btbyrd

Thanks! The "newspaper" was printed.

Dave Arnold was definitely an inspiration with the SPL pre-soak. I originally used the ChefSteps recipe which blanches the fries sous vide.... it helps keep them from falling apart, but sealing up fries with brine is a pain and requires a bunch of bags if you're making a larger batch. So I skip the bags and just blanch them conventionally. You break more of them, but each time I make them I try to cook them a little less so they don't break as much. Haven't been very successful, but I don't make these fries frequently because they're so involved. If I had a bigger freezer, it might happen more often.

Thanks! My family has always, and I mean always, cooked burgers on the grill. I've always considered the "grilled, roughly 1/3lb burger" to be my personal burger-making style; its what I grew up with and it's what I've been making my entire adult life. But I recently got a small Blackstone griddle and decided to give the smash variety a try; we love them at restaurants, but never made them at home because we haven't had a cooking surface large enough to cook them efficiently. But oh my goodness, this was probably the best burger I've ever made, and I doubt I'll make them another way for quite some time. As for the fries, they were hand cut. I follow a modified version of the ChefSteps thick cut fries recipe, the potatoes get a pre-soak in Pectinex SPL and are then blanched in simmering brine instead of cooking them sous vide. You blanch them until they're almost falling apart, let them dry, and do a low-temp fry to set the crust. Then freeze them and do a final high-temp fry to brown them up and warm them through. The fries are superior, but the downside of blanching them until they're almost falling apart is that they're very fragile and you end up breaking a lot of them. The batch in the photo was the busted/broken dregs of a larger batch that I'd used for steak frites and fish/chips. Just realized that I never posted the fish and chips, so here they are with the unbroken "fancy" fries:

It's the Mercer Praxis heavy duty 5"X6" turner. (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) It's very large, so it's basically going to be a unitasker in my kitchen. But it's well made and does the job. The edges are thin and sharp enough to get under the burgers -- no need to use a razor scraper like Kenji does.

New spatula day. Time to smash some burgers. Lacy and crispy. With triple cooked chips: Plated:

As they say in Argentina, a tool rusts more because it's not being used than because it is being used. Anyway, I already have a No 27 in the old style, but I'd happily use one of these thicc boi 4mm new models if it showed up on my doorstep.

If it's one I recommended on here, it's probably an Epicurean board. They're thin, light, easy to care for, and last basically forever. And inexpensive. They sometimes warp. They're not-so-bad on your knife edges, but not especially great. I much prefer cutting on wood or on a good synthetic board like HiSoft or Hasegawa rubber board.

+1 for Toiro and Korin. Also check out MTC Kitchen (though they're slow shipping right now because of COVID). Then there are knives...

"Snow day" ramen. 4 inches of snow was in the forecast, but we got nothing. Shoyu chicken and Benton’s bacon dashi broth. 63C egg. Sous vide chashu.

I agree with jimb0's post above, but would elaborate since you're immunocompromised (or at least pregnant). There's a difference between pasteurized and "safe to eat." If you're willing to eat a conventionally cooked medium-rare steak or a soft boiled egg (that didn't start out pasteurized) then you should have no qualms about eating food prepared SV according to recipes and guidelines from reputable sources (like ChefSteps, Anova, Modernist Cuisine, Doug Baldwin, and America's Test Kitchen). It is just as safe to eat as conventionally prepared food. But if you're trying to abide by strict guidelines in avoiding pathogens, SV offers you the additional advantage of being able to pasteurize foods that you couldn't normally consume (like a medium-rare steak). If you're looking for pasteurization times/temps, Doug Baldwin's Practical Guide to SV offers pasteurization tables for fish, poultry, and meat. Most SV ice cream base recipes (like those from ChefSteps and Anova) have you cook the base at 185F for an hour, after which it's going to be pasteurized (just be sure to agitate the bag a few times during cooking). Since you mentioned curds, I'll add that the same thing is true of ChefStep's lemon curd recipe (which cooks at 75C for an hour). All that's to say, if you already have a Joule, I wouldn't go through the bother and expense of returning it in favor of the Breville/Polyscience unit. For the novice, the Joule is extremely helpful with its visual doneness features and in-app recipes. And if pasteurization is a concern, you can easily look up most of that information in tables. I realize that SV can be daunting to the beginner, but if you've got good recipes (many of which are in the Joule app) and some good online resources, there's no need to fear the technique -- even from a safety standpoint.

I'd eat it and serve it to my non-immunocompromised family members. Baldwin's timetable isn't an indication of how long it takes for an item to cook per se, but rather how long it takes for the temperature of the core to reach (basically) the temperature of the bath. This results in that uniform, edge-to-edge doneness that is associated with most SV cooking techniques. But if you don't care about the core being the exact same temperature as the edges, a piece of meat can be cooked all the way through (i.e., the core is at 130F or higher) faster than the times listed in the table. I broke out the Polyscience SV Toolbox app to do some calculations. In a 137F water bath, a 2 1/8" thick pork chop starting out at 33F will reach a core temp of 130F after 2 hours and 19 minutes. It will reach 135F at 3 hours and 16 minutes. And because it takes the core so long to come up the final degree or two when cooking SV, it won't reach 137F in less than four hours and the app will not provide the calculation (though Baldwin's table suggests it'd take roughly 4 hours). TLDR: your chop is fully cooked, even though the core didn't reach the same temp as the bath. If you're going to retherm it SV, keep in mind that it's not going to reheat any faster than it took to cook; it'll still need to hang out in the bath for a couple/few hours. Finally, FWIW, ChefSteps suggests cooking a frozen 2" chop for 2 hours and 15 minutes.

Gas is better than induction, but it depends on your range. I used to use mine on a low-end gas range to make pancakes, but the ones around the outside took significantly longer than the ones in the middle. Since this thread is about baking it makes more sense to just stick the pan or steel in the oven as the oven preheats. This is especially true if you're going to bake the bread in a dutch oven to mimic the effect of a steam oven.

They heat very unevenly, especially on induction. Only the part of the pan directly above the induction coil will fully preheat. I did some tests with an IR thermometer using the MC baking steel on a Vollrath Mirage Pro induction burner. After 30 minutes of preheating, I found that the surface just an inch away from the induction coil was 100F cooler than the steel directly over the coil. Though that's pretty awful, things got much worse out toward the edges. The steel would be useless as a baking surface or griddle unless you wanted to cook only in the area above the coil. The combination of a poor conductor (steel/iron) over a spotty heat source just doesn't work very well at all. Cast iron pans and baking steels are best pre-heated in an oven.

Anova Precision Oven. I took your original post to include the APO as one of the "overly sophisticated and expensive" options if all you're looking for is a proofer.

Again, you have said nothing that begins to address the question at hand. I just reread the relevant parts of this thread. The dialectic seems to go something like this: liamsaunt's question: Is 2-3 hours long enough to cook the chops I have? Rotuts's best attempt at an answer: Nice chops! Can you unbag and re-vacuum seal them for some reason? I like mine cooked at 130.1F! By the way, SV doesn't brown meat! Here's some unsolicited advice about searing that doesn't really matter on a 3-inch-thick steak! Send pics! My answer: 2-3 hours isn't long enough for the chops you have. Doug Baldwin's SV tables are a good resource if you want to estimate how long it will take protein of a given thickness to come up to temperature. A 4-inch thick piece of protein takes at least 3 times as long to come up to temp as a 2-inch thick one. Rotut's retort: No it doesn't, once isotherm is achieved. Me: Dude, we're talking about how long it takes for isotherm to be achieved. Also, who calls it "isotherm?" Do you have any citations? Rotuts: LOOK IN MY FREEZER! After something comes up to temperature, time=tenderness! QED. Me: We're not talking about what happens after something comes up to temperature. Here's that table of thickness and cooking times to illustrate the point I was making. Rotuts: But it's not exponential! CHECK MY FREEZER! I HAVE EXPLAINED THE BEST WAY I KNOW HOW! Go back in the thread and see - it's all there. Me: Except for the part where you even begin to address the question that was asked. Maybe I missed something, but I don't think so. I'm sure they will come out great! Sous vide does wonders for pork. I look forward to seeing pics of the finished product.

I've tried them and liked them a lot. I liked them even more than fresh Sun Noodle ramen, though that's mostly because Sun uses an absurd amount of riboflavin to die their noodles yellow -- enough to dye your boiling water yellow. They're really high in sodium though, which I'm not nuts about. I don't remember them tasting especially salty, but that may have been masked by the already-salty ramen broth. The texture is quite nice.

I borrowed the term "exponential" from Polyscience. I guess they weren't being precise. The point is that the relationship between thickness and the time it takes the core to reach temperature is not linear. A one inch thick steak takes 75 minutes to come up to temperature. Intuitively, one might think that a two inch thick steak would take double the time, 150 minutes. But in fact, it takes 210 minutes -- a full hour longer. If you bothered to read further than the first two rows in the chart, you'd notice that while a 1-inch sphere of protein only takes 25 minutes to come up to temp, a 2-inch sphere takes 90 minutes; a 3 inch sphere takes 165 minutes, and 4-inches 285 minutes. So a four inch sphere takes almost eleven and a half times as long to cook as a one inch sphere. Anyway, the question was about cooking times for pork of a given thickness. You've provided no insight on this issue. The original recipe calls for 2-3 hours in the bath for chops 1.5" thick. Doug Baldwin's table indicates that a chop of 40mm (1.57") will come up to temp in 2.5 hours, so this checks out. But this is far from enough time to cook chops 3 inches (or 75mm) thick. Even doubling the time would not be enough. If you're cooking in a Ziplock bag, you can always just open it up and check the chops with an instant read thermometer after four hours and see how hot the core is. If you're cooking at 140, the center may be fully cooked at that point, but just not all the way up to bath-temperature. It takes a much longer for the core to come up those last couple of degrees than it does to warm up toward the beginning of the cook. This explains Baldwin's note that you can shave 13% off the cook time if you just want the core to come up to two degrees less than the bath temperature. Finally, for what it's worth, I prefer pork cooked to a higher temperature than beef. All that's down to personal taste. I'm not scared of pink pork, but just prefer a slightly firmer bite. ChefSteps and Kenji (and apparently ATK) recommend 140F; Modernist Cuisine recommends 136F. There's no "right" temperature, but I'd advise against an ultra-low temp cook for your first SV pork experience.

I'm not talking about holding items for extended periods to break down collagen. You don't need to do that with pork chops anyway. I'm talking about the time it takes for the core of an item to reach the temperature of the bath. Per Doug Baldwin:

Citation needed.

Sous vide cooking times increase exponentially as thickness increases. A slab of meat four inches thick takes at least three times as long to cook as one that is only two inches thick. If you're cooking a tender cut to a particular core temperature, you can consult charts (like those from Doug Baldwin) to see how long something will take to come up to temperature. These charts usually list times for slab-shaped items, cylindrical items, and sphere-shaped items. For steaks and chops, consult the slab column. For pork chops 3" thick, cook for 6.5 hours. Also, I'm jealous of those awesome looking red waddle chops. Heritage Foods USA are good people.

Thank you. It does take a while to prepare, but the process is very straightforward. It's not impractical for a home cook, but it's also a somewhat ambitious "composed" soup. The impetus behind it was the fact that whole chickens were on sale this week, and it had been forever since I'd made a proper soup. Now that the weather is colder and we're in a pandemic, I figured some comfort food was called for. So I told my wife that chicken soup was to be on the menu and asked her what she wanted. Ramen was out. Pho ga was out. Noodles in general were out. She wanted a chicken and rice soup, which is usually somewhat homey and modest, but I wanted to do a take on a showstopper chicken and rice soup. And that's what I did. So I bought two chickens and broke them down. I deboned the legs and thighs and used the bones, along with the carcasses and wings, to make a roasted stock in a pressure cooker. While the bones were roasting in the oven, I brought the water to a boil and added half a head of napa cabbage and two sheets of kombu, and then turned off the heat to let it all steep. Once the bones were roasted, I strained out the veg, added the bones and meat, deglazed the roasting pan with water, and added a boatload of alliums. I used onions, shallots, garlic, and ginger as aromatics for a sort of vaguely Asian broth. Pressure cooked for 1.5 hours. Then I strained the stock, chilled it overnight in the fridge, and defatted it (reserving the fat). It was around this time that I thought about clarifying the broth to make it more upscale. So I used a technique from ChefSteps and blended the stock with a chicken breast and a couple grams of methocel, which I then brought to a simmer until a raft formed and I could strain out the clarified broth. I also added a spoonful or two of Minor's chicken base before clarifying -- a way to add salt to the broth along with some chicken flavor and MSG. I strained the clarified stock through a cloth and reserved that until it was time to make the soup. The broth is the complicated part. Everything else is pretty easy, especially if you skip the pretentious steps like using a tiny melon baller on the carrots. The carrots got balled, and the celery and napa cabbage got cut into large-ish, but spoonable pieces. I did a quick blanch on these in salted water and chilled them down in an ice bath. It sounds fussy, but really didn't take much work. I salted the chicken breast and threw it in a bag with a bit of oil and white soy sauce, and then cooked it SV at 64C for an hour. After an hour, I added a few eggs to the water bath. While the chicken and eggs were cooking, I made some rice and threw the mushrooms in the oven after tossing them with some chicken fat. At the end, it was just a matter of assembly. I mounded the rice in a ramikin and unmolded it into the bowl. Staggered the celery, carrots, cabbage, mushrooms and cubed chicken meat around the bowl. I brought the broth up to a boil and seasoned it with white soy sauce and a bit of salt. Poured in enough of the almost-boiling broth to come close to the top of the molded rice, scattered over some green onions, and added the egg yolk. Added a drizzle of sesame oil around the broth and it was done. So yes, I suppose it was a lot of work. But I went pretty crazy on broth-based soups a few years ago, including a deep dive on ramen and pho. I would never have made this dish without having done that before, but after cooking enough stock over the years, cooking something like this didn't seem especially extravagant. If you make the broth consciously and in large quantity, by buying a bunch of chicken backs or wings just to make the liquid, it can be really easy to do. If you're just trying to make the most of a couple of birds, it's somewhat more work than the payoff (which is why buying extra wings to make stock is a great idea, but one I didn't follow this time). But the idea of making a non-cloudy chicken and rice soup got in my head, and I decided to run with it. I love a rustic soup and stew, but there's something really special about a bowl that's filled with artfully plated (or "bowled"?) and intensely flavored ingredients that have been cooked separately and then get brought together by a well-seasoned, aromatic broth. If you're a hobbyist cook, there are worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Chicken and rice soup. With methocel-clarified consommé and 64C yolk. Blanched carrots, celery, and napa cabbage stems. SV chicken breast. Shiitake and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms roasted in chicken fat. 16-grain donabe rice. Sur la plate w/ Ruhlman soup soon.

I've done it, but never for that long. Sausage and other ground meats tends to get pappy and mealy after four hours or so.

Salt brings fluid out for like ten minutes, but it reabsorbs back into the meat. Salting well in advance gives the salt time to work its way beneath the surface of the meat and will help the roast hang onto moisture during the cooking process. And the workflow is much nicer if you season beforehand as opposed to vacuum sealing, freezing, unbagging, seasoning, and rebagging. That sounds awful and unnecessary.

Go ahead and season before. I also suggest a pre-sear. SV roasts are so easy, delicious, and convenient, I doubt I'll ever do one conventionally again.