ThayerG

Sous-vide Hainan Chicken? Does anyone have any experience with this dish? There are a few blogs which mention it and today I tried a couple of pieces of dark chicken meat with ginger and soy sauce and a couple of dried red chilis. Conventional Hainan chicken is steamed and then chilled to gelatinize the liquids so I svied the chicken for two hours at 63C and then gave it a 30 minute ice bath. The results weren't bad but need some help. Brining?

If you buy garam masala and curry powder and smell each you will understand better how they differ. Curry powder is useful for devilled eggs. It is ironically mostly useless for any attempts at Indian food. Patak's pastes are better but they also amp up the flavors with salt and sugar. Fresh spices and herbs are your friends. There are no shortcuts. But with a dozen spices, some chili, and a paste of garlic and ginger you are in business.

I have been experimenting with sous-vide cooking and decided to see how low-effort an Indian dish I could make. I stuffed a vacuum bag with fresh spinach and then I mixed fenugreek leaf, kalonji, chaat masala (home-made, with black salt) ground coriander, turmeric, mango powder, yogurt and a touch of cream. After mixing all that I poured it into the spinach and sealed. No frying, no onions, no chili, no garlic, no ginger. I cooked it at 85C for 40 minutes. This should have been a total failure on moral grounds alone--so little effort deserves a commensurate reward. But it wasn't. The sauce developed a nice golden color and the dish was pleasantly sour. It complemented some other dishes quite well. I think sous-vide Indian (or "Indian-inspired") cooking is well worth exploring.

I had the sidekic go south twice. Both times the circulator pump failed. So I decided to invest in the $400 Polyscience number Williams Sonoma sells. And I'm glad I did. Having one piece instead of two is already less clunky. Plus the 1100W heater brings water up to temp faster. The pump motor is at the top of the housing, ie not submerged, and drives a submerged impeller via a shaft. I'm no engineer but it seems that keeping the motor dry and cooler can only be good. And finally the temperature can be set in 0.1 degree increments. The Polyscience user interface isn't nearly as good as the sidekic's but it gets the job done. I'm using a small igloo cooler as the water oven with just a piece of cardboard covered in plastic as top insulation. This works remarkably well--much better than a stockpot because heat loss is reduced very considerably. With this setup sous vide is a lot more fun than it was with the sidekic, although the sidekic is impressive for the money and got me into sous vide.