Borgstrom

I've only cooked with short ribs twice, but was very happy with the results each time. The first time was for hamburgers. I ground a 50/50 mix of short ribs and sirloin. The burgers were excellent - lots of beef flavor, juicy, tender. This is my go-to recipe now anytime I make burgers. The second time was last night. I cooked them sous vide at 60C for 48 hours following the recipe in the Momofuku cookbook. They turned out spectacularly well; effusive praise from my guests. I will definitely make them again, but may cook at 55C to get a more medium-rare color like is in the book. 2 days sitting in circulator bath: Short ribs don't look so appetizing just out of the sous vide bag: Short ribs look better after 3 min in deep fryer Plated short ribs a la Momofuku:

I went all-out with modern techniques last night for dinner with some friends -- my very first efforts with sous vide, NO2 siphons, sodium alginate, methyl cellulose and tapioca maltodextrin. Menu: Gin Fizz "frozen caliente" Kir Moleculaire Olive spheres Shrimp chorizo Mozzarella spheres filled with warm tomato 48-hour short ribs with dashi-braised daikon Warm vanilla ice cream with Nutella and caramel powders Cold espresso espuma The Kir, olive spheres and espresso espuma were only so-so; I need to work on my technique. Everything else was out-of-this-world excellent! Thanks go out to El Bulli, Momofuku and all the good folks at egullet for inspiration and wisdom! Some photos below...

I would have to agree; not only does the blender take longer but it's incredibly noisy! Just for grins, I repeated my experiment in bringing 1.5L of room-temperature water up to a boil, this time in a covered stainless-steel saucepan on a gas stove instead of in a Vitamix. Unsurprisingly, the stove was almost 2X faster, completing the job in about 10 minutes vs. 18 minutes for the Vitamix. This implies about 837 watts going into the water from the stove vs. 465 watts from the blender. See chart below. I think I'll stick to the blender for blending and the stove for cooking...

I did an experiment this morning with my Vitamix 5200 to see if I could boil water in it. The answer: absolutely yes. I started with 1.5L of cold tap water at about 20C. I slowly ramped the speed up to high over the first minute, and then let it run at high until I reached 100C. This took about 18 minutes; see chart below from my Vernier datalogger. When I turned the mixer off, the water was definitely boiling with bubbles rising from the blades. This experiment with water should hold for other things like soups or purees. Given that water has a specific heat of 4.186 joules/gram-C, this means the mixer was pumping about 465 watts (0.62 HP) of power into the water. Since the specific heat of water is higher than any other common substance besides ammonia (i.e. water needs more energy to raise 1 gram of water 1 degree C), the 465 watts going into a soup should result in an even faster rise in temperature. I may have to try an experiment with potato-leek soup....