paulraphael

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.

My Anova went a little weird on me last night. I was cooking in a cooler at 59°C. I stopped it at one point to change the temp to 58. It had been rock steady at 59, but I looked up and noticed it was dipping to 57.9. Then 57.8. When it got down to 57.6, I realized it just wasn't heating at all, even though the circulator was on, and the screen showed everything running. I restarted it, and it almost immediately came up to 58 and stabilized. No issues for the last 2 hours of my cooking. So ... it seems to have crashed when I paused it to reset the temperature. Has anyone else experienced this?

Olive oil when I want it to taste like olive oil, or very refined safflower oil when I want something that's neutral or can handle high heat. I do a lot of sous-vide cooking of proteins, which means browning food as quickly as possible in a hot pan. I find olive oil unsuitable for this. I don't get scorched oil, because I can get food in fast enough to cool it, but the pan frequently goes up in flames from oil vapors carried up in the splatter. This never happens when I use more refined oils. There are many high heat oils that just as good as safflower. I made my choice based on the quality and price of products where I shop. Besides heat tolerance, I often don't want an oil with an assertive flavor. Olive oil has one, and so doesn't go with everything. I don't usually cook in butter when searing. I'll use a neutral oil, and then if finishing in the pan, turn the heat down and add butter. Baste with it while it browns. Much better butter flavor than you can get from clarified butter.

Water 100% Carrots 15% Leeks, whites and 1” of greens 15% Celery 10% Tomato, seeded 7% Parsley 1.5% Chives 0.3% Garlic 0.2% Coriander seeds 0.15% Black Peppercorns 0.15% Star Anise 0.07% Cloves 0.05% Bay Leaf 0.01% Next time I'm going to put in mushrooms, probably 7%, and a bit of white wine. This could be really freely interpreted and still be delicious.

It's a nice chart, and I'm wondering how well it corresponds with other people's experience with salmon ... like the "too toothy" range of temperatures. I haven't heard that elsewhere.

Dave Arnold and Co. at cookingissues.com made some remarks about SV salmon that I haven't seen elsewhere. In their chart they found different ranges where they liked the texture, separated by ranges that had flaws. I don't know how much of this is quirks of their tasting panel, or of the variety / sample of fish they used. I'm looking at other people's recommendations and they're all over the place. No comment yet from me because I've yet to try it. I'm hoping to get really close on the first try, because the only salmon I really like (culinarily and ecologically) costs a bunch.

You have a lot of leeway with the amount of water. No matter what, you want to use less than you would with a conventional stock, because as you said, there won't be any evaporation. But beyond that it's up to you depending on how strong you want the stock to be. As a starting point, I'd suggest the same quantities of ingredients you'd use for a conventional stock, except for the water. Base that quantity on the final yield you expect. In other words, If a recipe normally gives you 2L of stock, start with 2L water. You should end up with roughly 2L stock, depending on how much liquid the ingredients contribute and absorb. And the strength of flavor should be similar, although the flavor profile will be different, and the aromas should be stronger. I find the stock recipes in the MC series to be designed for very strong stocks. I'm making stocks more for everyday use so I use more water. I get amazing flavor, but at conventional concentrations. Nickrey is right that a pressure cooker is the better tool for most stocks. SV is ideal for more delicate flavors, like vegetable and seafood stocks. The sv veggie stock I made last week is amazingly vibrant, and was pretty easy. Next time I may use the slicing blade on the food processor to make shorter work of it. These stocks only need to cook for 3 hours.

Some more cooking time puzzles. I picked up some Berkshire pork chops for a lunch tomorrow. I'm used to loin chops, but they had some beautifully marbled shoulder/butt steaks. The butcher told me I had to try those ... that the flavor was even better than the loin. I'm used to butt as a brazing cut, and assumed they'd require a long cook. But she said she cooks them up fast on the grill and they're as tender as you could ever hope for. I remain skeptical. And she didn't know much about sous-vide. I've got them in a 59°C bath right now, and plan to try them after 2 hours. If still tough I'll go for 6, or go overnight. Has anyone tried this cut before? The only thing I've SV'd is a similar quality kurobuta chop from the short loin, which was predictably tender as soon as it came to temp. I noticed that Doug Baldwin gives times of 7 hours for chops from the rib end, and 10 hours for chops from the sirloin end. I find this curious, since with conventional cooking I don't treat these cuts so differently. Thoughts?

Do you not use Nathan's tables because you found them unreliable, or because they're harder to use? According to my comparison, if the MC tables are accurate then the SV Dash times will work. They'll just be overkill, by a lot. But if the SV Dash times are accurate, the MC tables have serious problems. Which I'd think we would have heard people screaming about by now, right?

Ok, I have a new contender: Delapietra's Gourmet Meats, on Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn Heights/downtown Brooklyn. I called several shops, including Heritage Meats, Otomanelli & Sons, and Florence about dry aging a chuck roll for me. Everyone hemmed and hawed about it ... either they couldn't get the cut in the quality I wanted, or they had reasons (dubious) why it was a bad idea. Rob Delapietra said no problem, that they have prime chuck subprimals in all the time, and that they'd dry age any portion that I wanted for as long as I wanted. And when he found out my plan (steaks, sous-vided for 48 hours) he said "that's gonna be freakin' amazing." I went in and discussed the options and the yield and everything else, and he cut for me while I watched. No charge for the aging (I payed up front for fresh weight) and he gave me a very friendly discount for buying a big piece. The meat itself looked excellent ... not insanely well marbled but well above average. And the aging cabinet looks like a very clean, custom installation. Not just an improvised corner of the walk-in, which you see in a lot of shops. They're about a 5 minute walk from the borough hall station, where quite a few trains stop. Definitely not the most convenient location for me, but reasonable for special purchases. I can't wait to try these steaks at the end of June.