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Robert Jueneman

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Everything posted by Robert Jueneman

  1. As an alternate recommendation, I would favor the $50 All-Clad T201. It has a unique self-set capability, whereby you can calibrate it with an ice bath. I've compared it to my $400 NIST traceable thermometer, and found it to be within 0.1F across most of the range. I don't think the Thermapen will do nearly as well, although I have never tested one. No matter what kind of a thermometer you get, you simply MUST calibrate it, somehow, and preferably at at least two points. I have found well-known brands to be off by as much as 14 degrees F! A basal (ovulation) thermometer should be accurate within 0.1F at 100F, and most digital fever thermometers should be within 0.2F. Trying to test a thermometer at the boiling point of water probably isn't worth doing, except as a very rough check. It is too hard to judge how rapidly the water is boiling, and what the atmospheric pressure is, and those variables can easily make a couple of degree difference. Not worth the effort.
  2. I'm curious why you think you need a circulator? For $139 to $159 for a Sous Vide Magic controller (depending on the accuracy -- 1500B for 0.1 Celsius vs. 1500 C for 1.0 Fahrenheit ), plus $185 to $200 for a commercial rice cooker, and $50 for a good thermometer, or around $400 total, what more do you expect to gain in terms of accuracy, convenience, etc., with a circulator plus a tank for probably $1700 or more? I'm certainly not in the high volume restaurant business, nor even the catering business, but it seems to me that four Sous Vide Magic setups capable of running at different temperatures for cook-hold of various foods would be vastly more useful than a single circulator, at about the same price. If you are really worried about circulation, and my tests with a calibration-grade thermometer indicate that there is no reason why you should be, then $15 for a garden fountain pump ought to solve that problem. Temperature is temperature, and once you get the food to a steady-state temperature, that's all you need. No one is going to convince me that keeping the temperature of food to within 0.1F vs. keeping it to within 0.2F is going to be at all noticeable, so why spend the additional money for a laboratory grade instrument? (Unless you are getting your Ph.D. in sous vide?)
  3. I've never cooked for more than four people, so take this with a grain of salt. But it seems to me that some sous vide techniques would be very applicable here. Once you bring the water up to temperature, an 85-watt, 24-liter rice warmer controlled by a SousVideMagic PID controller ought to be able to cook as much as 50 pounds of brisket to melt-in-your-mouth tenderness -- 48 hours at 135F. See the recipe I posted recently in the sous vide thread. You could run a carving station, or pre-carve it and serve it from warming pans, with anything from barbeque sauce to demi-glace with sautéed mushrooms, left over from making mushroom stock. Then I would use a 12 liter rice cooker to prepare and keep warm 50 bowls of rice, perhaps flavored with beef and mushroom stock -- almost like mushroom risotto, but without all the stirring. Assuming you are having other courses, 50 bowls would probably be enough for 100 people, and it would look and taste quite elegant, with minimal prep time for the staff.
  4. e_monster, thanks for reminding me about the pasteurization tables. Even at 130F, 48 hours should be more than enough to kill all of the salmonella and listeria dead, dead, dead. For relatively short times, however (less than that required to pasteurize), briefly pre-searing seems like a good practice, followed by post-searing to enhance flavor and texture.
  5. In my previous post re brisket, I suggested using a 48-blade Jaccard to poke tiny holes in the brisket prior to marinading it, but now I'm having second thoughts. My understanding is that we can normally assume that the interior of meat can be considered sterile, except perhaps in the case of a sick cow. However, the same should NOT be assumed for the outside of the meat, or for any ground meat product. But if in fact the outside of the brisket or any other piece of meat might be contaminated, it would seem that using a Jaccard, or even a fork, to poke holes in it might risk transporting any "bugs" from the outside to the inside of the meat. One of the unanswered questions in my mind with respect to sous vide is whether to sear meat before cooking it, or afterwards. My thinking now is that it might be best to do both -- lightly sear the surface, whether with a torch or in a skillet, BEFORE using the Jaccard, in order to sterilize the outside before poking any holes in the meat, and then again afterward to develop a crust. And I am also going to be just a little bit more careful about the sterility of any components of the marinade. I have been less than scrupulously careful about storing Kosher salt, for example, and herbs may be even more suspect. Any thoughts from anyone? Other than a pocket nuclear reactor, is there any way of sterilizing common herbs, or even pepper? Is there any significant danger lucking here, or am I just being more paranoid than usual?
  6. OMG Brisket Sous Vide Procedure Using a Jaccard meat tenderizer, poke holes on both sides of a large brisket. Quarter the brisket into four equal-size pieces. Unless needed immediately put three of the pieces in evaluated FoodSaver bags, and store in the freezer. Prepare a brine consisting of 1 liter of tepid water, 40 g Kosher salt, 30 g sugar, 2 tbsp crushed juniper berries, and 1 tbsp Liquid Smoke. Score the fat side in a crisscross pattern, and soak in the brine solution in an evacuated FoodSaver marinade container in the refrigerator, for 2 to 3 hours. Discard the marinade, and pat the brisket with paper towels, then spritz it with a olive oil pump and sear it briefly with a butane torch (or in a smoking-hot skillet, at high heat) to a light brown. (It will be seared again later, once it is though cooking.) Cook for 48 hours at 135°F. When cooked, remove and sear again, then finish with any desired sauce or vegetables. Results: Oh! My! God! Awesome!!! I should have taken a picture after searing it, and again after slicing it, because it looked so nice. Next time, I promise. It was a very pretty pink, perhaps on the rare side of medium-rare, and absolutely melt-in-your mouth fork tender. If I had set the table properly, I’m sure I could have cut it with a spoon. I sliced it across the grain, like a London broil, into slices about 1/8” thick and three inches long. I didn’t serve the vegetables on top of the meat, because I wanted to taste the brisket by itself, but I did pour some of the juice from the vegetables over the meat. In this case, I followed a recipe from Julia Child, and cut up a baking potato into slices, coated with pepper, and daubed with about 2 tbsp of butter, in a 350°F oven for a hour. After 30 minutes, I turned the potato slices, and added a white onion, cut into medium slices. 15 minutes later, I added some baby carrots (this probably should have been done earlier), and 15 minutes after that, I added 150 ml (1/2 cup) of beef broth, plus the juices drained from the sous vide brisket before searing it. I omitted the tomatoes she used, as it just didn’t seem appropriate for a medium rare dish, which I was planning.) My initial plan was to cut up the brisket into four equal pieces, and then cook them one at a time at 135°F for 48 hours, 147°F for 48 hours (as the French Restaurant is said to use), and 176°F for 24-36 hours, as suggested by Douglas Baldwin. But at this point, I simply can’t imagine getting a better result than the combination of 135°F for 48 hours, although I might push the temperature up to say 138°F. My wife isn’t that easy to please as regards some of my cooking experiments, but even she thought it was absolutely great. Other recipes call for sweet and sour, barbeque sauce, etc., but I think that it would almost be sacrilegious to drown the taste and tenderness of the meat in such a way. Chacun à son goût! I confess that I really couldn’t taste the Liquid Smoke or the juniper berries from the brining, so the next time I might try adding just a bit (perhaps 1/2 teaspoon?) of the Liquid Smoke, and some of the crushed juniper berries (maybe wrapped in a plastic sachet to keep them from being too overpowering) into the FoodSaver bag before sealing it. All in all, it was extremely successful, and many thanks to Frank Hsu and Douglas Baldwin for blazing the trail . Sous Vide Cooking Instructions: I used the SousVideMagic™ 1500A controller (http://www.freshmealssolutions.com) with its attached thermometer probe, together with a 10-liter commercial rice cooker to control the temperature of the water bath. I double-checked the temperature with an All-Clad T201 thermometer, the only affordable ($50) thermometer I have found (out of the 10 or so I have tried) that agrees with my $350 calibration grade thermometer within +0.1 F, and includes a self-recalibration function for use with a distilled-water ice-bath. The temperature never varied within 0.1 degree F during all of that time. For those who aren’t interested in buying another big pot, a simple Crock Pot will also work. The rice cooker maintains better uniformity, because it heats from the bottom instead of the sides. However, a $15 submersible pump of the type used for garden fountains (I bought mine at Home Depot) will solve that problem, and so will an aquarium bubbler. You don’t want to use one of the high-end micro-processor controlled cookers such as the All-Clad unit, because the SVM controller is going to be used to turn it on and off repeatedly. The FoodSaver system is used to evacuate a food-safe bag and seal it so it is water tight, before immersing it in the water bath. Or you can use a chamber vacuum system, for roughly 50 times as much. If this is your first time attempting low-temperature, long-duration cooking, be sure to pay attention to the important food safety issues. See “A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking,” by the inestimable Douglas Baldwin, http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html. Good eating! Bob
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