nickrey

Contact Dale Prentice at Sous Vide Australia. www.sousvideaustralia.com He has plenty and the price is reasonable.

It would seem the problem is more related to using cheap wine than it is to the variety. Pinot Noir (which is all Red Burgundy) has thin skins and does not impart a dark purple colour to wine when it is made. If you are getting a very dark Pinot Noir or Burgundy, I'd suggest that it is not what is advertised on the label. Pinot can only grow well in cooler climates, hence good Pinots come out of Oregon in the US. If it is grown if warmer climates, it will develop large amounts of sugar and taste something like dried raisins or stewed fruit. My recommendation for cooking with wine is to use the cheapest wine that you would conceivably drink. Taste a teaspoonful. If you don't mind it, use it. After this it is a matter of controlling your cooking and your seasoning. If the dish is too bitter, which can be caused through tannins from skins and seeds, then add some salt. As for all cooking, it's all about balance and adjusting seasoning to make the dish work for you.

Yes on both counts, as long as they are cooked to your satisfaction prior to chilling.

Sake seems to be going much more mainstream. The Wine and Spirits Education Trust has just launched a level 3 award in Sake (see here). Only available in UK at present.

I did a sous vide demonstration recently and one of the dishes was sous vide asparagus with a 63.2C egg (one hour) plus sous vide hollandaise delivered via a Whipped Cream Siphon. The recipe for the Hollandaise came from chefsteps.com, who also now have an app for the iPhone.

2 days is fine without freezing. Just make sure you cool it quickly in an ice bath (ice with some water) rather than water with a few small blocks of ice. If you're using it in a risotto, I'd just bring it up to around 50C and then put it in the risotto at the resting phase prior to serving.

No I haven't with any of the circulators as yet haresfur. If the ANOVA drifts, it should be easy to fix as you can recalibrate.

If your rig is stable and if it is close enough to temperature, temperature doesn't matter particularly. Sous vide cooking is not rocket science nor does it depend on extremely fine differentiations in temperature. However, as PedroG said, if you want to surf the edge you'd better have an accurate thermometer. If you're worried, get a reference thermometer and get it calibrated annually. If the reference thermometer is too expensive, perhaps the issue isn't as important as it may seem.

I agree with gfweb's comment above. Moreover, you'll find variances amongst many writers on what temperature defines a "perfect" medium-rare steak. As you cook, you'll get to know what your preference is with your particular equipment. While I acknowledge that I have a fully calibrated reference thermometer, I rarely use it. Instead I prefer to use temperatures that I know work with the sous vide machine that I am using at the time.

I don't find that tender meat cooked for longer than times needed for pasteurisation lose liquid and flavour; what they do lose to my palate is texture in that they can become somewhat mushy. However, whatever works for you is good.

Looking forward to getting my 240V version of this. It looks good.

And pinot noir is used in Champagne. The colour in red wine comes from leaving the clear juice on grape skins. If the juice is removed from the skins after pressing, it makes a white wine. The other grape in champagne, apart from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay is Pinot Meunier, also a red grape. A Blanc de noir champagne is made from the red champagne grapes (Pinot Noir and Pinot Meaner). A Blanc de Blancs is a champagne made exclusively from Chardonnay. White Zinfandel is actually a blush wine (rose) which is made by leaving the juice on the skins for sufficient time to get a bit of colour. I'm not sure of the winemaking technique beyond this but suspect that it is fermented at a lower temperature than red Zinfandel. White wines are often more acidic than reds and Champagne is very acidic so I'd be tempted to commence your experiments with white wines rather than reds and ones that are fruit dominant. Cheap sparkling wines are often made by carbonation, always with carbon dioxide. It's nice to think that rotuts made it up but it's been around for a long while. Portuguese espumosos are always made in this manner.

Rereading the thread, I can see where your question is coming from. The graph that Paulraphael included above shows sufficient reduction of both pathogens around 20 minutes after the core reaches temperature. Listeria is slightly slower in its reduction but not in a practical sense. Thus 20 minutes holding is the answer to your question if you are holding it at 66.5C or above. With your varying temperatures, you just need to ensure that the temperature is at or above this level for the entire time after the meat reaches your core temperature. Using a higher cooking temperature to start off with moves you more towards conventional cooking with a gradient in doneness from the outside (high temperature) to the inside. I'm not sure why you would want to do this. One also has to consider that the mathematical models sitting behind sous vide dash and Douglas Baldwin's tables are based on constant temperatures. Might it not be better if you were to try to make your sous vide cooking process more conventional so you can use the resources that are available.

I think you are missing the point. If it's already pasteurised and you hold it at 140F, you can hold it indefinitely without it suddenly becoming unpasteurised if you hold it at a high enough temperature. The time to pasteurisation is the graph that paulraphael put in earlier. If you go below 55C (131F) then you start moving into more dangerous territory if you hold it longer than four hours. This is because pasteruisation does not destroy bacteria (only sterilisation does that). Instead it reduces bacteria to levels that will not cause food poisoning, even in immuno-suppressed individuals. If you go below 55C (ok, it's really 54.4C), you can produce an environment that is conducive to incubating the small amount of bacteria that may be present, resulting in large amounts of bacteria that could cause food poisoning. When you hold at 55C or higher, however, the meat will still cook. That means that it can become unpleasantly mushy over time. Simple answer: cook to pasteurisation and you can hold it at any temperature higher than 55C for a few hours at least without either breeding bacteria or spoiling the meat.

$599 for those of us with 220-240V and yes that's the one I was talking about.

They have not been shipped as yet (I suspect because of finishing and sending out the Kickstarter models). As such they are unlikely to be freely available for review.

It's not just a matter of reaching core temperature. The long cooking tenderises the meat.

My main concern when you're skirting close to the safety margin is the accuracy of sous vide machines. I'm sure that Chefs Steps have properly calibrated sous vide equipment but when I've used a properly calibrated reference thermometer to check temperatures (and yes this is different from my thermapen), I've found variations in target temperature of 1C or higher. This means that a reading of 54C on the sous vide machine could reflect a cooking temperature of 53C or less. In a domestic environment I'd be putting a safety margin on there, which is why I tend to use a minimum temperature for long cooks of around 57C.

I sort according to country of cuisine/author (Italian, French, Indian, Spanish, Nordic, Greek, American Chefs, UK Chefs, etc). I also have sections devoted to Modernist Cuisine; Cooking Techniques; General Cooking Instructional Texts; BBQ, Charcuterie and Fermentation; Ingredients Cookbooks; Pastry, Bread and Desserts; Vegetables and Vegetarian; Food Science and Safety; Cheese; and Wine and Drinks. I also use the same categories in my Kindle cookbook library. With over 1200 books in electronic or hard copy, I find this the best way to keep track. I also use Eat Your Books to search indexed cookbooks for recipes with ingredients that I have on hand or am considering.

Anyone who has made home-made bacon will tell you that the sodium nitrite in curing salt #1 penetrates the meat, apparently through diffusion (if it is taken out too early you get pink meat around the outside and regular coloured pork on the inside). Likewise salt is definitely absorbed into the structure; otherwise you couldn't get oversalted brined meat. Acid in marinades breaks down the surface and enables penetration of larger molecules on the surface. Do this for too long and you'll get a surface breakdown similar to cooking but with possibly unpleasant consequences. As said above, the flavour molecules in cloves are so small that they penetrate plastic cooking bags used in sous vide. I'd venture that they could do likewise with meat, as well as many other flavours. Agreed, the process probably follows the random walk pattern of diffusion but I'm still not convinced that osmosis doesn't also play a part with water enabling the penetration of extremely small flavour molecules. Fat and similar big molecules are never going to get absorbed although with injection or larding, you can force them into the structure.

If the salt content in the meat is different from the salt content in the liquid surrounding it, water containing the salt will operate through osmosis to equilibrate these levels. The process also takes flavour with it. It won't take fat as the fat molecule is too big to enter the meat. This is not a thought experiment but rather a simple statement of scientific fact as it is understood at this time (or at least as it was presented in the EdX course on Science and Cooking).

This is true about fat which is complex and exists as large molecules. Flavour molecules, however, can be very small and definitely do penetrate, which gets back to the OP question. In other posts we've discussed the phenomenon that clove scent penetrates sous vide bags and can be detected in the cooking water. If it can get through plastic it is most unlikely that it will not penetrate meat. If flavour in liquid did not penetrate into meat the whole notion of marinading would be rendering null and void, which doesn't make sense from an experiential viewpoint (it would also negate curing and brining, which we know work). The question then becomes one of whether adding heat in the cooking process hinders flavours from penetrating. I'm very dubious about such a statement. To qualify as a scientific study, pbear's A/B/ test would have to be conducted by cooking the meat not in the sauce and in the sauce and then washing the sauce off, cutting pieces of the meat from below the surface and serving them blind to multiple tasters to determine if there was any difference. I suspect this hasn't been done.

1. Add powdered dried porcini mushrooms to dishes to up the umami. 2. Squeeze lemon over cooked broccoli for serving. 3. Use Maldon flaked sea salt in homemade butter. This allows you to reduce the overall salt content as the larger crystals and associated salty burst give the impression that there is more salt in there than there is.

That's exactly what I meant, thanks Mark.

As a pure thought experiment, if the meat is cooked, it will have lost liquid. Liquid is the medium by which marinades, salt, etc move through the meat. My hypothesis would be that the loss of moisture created by cooking would slow down (but not stop) the speed of diffusion. As the diffusion is slower and has not occurred in parallel with cooking, the post cook marinade would most likely take longer. If you left the cooked stew with sous vide meat added in the fridge overnight, the meat should absorb some of the flavouring through diffusion. By doing this for larger quantities, you could then vacuum seal the stew into serving portions and reheat sous vide to ensure that the meat is not over cooked. You could even include freezing in the mix to produce ready to heat frozen meals.