed by someone else, and the burgers are competing with chicken and corn and whatever everyone else has brought over. And more importantly, grilling it well will never be as good as sous-viding well and finishing it well on a grill. Doesn't matter if it's me, or you, or Bobby Flay doing the grilling. You're going to overcook more meat on the grill or with any high-heat method.

Here's an example of SV burgers really shining. Last weekend some friends were grilling in the yard and we all brought stuff over. I've often brought burgers to this kind of thing, because I love grinding my own meat blends and making something special. But in a social grilling setting, the burgers often don't get cooked well. I'm there to hang out with friends and drink beers, not to commandeer a grill and play mr. chef. So the the cooking is a crapshoot. Especially on charcoal, which can probably give the best results, but is also harder to control, especially when you're not in charge (and don't want to be). Last weekend I made the burgers as I always do, but then cooked them sous-vide and chilled in an ice bath. I brought them over in an insulated bag just like I would with raw burgers. When it came time to cook, I dried them off, and asked my host to clear off a section of the grill that I could make extra hot. In about 4 minutes they were nicely browned, with grill marks, and while they cooked more while browning than I thought was ideal, they were still pink from edge to edge. They were honestly the best burgers I've ever had that came off a grill, and this was my first attempt at combining the two processes. It's only going to get better with some practice.

You may be disagreeing with me on how much overcooked meat constitutes "a significant portion." But I can promise that with SV, or other low delta-t cooking methods, that portion will be much, much smaller. Good technique when cooking with high heat can reduce the gradient only so much. It's ultimately a matter of physics.

By perfect, I mean evenly. But more importantly I mean avoiding overcooked edges. I've come close in a skillet, but even the best conventionally cooked medium-rare burgers will have a significant portion of meat that goes from medium to beyond well-done. Some people say they like a variety of textures. I get that. But I don't believe anyone honestly wants that variety to include completely dried-out and flavorless. 180°F ground beef = destroyed. With sous-vide, you can have your ideal level of doneness from edge to edge. Or if you want a gradient from, say, bright pink to slightly pink, you can easily create that too. And then you can put a killer crust on it, by your way of choice. You can smoke it, if you want, or deep fry, sauté, or finish on a grill for grilled flavors. No compromises. Another benefit: you can safely serve medium-rare burgers to immune compromised people. Just cook them long enough to pasteurize. It ads just over an hour to the unattended cooking time.

The point of a sous-vide burger is that it's probably the only way to cook a burger perfectly. The OP's dilemma is that half his guest want burgers that are cooked poorly, and to different degrees. Sadly, it's a pretty common one.

Isn't there some myoglobin-activating enzyme you could add to ground meat that would turn it the nasty gray people like so much, without wrecking the flavor and texture? You could also pass out sunglasses with just the right cyan tint to neutralize the pink.

Here's an idea. Limit it to medium-rare and medium-well. No one really know what they're talking about with their meat preferences, anyway. Restaurants know this ... 9 out of 10 medium rare burgers I've ever ordered came back the same shade of gray. Make the the medium-rare burgers thick, like 1-1/4 inch. Make the medium-well ones more like 3/4 inch. Cook them all about 30-45 minutes in 56-57°C bath, or whatever you like most. Sear the thick burgers in a blazing hot pan, with a lot of oil. About a minute per side. For the thin burgers, let the pan come down to more conventional temperatures and sear them more like 3 minutes per side. Flip the thin ones every 20 or 30 seconds. This will heat them through more evenly without burning the crust. To make the medium-rare burgers even more perfect, you can chill for a minute in an ice water bath right before searing. But I don't find this to be too critical. Even without they won't have much of an overcooked gradient. I think if you do this you'll get all the pink out of the thin burgers, and the thick ones will pretty close to perfect, all with minimal fuss. But you should force people to try a medium rare burger. Is it just pink aversion? If anyone's actually immune-compromised you can pasteurize the burgers by holding at 56C for an additional 70 minutes.

Makes sense. I can see the lower melting point of butter being an issue if there's a lot of it; maybe not so much if there's not so much. I'm aiming for about 4% by weight. We'll see. Butter appeals because I always have it around. It also may be an opportunity to add some dimension to the flavors, especially if it's cultured butter. The blends of meat I use are plenty beefy already.

Rotus, how much butter were you adding?

I'm hoping to use this technique to solve a problem. I've season my meat before grinding it (0.7% salt, 0.2% pepper for burgers). This has always worked well for conventional cooking, but when cooking burger sous-vide, I get a denser texture that's indicative of the salt beginning to denature the proteins and glue them together. I'd heard about this but never experienced it before. My suspicion is that sv cooking extends the meat's time in a warm but uncooked temperature range, which accelerates these reactions. Anyway, rather than trying to season the meat after grinding, which is more challenging to do evenly, I'm thinking of incorporating it into a compound butter. The fat will isolate the salt from the proteins, except for the brief period when the interior of the meat is above butter's melting range but below the cooking range. This is just 15 to 20 minutes, according to the time/temp model I used. And of course, the butter will open up the option of using leaner cuts of meat, like shin, and still getting a fat level around 20%. (And I've heard butter tastes rather good). Because of the concentration of salt and pepper, putting a pat of butter in the middle of the meat won't work. It will have to be distributed. And so the grinder question. I assume that as long as everything's cold enough it should work fine. Will report back.

There's always spun steel. Similar characteristics to iron, but they're made in a few different thicknesses. People like the thin ones for hot, fast cooking. And they're cheap.

This looks like a half dozen solutions in search of problems. I don't find any appreciable difference between my rough-bottomed and smooth-bottomed skillets. I don't ever want to have to deal with cleaning that spring thing on the handle. Hot pan handles should never be an issue anyway. There's no such thing as a cool handle if you've got lots of burners going or heat pouring out the front of the oven, so I've got a side towel on every handle no matter what. And the utility of the octagon shape confounds my imagination. There aren't so many things in the world that got good enough to leave alone a hundred years ago, but I think the humble skillet is one of them.

Has anyone added fat to burgers by chilling butter, dicing it, and adding it along with the meat? I'm thinking about trying this to kill a couple of birds.

It seems I only noticed a problem because I happened to look at the screen during the couple of minutes it was adjusting. I haven't tried duplicating the circumstances.

I wrote to Anova about this ... they said it's normal behavior. When you adjust the temperature downward, it modulates (or "reloads" as their rep said) by dropping the temperature down and then bringing it back up after a few minutes. He said "it's complicated," (transation: "I don't want to try to describe PID algorithms to clods like you") but basically it's a way to re-stabilize without risking the temperature going too high.

There's no really meaningful way to calculate the temperature of a broiler or grill. They cook almost entirely by radiant heat, so knowing the temperature (of what … the flames? The metal parts? the ceramic coals in the grill?) or even the BTU/hr rating doesn't say much. Gas burns cleanly, with very little radiant heat. The flames may be burning at over 2500°F, but you can put your hand right next to them. Gas broilers and grills have to work by heating up something else, like metal or ceramic, that can radiate heat efficiently. There may be a metric for radiant heat output, but it's nothing as simple as a temperature, and as far as I know none of the manufacturers use it.

Can anyone comment on the often huge discrepancies between the Modernist Cuisine tables and Sous Vide Dash app? So far I've only looked at steaks and medallions, in pork and beef. Time recommendations (to reach core temperature) are greater in SV Dash by 60% to 100%. If the MC cuisine times are accurate, then people using Dash are just cooking for extra time and may not notice a difference. But if the Dash times are accurate, I'd expect people to be screaming about the MC cuisine tables leading to undercooking.

In a blind tasting, everyone is one of those folks. You could probably some badly refined canola oils if you tried hard enough. These can develop a fishy off-flavor when heated. They might have been common at one point, but I haven't encountered it in a long time. FWIW, when I staged at a Michelin 3-star seafood restaurant in NYC, they used canola oil for sautéing everything. They used it by the gallon tin. The executive chef believed olive oil was too assertive to use on fish of that quality, unless it was part of a condiment. I'd happily use canola, but around here the high-heat safflower oils are cheaper and seem to work just as well.

My torch will work, but according the site it's much less powerful than their recommended model. And since power is the whole point of this thing, I don't know if it would make sense to get a searzall without upgrading. Something to consider for anyone who doesn't have the top torch ... an upgrade can effectively double the price of this endeavor.

That's just an adaptation of a sample recipe in the MC books. I tweaked it a bit for my own flavor preferences, and to give a more normal strength stock.