nathanm

I think that 60C/140F is fine for pork, and I don't think it will be too pink (but that depends a bit on the cut). As an example I would do pork tenderloin at this temperture - for no more than 1 hour. However, an issue with pork is that areas which are very fatty will not soften and render at a low temperture like 140F. In order to melt and render the fat a bit and soften it, you need higher temperture - say 170F to 180F. Since shoulder tends to have a high fat content, you may want to try it at these tempertures instead.

I usually buy a whole pork belly, cut it into serving size pieces, season, bag and seal and then freeze. When I want some pork belly I toss it frozen into the water bath. This works primarily because I cook the belly at 180F/82C for 8 hours or so - thus the timing is not critical. With something more delicate, like fish, it would be much tricker to do this and have the timing come out right.

Turkey works well sous vide. One thing that can be an issue however is that the time it takes for the core to get hot can be a long time if the product in the bag is too thick. So I generally would not recommend trying to do a whole turkey ballotine, which is what you are suggesting. Elsewhere in the thread are the time tables for thickness. Instead I would recommend taking the breasts off the bone, and bagging them. Even better, cut to individual serving sizes and bag them. Legs should be done separately - they can be tough so would want more time. Thighs are intermediate between the two. 60C / 140F is great for breasts. It is safe - US FDA has time/temperture tables even lower. You should make sure you hold it at that temperature for a while. 60C/140F is safe for the legs & thighs, but most people will freak out because they will be pink on the inside and might have reddish juices. So, many people would prefer a higher temperature - say 70C/158F. It is a matter of personal preference. Turkey legs and thighs can be also done confit style, in which case you can season like one would duck leg confit (several eGullet threads on this), put some oil in the bag (vegetable oil, duck fat, goose fat, or even bacon grease), and cook at 70C/158F to 80C/176F for 8 to 12 hours. You can do stuffing sous vide, but the value of sous vide is lower for stuffing, in general. If you do it, press the bag to make it relatively thin, so the interior heats quickly.

Traditional duck confit is stored in fat to keep oxygen away from it - it was a traditional approach to the same sort of sealing you get with a vacuum bag. Confit cooked sous vide in a vacuum bag should last just as long, perhaps even longer, than traditional confit. The amount of fat in the bag does not matter, the sealing is handled by the bag not the congealed fat layer. Note however a couple of caveats. First, there are many "confit-style" duck recipes that use less salt in the curing process. These may not work for long term storage. Second, even though traditional cured confit was stored for months, that doesn't mean it was an optimal thing to do for either taste or food safety. I have stored sous-vide cooked confit for months in the refrigerator as a test (and it worked), but in general I recommend using it up in a couple weeks.

For most beef I use the Jaccard first, and then do not brine, because brine does not benefit beef that much. For meat that you want to brine - say pork, for example - Jaccard it first because it will increase the penetration of the brine - just be careful about brining it too long because the improved penetration can make it too salty. As BrianZ said, 70C/ to 80C for confit style meat.

Yes, it will be in depth, and that is why it is taking a while to put together. I will discuss vacuum marination in the book.

Just make the bag extra-long, put the watermelon in the bottom of the bag and put a pleated paper towel around 2/3 of the way up. ← Or, freeze the watermelon first, then use the Foodsaver to vacuum pack it while still frozen. Then let it thaw. This will introduce some texture changes due to the freezing or course.

Perhaps I don't understand the basis for comparing the vacuum performance of various machines. A chamber type machine does not have to suck the air out through the very fine channels left by the cross-hatching on the inner surface of the bag (in fact a chamber machine can use the less expensive smooth bags), so when it gets to 1 mm of Hg, everything in the bag is at that pressure and the increase in pressure after sealing is due only to the ratio of free volume in the bag before and after returning it to atmospheric pressure. A Food-Saver on the other hand must generate sufficient vacuum to transport the residual air in the collapsed bag around the food and out through the vacuum port, and even with 1 mm of Hg at the pump, the inside of the collapsed bag has a somewhat higher pressure since it can never totally equalize due to the low differential pressure. But the bag is collapsed already and the pressure doesn't increase after the seal is made, at least until the bag goes in the water bath and the residual air begins to expand. Can somebody explain the relative performance of these two types of machines in a quantitative way? Doc ← You are both right. An edge suction machine, like Foodsaver, must suck the air out from one side, and it is harder to do a good job of that. A quantitative assessment would be be the amount of residual air left in the bag. I don't have a good measure of this - it is difficult to measure directly. Generally you get better results from a chamber style machine, for the reasons listed above - an edge sealing machine must try to suck the air out from the edge. The cross-hatch channels help with this, but not perfectly. Note however that there will not be that much difference in the pressure. Atmospheric pressure is 14.7 lbs per square inch. A perfect vacuum in the chamber prior to sealing would result in that much pressure on the outside. No vacuum is perfect, but good chamber machines are probably 99% vacuum. However, a 90% vacuum would still be 13.3, which is almost the same amount of pressure. Another way to say this is that the amount of pressure depends on the atmosphere, not the machine. Even a rough vacuum gets you a lot of the pressure.

Actually, the pressure occurs when you use a vaccum sealer, not a vacuum chamber. In a vacuum there is no pressure! When the food is sealed in a bag, ideally in a chamber style machine, there is no pressure on it in the chamber. But once you put into the air, it gets 14.7 lbs per square inch pressure from the outside air. That is what crushes the vegetables.

I'm glad you like the thread - sous vide is an interesting and powerful cooking techinque. Vegetables tend to get less focus than proteins in sous vide generally speaking. The main reason for this is that protein products have very delicate transition temperatures - which give you a narrow range between underdone and overdone. That is where sous vide has a larges advantage over conventional cooking techniques. In many cases vegetable cooking is about softening the cell walls of plants. This tends to require relatively higher heat than protein products - you need to get fairly close to the boiling point of water, say 180F/82C to 200F/93C. In some cases you are better off just steaming the vegetables. The difference in temperature requirements means that it can be difficult to cook meat and vegetables together. If you put veges in the bag with meat you cook at 130F/55C - even for days - they will stay crisp. You need to pre-cook the vegetables to the desired state prior to putting in the bag. The best cases for sous vide vegetables are where you need delicate control of temperature. Sweet corn is a great example - 150F/65C for 10 minutes is wonderful. Fresh garden peas are another good example. A second area where sous vide is very useful is for items like endive or artichokes which tend to turn brown when cut. Cooking in a vacuum helps a lot in these cases. So, by all means experiment with vegetables sous vide!

I agree with the above quotes quite strongly. Baths without circulation pumps do work, but they are prone to temperature stratification, and even worse, dead space between food items. One way to get a non-circulating pump is take a crock pot, rice cooker or hot-plate with a pot and add thermostatic control (PID or On-Off) such as Ranco, or the new sous vide conversion unit that was briefly posted to this thread, then disappeared. However, there are also laboratory water baths that lack a circulating pump - the most common brand is Precision (but other brands make them). They are a bit cheaper than a circulating pump water bath. They are sometimes called "utility water baths". In a lab they are NOT used for precise temperture control. If you have one bag of product is the middle of a large crock-pot or non-pumped lab water bath it is probably going to be OK. This is particularly true if you are cooking at 170F or above because at those tempertatures there is substantial convection in the water (i.e. what we normally call simmering). But if you are cooking at lower temp (rare beef, barely cooked salmon) or if you put a bunch of bags in at the same time the circulation can be a BIG help. If you are working in a restaurant, or you cook in quantity, then a circulating water bath is cheaper than a non-circulating one when you consider how much more you can load it. It may look big but you can't really pack it as full as you could with a circulator. If on the other hand you are experimenting at home, are on a budget, or are doing just one or two bags at at a time, then a modified crock pot / rice cooker or non-circulating water bath may work out just fine.

This is a great idea! I have done this in a way when I make pork confit or pork belly, but have not done it only for the fat output. Sous vide is a great way to do this. There are multiple processes for rendering fat. Here are some suggestions. The traditional method for home use is to cook chucks of fat on the stove at low temperature. If you cook confit style sous vide (i.e. meat with some oil in a bag at 160F/71C to 180F/82C), then rendering will occur. However if you really want to render the fat well you must grind or homogenize the fat with water first. Put the fat to render in a blender with water (nearly to cover). Blend it until it is very fine and smooth. The best fat rendering always involved grinding to very fine pieces - it dramatically increases yield. A food processor would also work. Or you could put through a meat grinder but yield will be better if you pass through a blender or food processor after the meat grinder. This will eliminate the cracklings, but will get you much better fat yield. Once you have the blended fat and water (a fat-shake), you need to heat it. Here are various methods: 1. In a pan, in the oven, at 225F/110C for 8 - 12 hours. 2. In a covered pot on a set up like Pielle's PID stovetop, or a laboratory hot plate with a temperture control, or a hot plate or slow cooker with the Ranco themostat. The thermostat should be set at 180F/82C. Let it go for 8-12 hours. 3. Put the fat-shake mixture in a pressure cooker at 250C/121F (1 bar or 15 lbs pressure) for 30 min. 4. Seal the fat-shake mix in a sous vide bag and cook in a water bath or other method at 180F/82C for 12 hours. The fat can be poured off the top. If you clip the top corner off the bag, you can pour the fat off pretty well.

Heart muscles is TOUGH because it is constantly in use. I would try 180F/82C for 8 hours. This ought to be enough, but you may need to take it longer. This will create a texture similar to a traditional braise, which is probably what you are familiar with. I would cut it into serving portion and bag each separately. You could cook it down to 140F/60C but then it would require days and that may not be what you are looking for. Some experimentation will be necessary to get the results you want.

Well, almost... It is likely that the stock was OK, but not 100% certain. The safest thing is such a case is to pour it down the drain. If the stock was pressure cooked, then allowed to sit sealed, then it would be fine - indeed it would be canned chicken stock. Canning does not require a can! At the kind of low tempertaures that we are talking about 12 hours may, or may not, be enough to kill the certain heat resistant bacterial spores. The worst ones generally are Clostridium botulinum (botulism), Clostridium perfringens, and Bacilis cereus. Their spores can be very resistant to heat as discussed in a post above. Depending on the time and temperature they could be an issue.

An on-off controller like the Ranco is bound to have some overshoot. In most cases this is not critical, beacues the tempertaure you cook at is not absolutely critical to within the tolerance. The places where you need to be careful are things like salmon mi-cuit, or rare beef where there really is a difference in the outcome over a couple of degree range. However, for many things there isn't. A PID controller would work a lot better. This is because in addition to on and off it will ramp the power up and down gradually. There are many web sites on converting espresso machines to PID control - a similar procedure would allow you to change. Here or here are some examples. This is a bit more expensive, and of course a bit more electronically involved. Note that the espresso machine kits ought to work as-is, but you can probably get by with a lower wattage/voltage solid state relay, depending on your slow cooker. Pielle's PID stove top is a great idea - indeed it is a kitchen gadget that I don't have, which is pretty rare. Somebody OUGHT to make a PID controller that you can just plug in, like the Ranco, but if they do, I don't know about it.

As long as the temperature is low (i.e. well below boiling 212F/100C) then simply putting the stock in a pot with a lid that it reasonably tight would work. Sealing with dough will help. But using a pressure cooker (but at low temp so no pressure) would be better, and won't have the clean up.

The Thermos Shuttle Chef is sold in the US as Thermos Cook and Carry or Thermos / Nissan Cook and Carry. Australian and UK web sites show 4.5, 6 and 8 liter models. US sources only seem to offer the 4.5 liter size. It is available on Amazon.com This is basically a simple way to keep something at low temp. You heat it up, then let it steep for 7 to 8 hours.

I am not sure why your pressure cook stock is bitter or powdery. Perhaps you are cooking it too long, or too hard. Pressure cookers should be turned as low as possible for the vent valve to stay in range. However, if you want to try sous vide stock making that is fine too. I am not sure what the optimum is - I use 190F/88C for poultry and red meat. However, I have not (yet) done exhaustive tests to find out. That temp is high enough to denature the collagen into gelatin very well. Over a 12 hour cooking you will do a pretty complete job.

Botulism - Clostridium botulinum you need to get very high heat to kill it. It generally take 300 minutes (that is 5 hours) at 100C/212F. This is why people use pressure cookers for canning - 121C/250F for 10 minutes is a typical recommendation. Here is some data: http://www.anthrax-protection.org/BacterialDestruction.html

The key issue in this method is sealing the container so that the volatile flavor compounds do not escape. To do that you need to have some way of making an air tight (and ideally water tight) seal. Note that you must NOT bring the temperature to a boiling point if you have a sealed container - otherwise the pressure from the steam will burst the bag or seal. Roasting bags, as listed in the first post are one good way to do this. The only issue is that the bags cannot be heat sealed, so you need to double bag them and try to make sure that the seal is done tightly with the supplied twist ties. This approach to stock making could be done sous vide, however to do that you need to have a large chamber style vacuum sealer, and large bags. You could also use sous vide style bags and heat seal them without a vacuum. For example, a Food Saver vacuum packer, or other edge seal vacuum machines will let you seal bags. Food Savers work poorly for liquids - they tend to get sucked up into the machine. However, you don't really need a vacuum at all in this case, just dial the vacuum down to zero and use the food saver to seal the bag with air in it. A sealed sous vide bag (with or without vacuum) will get a much better seal than you can get with the roasting bag approach. You can turn it upside down and the seal won't break. I would NOT try this with roasting bags - the seal you get with the twist ties is not that good. If you use bags (either roasting or sous vide), there is a useful trick once you are done. Instead of dumping the whole bag out the top, hold the bag at an angle and snip one of the lower corners off the bag with kitchen shears. The liquid will drain out and leave the meat, bay leaves etc in the bag. It also acts as its own funnel. This makes clean up simpler. Fat will rise to the top - if you don't want it in the stock you can keep it n the bag by pinching off the cut corner just before it drains out. Instead of bags, hard containers can also be used. Mason jars like those used for canning work well - the gasket in the lid is made to take 250F and above so it will work fine at lower temp. Just seal the meat and liquid in large mason jars, and put them in the oven, or in a bath of water in the oven, or even a bath of water (big canning pot) on the stove. You must keep the temperature below boiling. Note that the result is NOT "canned stock" because the temperature is not high enough for canning. Instead of an oven one could use a sous vide water bath. Or, you could probably use a crock pot, set on low. Mason jars, or sous vide bags set in water in a crock pot would work very well. Just check the temperatures - crock pots and slow cookers often have inaccurate thermostats. However, the simplest way to do approach to stock making is with a pressure cooker - many people already have a pressure cooker in the kitchen, it is larger capacity than mason jars or sous vide bags and is made to seal tight. Normally you use a pressure cooker above the boiling point of water, so it is actually under pressure. However, if you use a pressure cooker BELOW the boiling point of water, it is essentially an air and water tight sealed container, which is just what this techinque requires. In this approach you load the stock ingredients in the pressure cooker, then put the whole thing in the oven at low temp (190F to 200F). Some pressure cookers have plastic composite handles, and may not be OK in the oven, but most would work as long as the temperature is 190F or lower. The metal part of a pressure cooker routinely gets to 250F when it is pressure cooking, so the handle has to be able to take that - and usually some margin above it. So, even if if your pressure cooker says it is "not oven safe" - what they really mean by that is 350F and above. If you are 190F to 200F, it should work fine. You could also use the pressure cooker on a stove burner, but only if you can turn it down low enough that it does not boil. Try the lowest setting and find out. Using a pressure cooker for low temperture sealed stock making begs the question of why not turn up the heat and save a lot of time? Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck uses a pressure cooker for stock making (as discussed in many threads on eGullet). People often say that a pressure cooker will make a stock cloudy or have an off taste, but this does not occur if you do it right. The key to doing this is to pressure cook the stock very gently by controlling the heat so that the the pressure valve barely reaches the point you want it to be. The pressure relief valve should not be whistling like a tea kettle. If you do that then there is some loss of volatile compounds, but very little. The time is cut dramatically - instead of 12 hours, an hour would suffice. However, if you prefer low temperature that is fine too. In all cases you should cool the stock quickly after cooking unless you are going to use it immediately. The best way cool it is to put the bag, jars, or pressure cooker, into a large basin (or stopped up sink) with cold water and ice. Or, filter out the meat and bones and then either use it, or chill it. Letting it sit and cool slowly is a bad idea from a food safety standpoint - there are some species of bacteria that have spores that could withstand the long low cooking and there is no point letting them germinate. Although the topic of this thread is chicken stock, the same methods work for fish stock and meat stocks, with some adjustment of the time. Vegetable stocks can work as well. In all cases you are trapping the volatile flavor compounds. It means that your kitchen will not have that incredible smell in it during the stock making - because you are saving the smell and flavor for the final product. One final point. All stock making works better if the meat and bones are cut up finely. This increases the surface area, and helps promote the flavor compounds leaching out into the stock. The best is to grind it with a meat grinder - bones and all. This has been discussed previously in other threads on eGullet.

I was there last night also - it was another incredible experience (third time for me). Just amazingly good. The stunning thing is the combination of technical excellence with incredible taste combinations.

I was there this week - the smoked ricotta ravioli and the beet ravioli were both excellent!

Well, I am in Spain. So far I have had lunch at L'Esguard and Alkimia and dinner at Sant Pau. L'Esguard was interesting - I am glad that I went. A couple of the dishes were very good. A couple were unsuccessful. None were really terrible. He sure does beautiful presentation - some of the dishes were stunning visually. The unsuccessful dishes were generally because of (in my view) poorly chosen combination of flavors - i.e. a strong taste that overpowered everything else. But that was only two. There was Micri, but not as much as I thought there might be. Several dishes had none, or so little that it was not noticeable. I am not fond of the Micri sheets - they can be tough or rubbery. I think that everything he did with Micri could probably be better done with something else - gellan for some things, gelatin for others. That said, as somebody who follows new developments in cuisine closely it was interesting to visit the place. As somebody noted it is the most expensive restaurant in the area - more than el Bulli or Sant Pau, for example (165 euros for the tasting menu, which is the only option). That is much less important to me than the quality. So, net-net I would not rush back but I don't regret going. Sant Pau was great. Excellent execution on everything, and there were several very cleverly conceived dishes. The pastry department is clearly on a roll - the desserts were excellent, and very creative. So far this is the best of the three. Alkimia was reasonably good - it was far less adventuresome in terms of ingredients or technique than I had thought from reading about it. Indeed the dishes were more conventional and less daring in ingredients or technique than the other two. One dish on the tasting menu was called "chicken cannelloni". Which is what it looked like. I assumed that it must be some variation, or have some clever surprise or trick. Nope! It was indeed chicken cannelloni. It was delicious, so I have no complaint about it. El Bulli is coming up soon, and I am trying to scheme a way to El Poblet. Thanks for all of the help!

No, after cooking for 48 hours there is not much point in further "resting". Usually what "resting" when you roast or grill is time for the temperature to equibrate and even out. The very hot surface temperature needs to cool down, and as that happens some juice will be sucked back in. However, that only occurs when the suface is above boiling point (i.e. grill, plancha, broiler, hot oven).

OK, I will see if I can swing by El Poblet.... it might be possible. L'Esquard surely seems to be controversal! I have peolpe saying it is fantastic, and now you say worst in your life. Wow.... I wonder whether this is an issue of taste, or an issue of consistency. In other words, if everybody was there the same night, would they come back with more consistent opinions, or the same ones? There are other restaurants I can think of that have this property - one well known avant guarde place in the US gets these kinds of reviews. I have always had decent meals there, but some people I know hate it. If I have extra time I may try it just to find out which it is.