Brasshopper

I think that chicken teriyaki would benefit from sous vide. The typical way my Japanese cookbook suggested is to make the teriyaki sauce by mixing sugar, mirin, saki and soy in equal quantities by volume, then placing chicken thighs in a skillet, cooking until brown, adding the sauce and simmering uncovered until the sauce reduces with the chicken in the pan. Tasty, and safe, because the thighs are well cooked, but they have the traditional overcooked chicken issue. The sauce needs to reduce with the chicken fat until it becomes thick. So I'm thinking you take your thighs and trim all visible fat - heck, sous vide you could use breasts. Make the teriyaki sauce in a skillet without the chicken and put it in the bags with the chicken. Cook at about 147 for a couple hours, until pasteurized and for an additional hour. Remove the chicken from the bags and crisp up the skin, either in a pan or using a torch. Transfer the sauce and any fat that has rendered off the chicken into the skillet and reduce the sauce until thick, you might have to add a little oil. Put the chicken into the skillet with the chicken and turn it so that the sauce covers the chicken completely, then serve the chicken crispy side up. The hope is that the chicken would still be tender, while being thoroughly cooked. Azuki red beans for bun filling are cooked for some time to convert the bean starch to sugar for sweetness. They might well benefit from a week or so in a water bath. My cookbook claims that at one point the Japanese had little access to sugar and would cook the beans until they were sweet, but most recipes I see online call for adding a lot of sugar to the beans. My thought is that you put beans and an appropriate amount of water in a bag then put them in with whatever you were cooking in the cooker for about a week, with the exception that when you were not going to use it, just turn it up to about 180. In that amount of time, they should convert if they are going to. This is just a thought. I think that there are a lot of Japanese dishes where the food is overcooked - and they might benefit from pre-cooking the food in sous vide, just to let the food become completely cooked and tender - then you could remove the food from the bath early. Tako (octopus) is boiled before being prepared sushi or sashimi style. Again, a maybe, it might not be so tough if not heated to a boil. Just random thoughts, I'm not a big time Japanese cook or even Japanese. :-)

I found this to be an interesting article. I've been reading a bunch of articles, at NIST and on Wikipedia and other places, to determine how temperature scales are currently defined. There is something called International Temperature Scale of 1990 (ITS-90) which is designed to allow a laboratory to independently recreate a temperature scale, which for out uses would range across three standard points, the triple point of Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water (VSMOW), the melting point of Gallium (29.7646C) and the freezing point of Iridium (156.5985C). I vaguely recalled that the freezing point of water/boiling point of water were no longer being used, but at this point they are no longer being used to define the size of the Celsius degree, either. This article was also interesting to me: http://www.nist.gov/customcf/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=830919 - especially a table on page six which compares the tolerance of several different sorts of measuring devices, and the best case calibration tolerance. As I read the table, it seems that the "Grade A" PRT has a tolerance of over .1C at freezing, rising to .5C at sous vide temperatures. (Vertical scale is a log scale, that is my best guess). While calibration error is well below that (and reflect repeatability and adjustability, as I read the article) there is also some discussion of error caused by repeated reading of thermistors and such. All that said, I use a Taylor 9842 that I have checked with a freezing water bath and which was likely within half a degree - the water bath varied from about 31.6 to 32.4 depending on the amount of agitation. I didn't adjust it in the bath, since it was not distilled water. I validated it at sous vide temperatures by cooking an egg and looking at how much of the white and yolk had set, it seems to match what other people get at those temperatures. This thermometer reads in 0.1 degree F. While I doubt the thermometer is accurate to that degree (as it were) the last digit does let us know what the relative temperature is - if you measure something, and leave the thermometer in, then once the thermometer stabilizes, you can determine if there is a drift in temperature - is something warming or cooling? If the thermometer read in whole degrees only, the change in temperature over time would not be apparent until the reported temperature crossed a degree line. This should allow you to determine change in temperature faster than you otherwise would be able to. It is true that many people don't understand measurement accuracy, nor do they understand how calculations affect that. I don't believe that most people take physics, and if they do, they don't remember it. Your measurement accuracy can't be increased by performing calculations on it - an example would be that you have a wire that is a mile long and you want to cut it into one foot lengths, how many will you have? The answer is, probably more than 5000, but it is impossible to say for sure. The answer that a lot of people will give is, 5280, but is it likely that a 1 mile measurement is carried out to a 1 foot tolerance? Even if it were, if each piece is cut 1% too long (or there is a 1% cutting loss, actually really low), and everything else is accurate to four decimal places, we get 5227 pieces, plus a fraction. The rule of thumb is that you presume 2 places of accuracy in a measurement, so the fewest you are probably going to get is 5175 or so. Or that was how I was taught in high school physics, anyway. It is probably OK for high school, but people will do a series of calculations and carry every decimal place that their calculator will allow without looking at precision, or where to round, and they will believe that those decimal places are meaningful. How accurately can you measure when cooking? I'd bet that 1 decimal place would be pushing it for a recipe.

While you could set up a medium rare, medium, medium well, and well tank, pull steaks from the tank, dry and finish, the issue with rare is that the hold temperature is unsafe, it is going to be under 130, likely 120-125. The hold time there has to be minimal. Also, some of us think that a steak warmed to 120 is already overcooked, you might as well take it to 131 and call it roast beef. I just made a PID controller for the first time, and I've been playing with my food, as it were. In an effort to learn what to sous vide, and when, and what not to, I've been sous videing everything. Made sous vide french toast today. First thing I learned is that I think I have eaten sous vide food, a local restaurant makes roast beef that was pink edge to edge and had a very thin crust, and it does not really have much of a roast flavor. My original thought was that they were roasting very slowly, now I think that they sous vide and then finish. I can duplicate that flavor, and I can also make the food a bit better, by putting a bit more of a finish on them. In fact, so far I can make almost any steak taste like that roast beef by sous videing it to 131 for the right length of time. I got a large chuck roast, and divided it into meals - cooked at 131 for 2 days, it starts to get significantly tender while still having a fundamental medium rare quality. Now that was a good thing. When I was younger I used to like the toughness of chuck steak as steak, now I do not. But steaks need to be more than that - I'm learning, I think, that I do not like my steaks sous vide. My favorite steaks have been cooked as if I was crusting a sous vide steak, but a bit longer. The interior should be cold. There should be quite a bit of crust. I read a web site that claimed that even rare steak lovers preferred medium rare in a blind taste test. Problem is that I can't find a blind person to test me. Maybe I'm supposed to blind myself? Now, I tell the waiter, "I want it extra extra rare." "You want it rare." "No, I want it extra extra rare. I have never, in my life sent a steak back for more cooking provided it has thawed enough that it bends. I want it bloody, I want it to moo. I do not want it heated through, I want a cold center." "You want it rare." Sigh. I'd rather have a pink medium rare sous vide steak than what I'm gonna get - something that is about medium well, a small pink area in the thickest part of the steak and most of the steak grey. I had a waiter once tell me, "Look, I order your steak on the computer, it has a place for rare, medium rare, medium, medium well, well. Pick one. And rare will be, "some pink", medium will be "pale pink", medium well will be grey through and through and well done will be cooked long enough to re-toughen from the heat. Conversely, taking a 5.3 ounce burger, slicing onion to 3mm in the mandolin, lightly forming the burger, putting it in a ziplock bag using a water bath to squeeze the air out of the bag without squeezing the burger, with a couple of those thin slices of onion on each side, then putting the burger in a 131F bath for a couple hours, removing the burger from the bag and torching it until it has a nice crust, cooking those soaked onions on the side, and serving the burger in a lightly toasted sesame seed bun, well, that beats the heck out of any ordinary burger I've ever eaten. That burger, alone, and knowing that I can do it again, makes the whole sous vide thing worth it. Well, that and chicken breast, damn thing almost makes it edible. OK, you can cook a lot of things sous vide, it is mostly easy to do, and I'm becoming a convert. Not steaks, but I'm tired of pork chops that are dry and leathery - made some with nothing but a few tablespoons of ro-tel per chop, little salt. Somehow porkchops were always hit and miss, now they were hit and hit - my technique with them is not the greatest, I can't stand there that long so I tend to make them in the oven. If I pull them at the right time, they are good, else they are tough, dry. I feel like I can always cook these. But you might like those pork chops, they had character...or something. Of course, that is the point, I like things one way, my wife likes them the other. I had to put together a second controller, because she liked her steak, pork and chicken, even beef 10 degrees warmer than I did.