EnriqueB

The new book from the Ideas in Food team should be out in october: http://www.amazon.com/Maximum-Flavor-Recipes-That-Change/dp/0770433219/

Oh, and my eiPOT stopped bubbling a few days ago (it is supposed to bubble all the time when it is connected, isn't it?), I have to contact Frank to find out what may have happened...

Pedro, excellent review, very useful!! I was very surprised to see the severe temperature oscillations (lalmost 8 degrees C up in a couple of seconds, then down again), but it eventually stabilizes. I also though it had something to do with the probe positioning, I'll try changing it like you. Where did you get your Greisinger unit and probes? The official site says it's only for professionals and does not show prices... I have Thermoworks but I would like to have a European provider as every package from the US has to pay heavy custom taxes. I think your mad-scientist-style setup will scare off anyone starting with sous-vide, please do not make them run away!!!! X-D

seannymurrs, I think there is no such a thing as a "best setup". It all depends on your needs, requirements and intended usage. First, different categories (baths, immersion circulators, and external controllers) offer different options in terms of versatility, safety, precision, integration of parts, or mobility. Then each specific brand and model within a same category have specific implementation details to value or worry about. I own 3 units, representing each of the categories: a water bath (SousVideSupreme Demi), a circulator (Addèlice SWID) and a controller with in-water heater and bubbler (eiPOT). I like all three, and can not recommend one or the other, it all depends on your needs. SVS Demi is self-contained, you don't have to worry about getting a properly insulated container or start cutting lids with special saws, which is very convenient. It also has the look of a standard kitchen appliance which helps with acceptance. But the fixed pot size and integration of parts make it less mobile, less versatile, and require permanent countertop space. Having the thermometer and heater out of the water and using natural convection make it less precise, slower for short cooking times, and requires being more careful with bags positioning, but also make it easier to clean and require less maintenance. It is not very powerful: long heating times and does not perform very well with temperatures between 85 and 90ºC. No safety mechanisms for things like low water level. SVS It is my default choice for long cooking times (tough meats), because it is properly insulated from scratch, it is totally noise-free, for those cookings absolute precision and water circulation became less important, and if electricity goes off for a second the cooking process goes on when it comes back. The latter is not the case with the other models, which means that if you have a short outage while sleeping or not at home you will likely have to throw the food to the garbage. Addélice SWID offers all the versality of a circulator, it efficiently circulates the water and controls temperature with much better precision that SVS. Also has more safety mechanisms, like controlling the water level. It's not big and can be easily stored on a cabinet or taken with me to parties or when going on holidays. Detects automatically the pot size and insulation and adjust to them without any hassle. Very powerful, heats the water 3 times faster than the Demi and allows pots of very different sizes up to almost 50 liters. The aspect on the countertop starts to look strange, you have to search adequate recipients and lids and maybe insulate them yourself, and is a little noisier than SVS (though not much). Also requires some more cleaning and maintenance (I really like that in this model cleaning does not require unscrewing plastic parts like Polyscience and others). Circulators take a good part of the useful water volume of your recipient, and make it harder to adapt lids to properly cover different baths to limit evaporation. SWID has an extremelly useful timer up feature that most other models do not implement: by default it will show cooking time if you don't program a specific time, and if you define a cooking time it goes down to zero then a led (and alarm) signals finishing and the timer starts going up and shows you the additional time the food has been cooking. SWID is my default choice for shorter cooking times, especially if they require precision, and when I want to rapidly adapt to using different baths. Also if I need to prepare a lot of food for parties and the like. An external controller offers maximum versatility, and if combined with a submersion heater like the FMM II (eiPOT) it is an excellent alternative to a circulator. It not only adapts to different bath sizes like the circulator but also to different heaters. This comes at a cost, though, and autotuning can be pretty slow when changing baths or require expert knowledge to figure out the best parameters. Your kitchen will start to have the "mad scientist" look, which your partner may not like... and the positioning of the controller above the water bath if you require bubbles with the FMM is cumbersome at times, you may not be able to position it like that in the place where you would like to have the bath. On the other hand the small profile of the cables of the FMM make it great for any pot or bath without removing useful space, and with a beer cooler you have a cheap perfectly insulated bath with lid from day 1. It is very powerful and can heat big baths, only the baths must have different geometry (tall and narrow) than big baths for a circulator (low and wide). You can tune many parameters and options in the controller, which can offer hours of wonder if you are of the geek type... eiPOT is my default option to travel and take to parties (the beer cooler doubles function to move the food to the party, then as the cooking vessel, and the eiPOT is the lightest unit), for cooking eggs (offers the required speed & precision and the forced bubbles from bottom to top do not move the eggs around like the circulator does), or for short cooking times in soup-type pots. As you see, no clear winner. You have to match the unit to your needs.

I took my camera but was so busy I could not take any picture, but I promise I'll take some next time!

Yesterday I finished teaching what I think was, as far as I know, the first sous-vide course for home cooks in Spain. Six hours split in two days in a demo kitchen for 18 people. It was a real challenge to multitask so as to address the required theory as well as preparing the dishes with degustations for everyone and answering many questions, all in a kitchen I was not familiar with. So the first day was a bit chaotic but I managed to organize things pretty well the second day. We cooked tender meat (chicken breasts 56ºC with miso-butter-mirin-chicken glace sauce), tough meat (ibérico pork cheeks 65ºC for 36 hours, cooked prior to the course, with celery root puree and pickled apple slices, adapted from chefsteps), fish (salmon cured with citrics and cooked on lemongrass & coriander seeds infused oil at 43ºC, adapted from Keller), seafood (shrimps at 51ºC with butter and coriander seeds), soft-boiled eggs at 75ºC (fast method), vegetables as side dishes (green asparagus with evoo, butter-glazed carrots and leeks), and a dessert (vanilla crème anglaise at 82ºC with banana cooked skin-in also at 82ºC). Many theory and tricks I showed were learnt here, from how to seal with liquids to egg tables and so on. This forum is a neverending source of quality information, thanks to everyone who has contributed and specially to PedroG whose tricks, tables and analysis have been extraordinarily useful. A great experience that I expect to repeat.

Thanks Todd, maybe I should give it a try again.

In Modernist Cuisine they propose to torch the egg surface for about 2 minutes, turning the egg often with tongs so it does not burn in any point. I have tried a couple of times and never really got it to work, also found it not very convenient and too slow for many eggs at once. Has someone successfully tried this technique? I use an egg topper like the one in nickrey's picture.

Great, thanks!!

Excellent Pedro, as usual! May I suggest that you include in the document the egg size the experiments were made with, as times may differ for other sizes: "23.3±0.7 mm (95% CI) wide, 31.4±1.9 mm large and of 72.7±3.4 g of weight"

Pressure Cook steaming (not boiling) and sous-vide are the two methods that possibly preserve most nutrients in vegetables. With some vegetables like carrots and leeks this is clearly noticeable: the sweetness and taste of PC-steaming or SV has nothing to do with the dull value when they are boiled, where many water-soluble compounds are gone. With other vegetables the taste difference is not so evident. Note that for PC-steaming to really work for this retention you must use short times, otherwise the tradeoff between temperature and time will be on the wrong side for nutrient retention... On the other hand, PC-steaming and SV are on opposite sides of speed and convinience: PC-steaming is fast and simple, SV is slow and requires packing and heating a lot of water. PC requires very precise timing and SV provides ample margins. Boiling+ice water would be the choice if you care about colour/presentation, but for most home cooking I don't care much about this, convinience and nutrients retention come first. Boiling or steaming, on the other hand, allow easy verification of the doneness, something that the PC and SV make harder. In summary, I choose: Boiling+ice water only when I'm interested in retaining colors Steaming (non-PC) for vegetables with extremelly short cooking times (e.g. thin green asparagus which only take 2/3 minutes of steam) PC-steaming most of the time SV for special applications, e.g. when I want to infuse a given flavour into the vegetables, or when I need to cook many different vegetables together, because putting them at different times in the same bath is much easier than cooking them sequentially with other methods.

Me too. I also wish it would allow me to automatically store the tested combinations with additional info (result, comments...) into some storage system (google docs? the app by Simon and Todd?) so I can remember what I've tried, what worked and what didn't. Have you suggested this to SVDash author?

Sorry, not in the app but in a personal spreadsheet.

That's what I have done...

In fact I've never understood why the time-to-temperature tables and pasteurization times were NOT included in the kitchen manual. To me, it was the biggest "usability" error of Modernist Cuisine. With those tables and the "best-bets" sous vide tables in the Kitchen Manual we would have all the relevant data in a single place always at hand in the kitchen.

Unless we are talking of different "convential glass cooktops", because conventional gets hot and stays hot for a while when turned off, the thermal inertia reduces control and cooking consistency, in my experience. I love the instantaneous reaction of induction heating, which behaves closer to gas in this aspect. And the second consequence of the cooktop being really hot is that, unlike induction, any food that spills off gets burnt and then cleaning becomes a mess. That's why cleaning is very different, even if the surface material is identical. Of course there are very legitimate reasons not to use induction. I just say that for me they only have advantages, except for specific applications where gas is still the best option. Conventional glasses (at least the ones I've used) range second or third best in my personal ranking in each and every dimension.

Conventional glass and induction are standard here in Spain, I've had a couple of each at home, and I would say exactly the contrary: induction gains conventional on every single dimension: control, power, speed, safety, easy to clean.... maybe more expensive, and maybe you cannot use some of your old pans, but to me it is totally worthwhile. I would never go back to either gas (except for particular applications such as paellas or works) or conventional glass.

There are tables of SV times-to-core as a function of shape, width and temperature increment in volume 2. Pasteurization times to add appear on volume 1. Though I prefer to use SousVideDash to compute those times.

Yes, I use a spreadsheet, and these are the fields: Date Food group (Meat, Poultry, Fish, Vegetable...) Animal/Food (Beef, Chicken, Carrot...) Cut/Part (Shortribs, Brisket, Thigh...) Portioning ("Deboned ribs in 100 g / 2 inches pieces", "Halved carrots"....) Dish ("MC SV Braised short ribs", "Glazed carrots"...) Pre-treatment ("5 hours in 5% brine", "Marinated in spice mix", "Pre-seared in pan"...) Other bag ingredients ("15 g butter", "50 g chicken stock & coriander") Target core temperature Water temperature Time (where applicable, often just "Use tables as a funcion of width/diameter") Finishing ("Torch seared", "deep-fried 1 min at 190ºC"....) Degree of safety achieved ("As raw", "Surface pasteurization", "pasteurization to core") Result ("Like"/"Not like") Comments I forgot to include another field I also have on my spreadsheet: Degree of doneness achieved ("Pink", "Well-done", "Medium", etc., without closed values as sous-viding may result in new categories such as those used by Modernist Cuisine like "Tender, yielding", or "Steak like")

And I use SousVideDash for computing times for tender cuts, fish, etc, but not for selecting temperatures, I don't much agree with their default choices, they are as nickrey said "on the safe/conservative side", and nothing is given for tough cuts.

Modernist Cuisine "best bet" tables are always my departure point for a new food, and have rarely dissappointed me. They are by far the most complete source. From there on I experiment, write down the results, and come up with my favorite (or most convenient) combinations.

Yes, I use a spreadsheet, and these are the fields: Date Food group (Meat, Poultry, Fish, Vegetable...) Animal/Food (Beef, Chicken, Carrot...) Cut/Part (Shortribs, Brisket, Thigh...) Portioning ("Deboned ribs in 100 g / 2 inches pieces", "Halved carrots"....) Dish ("MC SV Braised short ribs", "Glazed carrots"...) Pre-treatment ("5 hours in 5% brine", "Marinated in spice mix", "Pre-seared in pan"...) Other bag ingredients ("15 g butter", "50 g chicken stock & coriander") Target core temperature Water temperature Time (where applicable, often just "Use tables as a funcion of width/diameter") Finishing ("Torch seared", "deep-fried 1 min at 190ºC"....) Degree of safety achieved ("As raw", "Surface pasteurization", "pasteurization to core") Result ("Like"/"Not like") Comments (Edited to add forgotten "Date" field)

Hi Todd, that message is for an evaluation version of your app. Is it already live? A link to it?

Me too, and a baking rack also. All very useful.

Hi Todd, it was good but not great, to our taste. I made some research and the 750 g seem to be good amount, it's not a typo. So likely the taste profile changed with the lower amount of butter....