Robert Jueneman

Mikels, it's certainly nice to have confirmation from someone else. Thanks! And BTW, "Bob" is just fine. zEli173, at first I used 135F, not knowing exactly what to expect. But that was a little more pink than reddish-pink, so I dropped it down a bit. I would be inclined to go even lower, but 131F/55.5C seems to be the magic lower number for pasteurization, and for the lengthy cooking time involved, that seems prudent. You might choose to pre-sear your meat and or marinade it to further reduce the risk if you wanted to go even more rare, but at least to my taste I don't think that is necessary, and from a safety standpoint, probably not desirable. If you use a liberal amount of a dry rub, e.g., from a tin of Kirkland Sweet Mesquite Rub from Costco, the surface of the brisket will be dark enough that post-searing is almost unnecessary, but do it if you wish. I've tried both a Iwatami blow torch and pan searing with very high temperature grapeseed oil. Both are certainly acceptable, and if you want to show off in front of guests, the blowtorch is fun and will certainly be memorable for most people, whether you do it in the kitchen or at the table. Just don't set fire you your grandmother's Irish lace tablecloth! But the blowtorch seems to sear the topmost little "spikes" of the meat without getting much deeper, whereas the very hot oil seems to get everything more evenly seared. Try it and see which you like best. Bob

Brisket is absolutely my favorite sous vide recipe. Brining a brisket really isn't necessary, in my experience. I would suggest cutting the brisket into reasonable size pieces, then you can just cook what you need, unless you are feeding a large crowd. I don't do a preliminary browning. Instead, I coat the brisket with a spice mix, such as a sweet mesquite rub, before sealing it. You can add a little Liquid Smoke, if you wish. The rub makes the piece dark enough that you almost don't need to sear it afterwards. Unless 131.5F is too rare for your taste, that is what I would recommend, for 48 hours. I would say that re-warming to 110F is too low. You don't want to have people complaining about cold meat. Shoot for 125-130F, but no more. You can transport the meat in a styrofoam cooler with water at 130F, and only loose a degree or two. Then you can heat up the water with hot tap water. However, do NOT attempt to move a large rice cooker filled with water. It may slosh, and fall into the cooker, and end up shorting out your SV controller. And always use pre-warmed plates, with whatever vegetables you are planning. A Iwatami or other LARGE blow-torch will work, and you will get lots of questions and admiration. I did this in front of 85 quests for a friend's 60th birthday party, and trust me, no one fainted out of squeamishness, but everyone was very interested in the process. However, if I'm at home and have access to kitchen equipment, I now use a big old cast iron skillet, put in some peanut or grapeseed oil until it is smoking hot, then sear the pieces briefly. Really, it's more for looks and taste (the Maillard reaction), so don't over do it. If someone wants something that is more crusty. let them eat the skillet! Slice the brisket across the grain, in 2 to 3mm slices, and serve it with some grayy, or something like a French finishing sauce from William-Sonoma. Bon Appetite!

These is no reason why you can't do this kind of precision braising with basic sous vide equipment, without having to keep an eye on it all the time. Use a rice cooker or a slow cooker, or just a pan on a hot plate, controlled by an SV controller; and put the probe directly in the braising liquid. I would recommend the Sous Vide Magic 1500C for this. The probe is certified food safe, and the newer thermistor/probe is much more linear at the higher temperatures than the older units. If you close the lid of the rice cooker, you will significantly slow down the evaporation, which you may or may not want, depending on whether you are trying to thicken a sauce.

Others have responded, but let me chime in, too. I think it is important to differentiate between medium-rare doneness, i.e., color and taste, vs. tenderness. These are really independent variables, and one of the really great things about sous vide is that it allows you to explore those variables. You can probably cook a piece of steak for days at 130F, and the color won't change, and the taste might not change much either. But the tenderness certainly will. As I understand it, LT/LT will produce two effects. The first is that the collagen will break down and turn into gelatin, giving a wonderful unctuous mouth feel, but something that is rather different from an inherently tender piece of meat, like a tenderloin. It really is similar to the effect you get with a braise, but without toughening up the muscle fibers by overheating them. Second, sooner or later, the natural enzymes in the meat will start to break down the tissue into mush. How quickly this happens depends on the meat. (I love the line in Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" with regard to this problem with fish: "Eat fresh fish quickly, before it eats itself!") I cook a nice 50mm thick rib-eye at about 129 for four hours, and am considering going to six hours for just a bit more tenderness, depending on the quality of the steak. Lamb chops and other cuts are treated similarly, although I cook pork chops just a little bit higher, like 135, because my wife doesn't like pink pork. A chuck steak at 8 to 12 hours is very succulent, tender, and with excellent flavor, more so than the rib-eye or a filet, but by 24 hours it is falling apart and beginning to be a bit soft, approaching mushy. Pork shoulder at 12 to perhaps 24 hours is also great, but quite different from the usual barbeque or pulled-pork. On the other hand, a nice piece of brisket cooked at 131.5 for 48 hours is my idea of heaven -- tender, but not too tender, and very tasty. Look for a recipe I posted called "OMG brisket." I've had a couple of disasters with beef cheeks, and they aren't easy to find. In addition, they are one of the ugliest cuts of meat I have ever seen, so I can't help you there. Bob

That's an interesting supposition. No one has ever explained how the sour smell penetrates through an allegedly air-tight bag, despite the fact that there was no obvious loss of vacuum. But your suggestion make at least as much sense as no explanation at all! Poltergeists is another possibility, I suppose! :-) Bob

OK, I've got to jump in here. First of all, with regard to the absolute accuracy of the controller, this is of primary importance when you get close to the point of not quite killing all of the bacteria when you are cooking something for a long time, like 48 hours. If you cook brisket for 48 hours, as I do at 131.5F, the minimum FDA recommended temperature, you want to be pretty sure you are dead on. (You might be able to get by at 127.5F, depending on who you read and who you trust, but at that point you'd better hope that both your thermometer and the original researcher's setup were very accurately calibrated!) NSF requires 2 degree F accuracy. That might be fine if you are cooking hamburgers to 165F, but I don't think it is good enough for sous vide. I've gone through over a dozen thermometers of various types in order to find three or four accurate ones, and my standard for acceptance is +/- 0.5F. And if I buy one that advertises 0.1F but is off by over a degree, and I have, I make a hell of a stink about it, up to the President of the company that manufactured it, and the buyer of the retail chain that sold it. Short of buying a calibrated NIST certified thermometer that is guaranteed to be accurate to less than 0.1F across the entire scale (as I have done -- the Traceable 4000), your best bet is to calibrate your working thermometer with a basal (ovulation) thermometer, which should be accurate to 0.1F or less at 105F. If you find that your controller isn't quite accurate, you can either adjust the offset, or simply make a mental adjustment. The next question deals with the precision of the controller. In my experience with the Sous Vide Magic controller from Fresh Meals Solutions, the controller is perfectly capable of holding the temperature of a water bath such as a rice cooker, or a CrockPot, etc., to within less than 0.5F, once it has reached steady state. (And by the way, I own a 1500A, a 1500B, a 1500C, and three rice pots of varying sizes, and I custom calibrated another dozen 1500Cs for a class, thinking that I might sell some. I still have some of those units left, so if anyone is interested, PM me.) Now, I'll grant that when you first start up the system, you may experience some overshoot,and conceivably even some long term oscillation. Generally, those problems can be alleviated by fussing with the PID parameters, but that would be an entire thread all by itself. But you can avoid all of that hassle by simply turning on the rice cooker, etc., a hour earlier, and letting it stabilize. And using a larger container of water, such as my 10 liter rice cooker, also helps Generally speaking, you would like to avoid any overshoot of more than 2 degrees F or 1 degree C for more an a few minutes. However, if the water overshoots a bit while the meat is still warming up, this does no harm, and may actually help. Now, as to circulation. One of the advantages of using a rice cooker is that the units heat from the bottom (unlike CrockPots, which heat from the sides), and the natural convection is such that very little temperature gradations exist -- in fact, I've never seen any that would exceed a few tenths of a degree F, at least while the rice cooker is empty. Now, depending on how big your pot or cooker is, how much frozen or cold food you dump in all at one time, etc., you might get some variations. In all probability these will be local cold spots rather than hot spots, and if you are cooking something for several hours, much less several days, everything will be evened out rather quickly. However, if I am cooking multiple pieces of meat, or calibrating thermometers, I do tend to use a circulator. For the lower temperatures, I use the cheapest submersible garden or "fountain" pump I can find -- about $20 at Home Depot, in the garden or outside section. They work great, and do the job well -- you can angle them in almost any direction, and they have little suction feet that will stick to the bottom or the side of a rice cooker. However, although I have used them very successfully at 165F, I can testify to the fact that at 190F, they melt and deform, and stop working. (If someone would like to know more accurately when they stop working, feel free to send me $20!) For higher temperatures, such as for cooking vegetables at 185 or so, I use a small external aquarium pump with a check valve, together with a circular air stone. I use that rather infrequently, because it is a little noisy, because it tends to cool the water bath too much, and because I seldom cook vegetables sous vide. In any case, I very much doubt that precise temperature control is required for a small bag of asparagus or some apples, even in a small 1.5 liter rice cooker. Hope this helps.

MikeTMD asked for some photos. As I said above, I don't have any quibble with the appearances of the meat vs. the labels attached -- they seem to be right on. I do, however, question their temperatrues THere is a 50mm rib-eye steak, cooked at 53.0C/127.0F for 3.5 hours, in a 10 liter rice cooker with a Sous Vide Magic1500B controller. The SVM controller was calibrated with my Traceable 4000 thermometer calibrated to NIST standards, and I double checked the temperature of the water bath, so I'm quite certain of the temperature. I sprinkled the steak with a Mesquite dry rub after removing it from the bag, then briefly seared it in a cast iron pan with about 1 tsp of butter and a good dash of olive oil, heated to the point where the butter was beginning to brown but not smoking. The sauce is Bordelaise French finishing sauce, from Williams-Sonoma. I corrected the output of my Canon 1D Mark III by applying auto white balance post-processing of the photo in Lightroom to correct for the tungsten lighting in the dining room. Although this may be more accurate in the technical, 5500F daylight sense, the picture actually looks warmer and more inviting with the tungsten light, although not particularly redder, and certainly not more translucent or "wetter". I normally cook my steaks to 131.5F, but decided to try it a little more rare. just for Mike's sake. My wife, who often complains about meat being too rare, raved about it; and the two cats practically clawed my leg off begging. And my Cro Magnon ancestors smiled down on me, as I was gnawing on the bone.

I don't know why the Angus Beef Association's pictures look so far removed from what I, at least, would consider "reality." Nathan, whom I certainly respect, tends to blame the photographer, or JPEG, or the lack of a calibrated monitor. Well, my monitor is calibrated, and I'm a photographer with about 50 years of experience, and I still would have trouble explaining the look of those pictures, particularly the degree of transparency. A much more reasonable explanation, I believe, is very poor quality control when it comes to the thermometer used. I think their thermometers are off about about 14 degrees F, as their 145F corresponds to what I get at 131.5F, using a thermometer that is calibrated to plus or minus 0.09F against NIST standards. Having a thermometer be off by 14 degrees is not particularly uncommon in my experience, and especially one of the dial-type instruments shown adjacent to the text, as opposed to whatever is lying in the pictures. Yet another explanation is that the editors, or perhaps their lawyers, decided to "adjust" the pictures and the text to make them agree with the USDA recommendations for hamburgers. The "From the Chef" page also repeats the canard that "Searing the meat locks in the juices."

Others chimed in before I had a chance, but I agree with the general tenor. I cook my steaks at 55.5C, partly because my wife doesn't like particularly rare beef, and also because that is sufficient to pasteurize them (depending on the time, of course). If I were cooking for myself, I would aim a little lower. What I meant by starting temperature was the resting temperature of the steak before throwing it in the SV bath. Was it at freezing or below, at refrigerator temperature (around 38-41F), or ambient room temperature? I haven't calculated how long it would take a steak to come up to say 131F from say 70F, but even then I doubt that 15 minute would suffice, unless the steak was quite thin. ???

That's why I liked my Viking. The burners were a coated cast iron that could go in the dishwasher, if necessary, and there as a pull-out drawer that caught everything else.

I agree with the above posters. I cook the flat part of Choice grade brisket for 48 hours at 55.5C, with nothing on the brisket except some chipotle dry rub on the fat side and perhaps some Liquid Smoke. The chipotle rub colors it dark enough that it doesn't really need even a torch, much less searing in a skillet. Just don't let the butcher slice off too much of the fat. Leave the meat in the bag, but pour off whatever liquid there is, put it in a sauce pan and bring it to a hard boil, then strain off the scum with a chinois. Add whatever precooked vegetables you would like to that au jus sauce, e.g, some caramelized onions and carrots, to make a simple gravy or topping. Slice the brisket thinly (2 mm) across the grain, like a London broil, pour the topping over it, and the results should be fantastic.

Mike, normally I would think that 15 minutes isn't enough to bring prime rib or rib-eye to medium rare, but I guess that depends on the starting temperature. Why do you use 61C, instead of something like 55.5C? How did you sear it afterwards (or before)?

I started cooking (sort of), when I was still in high school, back in the 50's, and got more serious in college, learning from the still cherished Gourmet Cookbooks -- the two American ones, plus the French, Italian, and German ones. More recently, Julia Child, Alice Waters, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten have illuminate the path. Nearly 50 years later, while buying a copy of an Alice Water's cookbook (which I already had, but had forgotten/mislaid), I came across the gorgeous Thomas Keller, "Under Pressure" cookbook, and was blown away by the photography and intrigued by this new sous vide technique. It's been a wild ride ever since, with four rice cookers of varying sizes; a bunch of Sous Vide Magic controllers; over a dozen thermometers, a few of which are actually accurate (as calibrated with a reference thermometer traceable to NIST standards); a 62 page PowerPoint tutorial I've written and presented for a class; and now my desk is groaning with cookbooks. TK, Alinea, Joan Roca, Hervé This , and most recently, the new On Food and Cooking, A Day at elBulli, and the absolutely gorgeous Big Fat Duck. Needless to say I haven't read them all cover to cover, yet, but I'm working on it. Some of these could conceivably be downloaded and read off the Internet if they were available in that format, but the best of these, certainly including Under Pressure, elBulli, and the Big Fat Duck, are treasures of the art of cooking, photography, and bookmaking that may not be possible or at least affordable in the years to come, and are not to be missed, over and above their challenging and impeccable content. I might have to buy the original Escoffier, just to have something of equal stature to the monumental tomes that I have acquired in just the last four months.

Jean-François, if you'll PM me with your e-mail address, I'll send you a slide deck that I used in a recent class that discusses these points and others. In it, I argue that absolute temperature accuracy becomes increasingly important as you get closer to the magical 127.5F/53C point of pasteurization. FDA Guidelines set 131.5F/55.5C as the lower limit, at least for commercial food preparation, to allow at least some leeway. In addition, there is an observable difference in the degree of doneness at or around that temperature, but that is a relative, personal choice issue. For me, I consider 1 degree F or 0.5C to be the upper limit of tolerable accuracy in a thermometer, and I won't recommend one that is off by more than 0.1F or 0.05C at four different points, at 100, 130, 160, and 190F. Many are advertised to meet that standard, but only a few actually do meet it in practice. Assuming that you have an accurate thermometer with which to calibrate your immersion bath, its absolute accuracy isn't all that important (because you can make a mental adjustment if necessary), but repeatability and stability certainly is. You don't want the temperature to oscillate wildly when you drop is some cold or frozen food -- in particular, you don't want it to overshoot by more than 1F or 0.5C, especially if you have something else in the bath at that time. Almost any controller, including the inexpensive PID controllers, should be able to hold the temperature within 1F/0.5C. My Sous Vide Magic 1500B (which supports fractional degrees Celsius) routinely holds the temperature to within 0.1C, once everything has come to equilibrium. Bob

Heartsurgeon, I assume that the problem with the fresh mushrooms was that they contain lots of water, which boils off when you sauté them. Since you had them in a sealed bag, the water had no place to go, ergo the slimy result. This suggests that you could use dried mushrooms, but then, how would you rehydrate them? I'm not sure whether butter only would be sufficient, but maybe a tomato sauce would be. But this bring up another thought. Recently I was trying to make onion marmalade a la Jean-Georges Vongerichten, but I neglected the pan a bit too long while trying to caramelize them, and ended up with sticky, burnt mess. So I've been wondering whether it would be possible to do this sous vide, taking advantage of the lower and more precisely controlled temperature. Then I realized that I don't really know what goes on when caramelizing something like an onion (or a mushroom, carrot, etc.), the essential role that sugar plays(?), or even what time/temperature is required. I've looked though most of Molecular Gastronomy, by Herve This, but I don't recall reading an explanation. I do understand that caramelization is different from the Maillard reaction, although Douglas Baldwin's technique of brushing a steak with glucose before searing with a torch may blur the distinction. Conceivably, at least, if higher than boiling water temperatures are required I could do sous vide in oil, in my deep fat fryer, although I'm not about to put an SVM probe into hot oil. This also brings up a question as to the essential difference between sautéing and frying, if any. Has anyone tried this, or can someone explain the fundamental principles involved?

On a couple of occasions I have noticed a sour smell in the case of some meat that had gone bad, and others have reported smells like cloves, etc., apparently escaping the bag. I don't THINK that fluids are flowing into or out of the bag, but I can't prove it, since there is some "juice" in the bag at the end. In addition, I've noticed that the bag never seems quite as tightly wrapped around the meat at the end of the process, even once it cools. So I don't think we can completely rule out the possibility that the FoodSaver bags are semi-permeable to either fluids and/or gasses, particularly over a long time. IFF that is true, it certainly suggests that every sous vide cooking session should begin with fresh, clean water -- something that I haven't always done, because of the awkwardness of draining the rice cooker. BTW, has anyone tried using an electric canner, rather than a rice cooker? I've seen one with a drain spigot that would be very useful. I've also seen an electric turkey fryer with a drain.

Smoked Sea Bass with Apple Acid and Vanilla Oil, and Asparagus with Smoked Sea Salt The recipe is due to Joan Roca, http://www.starchefs.com/chefs/JRoca/html/...ss_j_roca.shtml. I saw thawed Chilean sea bass at Whole Foods for $9.95 for 5.5 oz, and thought that was a little high, but I ended up buying a couple of packages of frozen sea bass for 12 oz for $19 at Andronico's in Palo Alto. The thicker Whole Foods version with the skin on probably would have been better. The amount of olive oil in proportion to the four pieces of vanilla wasn't specified. I ended up using 1/2 cup of EVVO plus two pieces of vanilla, and the results seemed about right. One cautionary note -- olive oil makes a good anaerobic medium for growing botulism spores, and the temperature used to cook the vanilla isn't nearly hot enough to kill any spores that might be lying around. So if you do fix this, be sure to chill (preferably freeze) any left-over olive oil promptly, and use it within a few days or throw it out. I didn't have a "liquidator" (?) as described in the recipe, so I used a blender on liquify the thick-cut peal for several minutes. I was prepared to force the remains through a food mill, but I didn't have to. I did add some sauvignon blanc to the apple peal to help liquify it and wash it down the sides of the blender, but that ended up making it too thin. After reducing it slightly (but not enough), I put it in back in the blender and slowly drizzled in the vanilla olive oil, expecting it to emulsify the way a hollandaise would, but it never did thicken. Duh -- no thickening agent, such as an egg! Nonetheless, the combination of the vanilla, olive oil, and apple made an absolutely delicious sauce, one that was also good on the sauteed asparagus. For Father's Day, my wife bought me a real masticating juicer, an Omega 8203. (Of course she didn't know that, until I brought it home. - We'll try the recipe again using just the juice, without the apple must this time. Although I used smoked EVOO (pecan smoke flavored) in combination with the fish, the result was scarcely noticeable. Next time, I would use more, or add it bit of Liquid Smoke. The Spanish version uses pine cones, I understand, and perhaps it is more pungent. I spritzed the fish with olive oil and applied a torch to finish it. Smoked Japanese sea salt on the asparagus complemented the acid sweetness of the sauce nicely.

I don't think it has been asked before, and it's a good question. I use a 10 liter commercial rice cooker with a tight-fitting lid, so I don't have a problem, even after 48 hours at 131F/55C. Granted, 12 hours at 195F might be a different story, but combination would be unlikely. I would check a plumbing supply store. You ought to be able to improvise a float valve from a swamp cooler, sump pump, or humidifier. I'm surprised that PolyScience doesn't have a solution, considering the price of their unit.

Sous Vide Class in Silicon Valley I'm being rather brave, and offering a free class/demonstration/tutorial on sous vide cooking next Saturday, June 27, from 1 to 3PM, at the Whole Foods Market at 4800 El Camino Real, in Los Altos, CA. This is a labor of love, and a chance to pay-it-forward for all of the knowledge gained from people like Nathan, Douglas, and all the others on this list. I know that some on this list live in the Bay Area, and I would welcome the opportunity to meet you in person. And even if you are busy, or don't think you can spare the time, I would welcome any referrals to your SO or friends. As I said, the class is free, but I am going to be offering some Sous Vide Magic 1500C controllers from Fresh Meals Solutions that I have imported and custom calibrated at four points from 100F to 190F, using my NIST-traceable precision thermometer. The price, including my shipping and handling costs, a modest fee for three days of calibration work, and the sales tax to help keep California from going bankrupt, will be $200. In addition, I will also be happy to perform a three-point custom calibration of your own digital thermometer, to an guaranteed accuracy of 0.1F, complete with calibration printout, for $25. (Hopefully some people will buy these. If they don't, considering what the equipment, food, flyers & posters, etc., cost me, I may be reduced to sitting on a corner with a sign, "Will sous vide for rent money!" ) The tasting menu (subject to last minute change) will include the "perfect egg" on grilled asparagus with smoked sea salt, 48-hour medium-rare brisket with mushroom finishing sauce, smoked sea bass with apple acid and vanilla oil, and mushroom risotto. If you are interested, PLEASE call 650-559-0300 to enroll, so I will know how many people are coming. PM me if you need directions, or would like to print a flyer to give to your friends. After the class, I intend to post the set of PowerPoint tutorial slides somewhere -- TBD.

slkinsey and others, this is a fascinating observation, and may help to explain some results I have been getting. I have a FoodSaver Professional III Plus, which has five different vacuum-level settings. For want of any better instruction, I have routinely been using level 5, the highest. But when I cook SV hamburger (from frozen), despite it being a nice pink and not at all over-done, the burgers tend to be rather dried out. Now I'm wondering if the high vacuum is sucking too much moisture out of the burger, and because I tend to pour out any liquid immediately after opening the bag, there is little opportunity for the burgers to re-hydrate. Similarly, last night I tried one more time with a cross-rib roast from the shoulder clod that produced the bad flat iron steaks. Once again, I got a copious amount of liquid in the bag, after only 24 hours. I opened the bag, decided it didn't smell TOO bad, resealed it in a new bag (again vacuum level five, and cooked it for another hour or so until we were ready for dinner. I was quite surprised at the amount of additional dark-red juice that came out, the second time around. After tasting and eating some of it, we decided it was still too gamy, and threw the rest out. I used the same technique on the two flat iron steaks that were individually packaged, and BTW probably had more oxygenation, and they were quite good, so I don't know if this is a tangent, or relevant.

I'm in San Jose, and the closest one seems to be in Fredericksburg, VA! Anyone seen irradiated beef on the west coast?

Where do you buy irradiated beef? I've never seen it.

I have to chime in here. I just turned 70, and my mother is 97, and has been in assisted living for the last six months. Prior to that she would drive, or more recently take her scooter to the main dining room, jacket and tie required, nice menu. (This is a retirement center for primarily Air Force personnel, mostly retired officers.) She can't stand the meals she gets now, because they are not prepared fresh, but instead are over-cooked and then brought over in insulated wagons. I tried one, and I couldn't stand it either -- too bland, no spice, mushy flavor mostly, and of course no salt -- it might take years off her life, don't you know! She's healthier than I am, unless you count her eyesight, hearing, and tendency to fall down. Now, you may not expect this suggestion from an old "geezer" like me, but my very strong recommendation would be to check out sous vide techniques. You can very safely cook meat at 131F/55.5C for an extended time, and get great flavor, and great tenderness at the same time. For a friends birthday party, I served nearly 85 people sampler-size slices of meat from a single brisket that might have cost me $16 at a high-end grocery store. I quartered it (for convenience) and cooked them for 48 hours at 131F/55C. And a small rice cooker with mushroom risotto provided plenty of high-quality, excellent tasting starch. Everything was hot and fresh, and very tasty. With sous vide, you can cook a $1.99 chuck roast for 24 hours and have it as tender as a filet. Pork shoulder is another cut that is inexpensive, and also cooks for 24 hours. I served it to my meat-and-potatoes brother and sister-in-law from St. Louis, along with small potatoes and carrots that I simmered for an hour in a pint of pork stock and two bottles of Guinness. They loved it. And my niece loved the salmon I did sous vide, as well. And you can even serve chicken breasts that aren't all dried out. If you or your kitchen can afford a couple of 10 liter rice cookers, you could cook various meats to different tastes in advance -- medium rare, medium, and throw-it-to-the-dogs well-done. For even larger quantities, you could use some hotel pans on an electric griddle, controlled by a Sous Vide Magic controller sold by Fresh Meals Solutions in Toronto. And by using cook-hold or cook-chill, you can prepare meals in advance, and then warm them up just before serving. If I were doing any catering, that is certainly the route I would choose. I see now that you didn't get the job, and that you suffered a death in the family. I'm sorry to hear that. But maybe this will be a time for you to do some experimenting.

Sous vide hamburgers with "grilled" corn on the cob with smoked sea salt. I was having some blood pressure & pulse rate problems due to a recent change in medications, so I decided to keep it simple. I dropped a package of 2 frozen hamburgers in a sous vide bag into the rice cooker, set at 55.2C/131.5F, and took a nap. I got up a couple of hours later (thanks to my indulgent wife, who had peeled the corn on the cob), brought the water in an asparagus steamer to a boil, and set the timer for 4 minutes. When that was done, I pulled the corn out and set it aside, while I open the bag with the hamburger patties. I put them in a gently warmed cast iron skillet, patted the surface dry, spritzed them with my olive oil sprayer to enhance the Maillard reaction, and torched them with an Iwatani butane torch until they were nicely seared. Then, since I had the torch out, I seared the corn on the cob very quickly, rotating it a 1/4 turn each time. The glass corn plates got hot! I also put a little blue cheese on my hamburger (my wife doesn't like it), and warmed that briefly as well, again using the torch. At the table, we buttered the hot corn, and sprinkled some Japanese smoked sea salt (from Sur Le Table) on it, instead of the usual lemon pepper. It was delicious -- even my non-foodie wife liked it! From a food safety perspective, the nearly three hours at 131F was way more than enough time to adequately pasteurize the hamburgers, even if all sorts of nasty pathogens had infested the interior of the meat. Compared to previous tries, the resulting burgers were a perfect medium rare, but just a little dry, for reasons that aren't quite clear. I poured off some juice -- maybe I should have allowed the burger to rest for a few minutes, or else cooked it for a little less time. Sorry, no pictures, but everyone knows what a hamburger and corn on the cob looks like, right?

That's about the same conclusion I've come to, even putting aside the issue of setting up two or more sous vide baths -- even just a small 1.8 liter rice cooker. I just wanted to be sure I wasn't overlooking anything. By the time you eliminate all of the green vegetables (best cooked in your biggest stock pot, and then shocked with cold water) you are left with carrots (brighter than boiled, but still rather blah, compared to sauteing them in butter and brown sugar), onions (better done in a pan), cauliflower (why bother?), rhubarb (not bad, but not something I want very often), and maybe squash (probably better baked, although I haven't tried it.) I suppose you could cook a potato SV, but why? That leaves artichoke hearts (worth the trouble?), turnips/parsnips, maybe mushrooms (hard to imagine they would be better than sauteing in butter). Tomatoes are better raw, or broiled, I would think, and I don't even want to think about a hot avocado. Chestnuts might be a real possibility, and they often come vacuum-packed already. Cherries, peaches, and apples might be worth exploring, and perhaps pineapple with vacuum-infused rum, or oranges with coconut. And some people have reported good luck with martini-infused cucumbers, although that risks being a waste of both a good martini, and a good cucumber that could otherwise be used in a salad. And it only uses the vacuum/marinade, not the cooking. I wonder what would happen if you SV'ed a pomegranate? Or a kiwi? Or a banana with rum, for an instant flambe?