EnriqueB

Alabaster is one of my favorite restaurants in Madrid. Kind of traditional "renewed" with excellent produce and top waiters & wine service. It goes just after DiverXO, SantCeloni and Álbora in my personal list. La Cabra and La Tasquería are good very both. I would suggest also Lakasa, Triciclo, Taberna Pedraza and La Buena Vida as excellent choices. For "non-just-spanish" restaurants but also great options, I would visit Kabuki Wellington, Sudestada, PuntoMX (or its "street-food" version Salón Cascabel, close to StreetXO), Nakeima (queue system, no reservations) or Umiko. Another excellent choice is Corral de la Morería. It has a top gastronomic menu which can be paired with some of the best Spanish sherries wines offer to be found in Madrid, and afterwards a Flamenco show which is not "just for tourists" but rather the best flamenco you can see in Spain (and I am not much of a flamenco lover, but it has been quite impressive in all of my visits). The gastronomic dinner room is pretty small and usually full on weekends, better go tuesday to friday and book quite in advance.

I had preordered it through amazon.co.uk and have no news, it seems they have run out of copies even before fulfilling the preorders

I have also had many reports of people experiencing the same problem when cooking for long times between 55 and 60ºC, though I have never seen it myself. I agree with the explanation by ChrisZ, I believe this is due to spoilage and not pathogenic bacteria. Althouh I also have some serious concerns about pathogenic vegetative bacteria disactivation around the no-growth/growh threshold (generally assumed to be 54,4ºC for Listeria, the most heat-resistant vegetative pathogen). For both reasons, I always recommend to pre-sear (reaching all surfaces, so a torch is my favorite) the meat or scald the bag in boiling water for these profiles (<60ºC for more than 6 hours).

I never use my sous-vide equipments to initially heat the water. I start from hot tap water (around 50ºC) and if the target temperature is much above that, or if I'm reusing water, heat it in the stove. It is much faster. Also, home units are usually cheaper because they have just the required power to maintain a given temperature, but are quite slow to heat the water from ambient temperature. Many manuals even recommend against using the unit for initial heating and say the machine life is increased if water is heated by other means.

Using the generally accepted rules, if you chilled to 3ºC in less than 2 hours and you are absolutely sure that your food has been under 3ºC all the time, then the food should be safe to eat. If your food has rather been between 3 and 5ºC, the maximum conservation time goes down to TEN DAYS, given the measured germination and toxin production of the most dangerous C.Botulinum spores. Even if this is a low-likelihood scenario, in this case your food is NOT necessarilly safe. Fast chilling does not seem clear from what you post. Fridge temperature seems ok from your measurements, but you should be absolutelly sure, i.e. are you sure the fridge door was not being opened frequently during conservation, which would likely take temperature above 3ºC? Honestly, I would throw the food away and not run the risk.

Nice demo. What was the temperature you used for cooking the short ribs?

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I would not call it "arbitrary", but rather a consensus based on research that provides conservative values than ensure safety for most of the population in worst-case scenarios. And that is what I expect from food safety regulations. Once we know that, we may decide -with good reason- that all people we are serving are healthy (immuno-competent), that our food is from trusted sources, that we use secondary safety measures such as salt levels, acids, searing, etc. We understand the logic behind and make our risk choices. But I am afraid when I read practices or recommendations on a forum like this that totally break those rules without any further explanation. Someone could follow them without the understanding and have dangerous consequences. I totally agree that many people get a wrong "binary" impression of safety, i.e. pasteurized to 6D = safe, otherwise you die, but it is rather a continuous change (on a given temperature/time range) and a given threshold like 6D is just a worst-case consensus. This is something I repeat a lot on the courses I teach.

"Not a huge concern". True, not the highest concern, but there are several reported cases of intoxications from contaminated meats. And meat are sometimes spiced and spices are mucho more susceptible. And some strains of B. cereus have shown to be able to produce enterotoxins under anaerobic conditions. For a source for both issues see Andersson A. et al "What problems does the food industry have with the spore-forming pathogens Bacillus cereus and Clostridium perfringens?" International Journal of Food Microbiology 28 (1995) 145-155.

Yes, nitrites should remove the botulism risk.

"Cook" normally means "reaching a given temperature at core", which, for the usual sous-vide temperatures, adds no safety. I guess you are also searing, which no doubt should kill many pathogens if present on the surface. But that is not a guarantee of safety.

Pasteurized sous vide meats normally means "pasteurized for vegetative forms of pathogenic bacteria" only. Unless you have also pasteurized for sporulated forms (which implies much higher temps/times, I think 75ºC is the minimum temp I've seen for this) you should NOT keep the meats in a home refrigerator "for weeks or months". You are running a serious risk of spores germinating and producing toxins than may make you seriously sick (B. cereus or C. perfringens spores) or die (C. botulinum spores).

The generally accepted rules for sous-vide cook-chill safety are: Food must be pasteurized to core for vegetative forms of pathogenic bacteria. Pasteurizing implies cooking the core to a temperature higher than 54,4ºC (the believed temperature at which the highest temperature-resistant pathogen C. Perfringens starts to die) for long enough time (enough that the slowest-to-die pathogen Listeria Monocytogenes dies). Pasteurization in this case would be heat process equivalent to 70ºC/2 min, which would reduce Listeria by a factor of 6 log units ("6D"). You have tables to compute these theoretical times depending on temperature, type of food, food shape, and food width, in Douglas Baldwin online guide and can also use the excellent ipad app SousVideDash Food must be chilled immediately after cooking and as fast as possible (to <5ºC in less than 1,5 hours) using an ice-water bath with at least 50% ice or similar, then immediatly refrigerated Conservation days under refrigeration must be limited depending on the fridge temperature. If <3ºC can be absolutely ensured, a long period of about 21 days can be used, but this is not usually feasible in home fridges. At 5ºC safe storage time is 10 days, at 10ºC it is 5 days. Requirements 2 and 3 are due to the fact that with pasteurization for vegetative forms of bacteria we are not killing the sporulated form of bacteria. Of special concern are those that are anaerobic or facultative, as we are creating a reduced-oxygen environment with the vacuum bag and the spores can start germinating as soon as we enter the danger zone while chilling. The limit times are due to psychrothrophic C. botulinum type E, but C. perfringens and B. cereus spores are also of concern. Given that the door of home fridges is opening often, their temperatures tend to be high, it is a good idea to keep the cooked pouches in the coldest part of the fridge, reduce conservation times to 5-7 days at home, and always keep a digital fridge thermometer close to it. Otherwise, freeze and conserve for several months without problems. Freezing many sous-vide cooked foods almost does not affect quality. For some foods the sous-vide cooking profile may imply pasteurization for spores too. This may happen with tough meats cooked to >75ºC for long periods, or with vegetables or grains usually cooked to >80ºC. In those cases cooking to an equivalent heat treatment of 90ºC/10 min would reduce C. botulinum spores by 6D and the conservation times can be much longer. Also, for inmuno-competent people, a milder form of pasteurization can be used with a reduced conservation time. Baldwin proposes a 3D core reduction in Salmonella, fast chilling, refrigerating to <5ºC and consuming in less than 5 days. For more details, I suggest reading Douglas Baldwin's guide or his review paper. I should also say that long cooking times around the threshold value 54,4ºC are still of concern to some microbiologist, as that is an area for which most thermal treatments are extrapolations and we lack enough experimental data to fully support them. Detailed explanations can be found in this report: Safety of sous-vide foods: Feasibility of extending ComBase to describe the growth / survival / death response of bacterial foodborne pathogens between 40ºC and 60ºC. (edited to modify some of the critical temps/times after consulting the sources)

That breaks the sous-vide safety rules I know. Could you please explain the reasoning?

No. For that you would need to add an external SV controller, which many people do with portable induction burners. OTOH, some brands are already working on appliances for their induction cooktops designed for that, see http://www.cnet.com/products/ge-monogram-36-inch-induction-cooktop-with-sous-vide-accessory/

Likely the relative prices of electricity and gas have something to do with it, but here in Spain and a good part of Europe you will mostly see electrical cooktops at homes, unlike in the US. I would chose induction over any alternative any day. It is fast, powerful, efficient, clean, programmable, reproducible and safe. That said, to me the best world is a main induction cooktop and one or two powerful gas ranges for things like paellas, woks, or when there are power shutdowns.

I have 6 SV machines. Out of which, SVS Demi and Anova PC are the most used, SVS for long cooks and Anova PC for all the rest. The other equipments are only used when I need more baths, to make temperature comparisons for the same food, or to teach SV classes. Used at least 2 or 3 times per week, usually more.

Chorizo, peas, olives, a thick layer of rice instead of a very thin one with "socarrat", and a surface so crowded of ingredients that do not allow to see the rice (which should be the actual star of the show) are the worst sins when making paellas That's a good article, PopsicleToze.

From a safety perspective, if you chill to 5ºC in less than 1:5 hours and store in a fridge under 5ºC, you can store the cooked & chilled potatoes for much longer, at least 7 days and likely longer. With the time&temp you need for potatoes they are almost sterilized. Flavour-wise, they will lose almost no quality during that period. On the other hand, some vegetables have been found to keep the most nutrients (with respect to other methods) like some vitamins when cooked sous-vide and consumed inmediatelly, but not so much when chilled and stored, in that case the vitamins retention is more or less equivalent to having beeing cooked by traditional boiling.

Tender, moist, but not "falling off the bone".

Pigeon breasts are tender cuts, and deep frying them after marination should be enough, no SV needed. On the other hand, the thights are tougher and do benefit from SV tenderizing. I do 3 hours at 65ºC following Modernist Cuisine profile and they are perfect.

Pork chops are a tender cut, you should cook them just until they get the desired temperature at the core (I use 55ºC core, 56ºC water), maybe longer if you want to pasteurize (and only if cooking to >55ºC). If the total time given their width is longer that around 3-4 hours, you should cut them in smaller portions that can cook in that time, otherwise you will have dry/mush. Use Douglas Baldwin tables or SousVideDash to compute the time required to reach a core temperature as a function of the width.

Many vegetables are excellent when cooked sous-vide. It has proved to be the technique that keeps most of several nutrients (when consumed inmediatelly, not so when cook-chill-reheat). Flavor-wise, it excels with vegetables with natural sugars like carrots, onions, shallots, leeks... as they keep their natural flavor more than with any other technique. The doneness is much better regulated with the lower temperature, as the window of time for aldente, soft, etc is much longer. "Hard vegetables" (i.e. that would normally not be eaten raw) need to be cooked at 80ºC or higher to soften cell walls and, in some cases, gel starches. 85ºC is the most common temperature. Time depends on the vegetable, and at 85ºC is about 2+1/2 times the time of boiling. From your examples, I would cook broccoli and cauliflower in small-medium florets for about 25-30 min, and medium green asparagus for 15-20 min. Others require longer times, such as carrots or leeks for 1 hour. With home vacuum sealers cooking vegetables is a bit annoying as bags tend to float (at 85ºC the remaining air plus internal vegetable water evaporating produce air in the bag), so you have to weight the bag or put some type of ceiling.

But the results are, simply, different. The same stock done at a lower temperature is much more clear and retains "fresher" aromas. With the pressure cooker it is darker, showing that Maillard reactions are starting to take place, and the aromas are different, more "cooked" ones. I have formally verified this with vegetable stock (here), not with chicken stock but I'm convinced the results are quite similar as I have tried both (though not side-by-side). Whether one is better than the other depends on personal preference, and the result one is searching for. I do prepare one or the other type depending on the dish.

Yes, it will give the cured texture. You have tables to cook from frozen in Baldwin's guide. But they are not so precise as when cooking from fridge temp as state changes are difficult to model.