btbyrd

Oven thermostats are notoriously unreliable, especially at low temperatures. My oven is garbage and I'd never dream about using it for sous vide work. If you have a combi oven or a higher-end consumer model, this is not really an issue. But if the OP was using such an oven, I doubt it would have randomly shut off in the night. My vote is squarely in the "when in doubt, throw it out" camp. If there aren't any off-smells and you're feeling adventurous (and you have decent health insurance) then go for it. But I wouldn't serve it to anyone else.

The Kraft flavor houses have a large line of "natural grill flavors." The grilled steak chips I researched have corn maltodextrin at the base of their seasoning. They also contain MSG, yeast extract, grill flavoring, smoke flavoring, and "natural beef type flavoring."

If you don't add water it will burn. Add water, pressure cook, natural release, strain, and chill until you can scrape the solidified layer of fat off the top. Alternatively, you can grind the fatback, put it in a mason jar, barely tighten the lid, and pressure cook the jars with a few cups of water. This will keep the fat and the water separated.

I'd never seen that before. Apparently it was a bit of a scandal when that recipe first aired. Sandra Lee's Wikipedia page even has a whole subsection dedicated to the Kwanzaa Cake: "A war crime." Classic!

There are better resources than a thousand pages of eGullet if you're just looking for times/temps for SV. The Cooking Issues Time/Temp SV Charts The ChefSteps SV Time/Temp guide / PDF version The ChefSteps Short Ribs Time/Temp guide Doug Baldwin's Practical Guide to Sous Vide Vacmaster's Time/Temp Chart Between these guides, I don't see the need for an app. Then there are more extensive resources like Modernist Cuisine at Home (which is basically a "Must Buy" if you're going to spend the money on a circulator).

I'm mostly with you, but here are some applications for which the SVS seems better suited than a circulator. You could still pull off most of them with a circulator and a bain marie, but the SVS would be easier/cleaner. Low temperature steaming: Cheese making: Meat stock: It's also better for any traditional crock pot style application. I'd still prefer a circulator most of the time. And the Anova is $150 cheaper than the SVS; you can almost get 2 for the same price. (Edit: not sure why that last link isn't embedding properly, but it links to the correct video).

Looks like a jack of all trades/master of none. The street price seems high for a SV device that doesn't circulate. It also doesn't have the precision of most circulators since you can only set the temperature in whole degrees. That's not an issue for most things, but for eggs it can make all the difference. So can circulation. The water at the bottom of the pan is invariably going to be hotter than the water at the top where the probe hangs out. The circulator I use is stable to roughly a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, so there aren't any hot spots. Bluetooth connectivity and phone apps strike me as gimmicky and practically worthless if you already know the basic time/temp suggestions for SV. But leaving the app aside, Bluetooth's range is only like 50 feet or so... why not just walk to the kitchen? Wifi would be better since you could leave your house, but even that would have limited applications. What do you really need to check on anyway? If the water is up to temp, it's up to temp; and it's not like you ever really need to change the cooking temperature during the cook cycle. If it had a separate thermocouple that could tell you the core temp of your product along with the bath temperature (and these were integrated into something like the Polyscience SV app) then I could imagine some use for a remote monitoring/controlling app. But mostly not. I also worry about the battery life on the wireless thermometer; is it up for 72 hour short ribs or 100 hour oxtail? EDIT: They say it's good for up to 3 months under "heavy use" of 2 hours a day. So it'll probably be fine for extended cooking. I do wish the probe could withstand temperatures up to 450F or so, as this would be ideal for deep frying. It tops out at 375F. It seems like this product would have been a great idea two years ago before the current crop of circulators made it to market. But I don't really see the appeal... at least as a sous vide rig. Using two or three of these to hold and serve soup, stews, sauces and whatnot would be pretty nice. You could also use it as a suped up crock pot, or to make stock while leaving it mostly unattended, or to do low temperature steaming. The ChefSteps crew came up with some interesting applications for the Sous Vide Supreme that would probably translate to this device pretty well.

Cut into chops and cook it on the ground over the coals of a still-burning fire using a cast iron pan and loads of butter. If you'd like to add herby flavors, simply reach for the nearest tree.

Bar Keeper's Friend.

Also, who eats steak cold? Seriously...

I'm in the anti-canola camp as of a few years ago. I rarely used it prior to that time (because I seldom use neutral flavored oil when cooking) but tried three or four brands of varying quality before giving up on it entirely. All brands produced fishy off flavors. I've switched to peanut oil and never looked back. (And sometimes corn oil if I'm cooking for a mixed crowd and don't know about allergies). But really, if you're going to sear a steak, clarified butter, tallow, or lard are the way to go.

I'd rather be a worry wart than give myself "the $hits all day." Or worse.

Unless there's something magic that the pro Anova offers that you really need, I see no reason to buy it over the normal home models. The "degree of precision" is exactly the same, and there are few occasions in a home cooking scenario where you'd want or need to circulate 15 gallons. If you're using it in a commercial kitchen, that might be a different story (though there you still might just be better off buying two Anova One circulators rather than a single Pro). So if it's just for normal, non-commercial use... get a cheap circulator and a chamber vacuum. It's hands down the better option. No contest.

Very nice! I wish my spouse would come home with that sort of surprise! I've been wanting to make these for a while but I don't have a dehydrator (I doubt I'd use it much) and am reluctant to use my crappy oven for the purpose... so I guess I'll have to stick with fresh ones from the local Mexican mart for now. On a related note, pork skin can instead of frying. So you could dehydrate a bunch of them, keep them on hand, and puff them on demand without the need for oil -- most convenient! I wonder how well seasoning would adhere to them given that they wouldn't be coated in oil.

Is this really that big of a deal? Just ask your butcher. My local high end grocers don't sell mechanically tenderized meat, and my local chain grocer already labels anything that's been needled. Pasteurize to core. I often Jaccard meat myself when cooking sous vide and I take the extra time to pasteurize it.

Pickling draws capsaicin from the pepper and into the pickling liquid, diluting the overall heat in the pepper. I think the effect of dilution will be magnified in heat processed pickles. I also suspect that acid somewhat masks the perception of heat. I've noticed that my instant pickled jalapenos (done in the chamber vac) taste less hot than they were before pickled. I'm sure this is due, in part, to dilution (because the vinegar takes on a spicy note) but also suspect some flavor masking. I have nothing to back that up scientifically though.

Amazing.

It depends on what temp you're wanting to reheat the steak to. But if you want to bring the core up to the temperature at which you originally cooked, it will take the same amount of time. "... Chilled food will take about the same amount of time to reach the target core temperature when reheated as it did when it was cooked from raw. Frozen food will take considerably more time. Thus, time savings occur only for foods that need to be held at temperature for long periods." - Modernist Cuisine 2:264 You might only want to bring up the core to 125 or so and then finish via searing, which would save you some time. But if you want to reheat all the way through to a uniform temperature that's the same as the original, it's going to take basically the same amount of time.

Hmm... that doesn't seem to be over the top. Since this is the main salt addition in your recipe, you might try scaling the salt in the brine back a couple of percent and see what happens. Or maybe soak it in a few changes of water over the course of an hour to drive out excess salt before you bag it.

There's not much advantage to precooking tender cuts because they take as long to reheat all the way through as they do to cook through the first time. The taste and texture don't suffer from reheating (it's not a microwave) but there's not a lot of time saved. The real advantage, as rotuts mentioned, is that pasteurized SV products will keep in the fridge for a long time without losing quality. So you can buy in bulk when things go on sale, pasteurize it, and then keep it in your fridge for a month if you want to. Cooking tough cuts for a longer amount of time is always a good choice. The same thing applies about doing it in bulk; if you're going to cook 72 hour short ribs, you might as well make a boatload of them at once.

When you say "70:30 brine," what do you mean exactly? My first thought upon reading that was that your ribs were going to turn out incredibly salty, but I'm not sure what your ratio is indicating.

Yeah, I would just serve the chops over the rice and cook them separately. You're already using stock and saffron to flavor the rice so it should have a good enough flavor without having another meat added to it; any flavor you get from the chops will be minimal and you will run the risk of overcooking them and you'll ruin whatever crust they had. And like Mitch suggested, I doubt the pork will pick up any saffron flavor. I'd much prefer to be served a pile of saffron rice with a freshly grilled/fried chop on top than a pile of rice that's been simmered with the pork. The flavor will be cleaner and the pork will be better prepared.

I wish people were more thoughtful and less snobbish about ingredients. Modernist Cuisine has a couple recipes that use potato flakes and Alex and Aki from Ideas in Food are big fans as well. There are lots of uses for them if you think outside the suggested labeling. They make a nice gluten free substitute for panko, they taste great in bread, and they're great as a thickener in creamy soups. The Ideas in Food folks like to roast them in the oven and use the browned flakes to make all sorts of potato-chip-flavored goodness, like Potato Chip Soup and Potato Chip Ice Cream. They also smoke them and use them to bread potatoes which they then deep fry. Their first book has a recipe for potato chip pasta using potato flakes. There are lots of possibilities. They also make decent mashed potatoes in no time.

In this podcast from Nordic Food Lab, they suggest that you don't pull a hard vacuum when fermenting in the bag but instead leave a tiny bit of air in there to keep botulism from growing. If you have a chamber vac that can save settings, you might consider adding a fermentation preset.

The potatoes in Potato Buds (and instant mashed potatoes more generally) have been pre-cooked and cooled, which retrogrades the potato starch and minimizes the amount of starch that comes out of the potato flakes during the final cooking process. This prevents instant mashed potatoes from becoming gluey and gross when you rehydrate them. In the context of your recipe, potato buds allow you to thicken the soup and add potato flavor without turning the final dish into a pot of glue. You could do this without the instant potatoes, but it would take a lot more work and I doubt the finished product would be significantly better.