nathanm

This method is being used by most everybody doing cutting edge cooking - Heston Blumenthal, Wylie at WD50 as well as Alex and Aki at ideasinfood. I don't know who did it first - I first heard about it from Christopher Young, who works with Heston. Heston and Harold McGee (and I) call this technique freeze filtering. It is as described - add gelatin as you would normally. Freeze, then allow to defrost in a colander with a coffee filter. It works VERY well! It is an incredible techinque. For a chicken or beef stock, you don't need to add the gelatin as long as the stock is concentrated enough to gel. It makes fantastic consumme. It works because the gelatin molecules cross-link and in effect create a "filter" that traps particles. Normally speaking when you freeze a gelatin gel and defrost it, it will weep liquid. This is called "syneresis". This is a bad thing if you want to freeez and then thaw an aspic or dessert gel, and there are ways to combat it - typically by using different gelling agents (hydrocolloid gums like agar for example). However, in freeze filtering you exploit syneresis to the maximum extent - you want the syneresis because the weeped liquid is the product. This is very different that the wine clarification method discussed in posts above. In wine clarification you put a TINY amount of gelatine into the wine - usally 10 to 120 ppm - that's parts per million. 10 ppm = 1 gram gelatin in 100 liters. This is WAY too weak to form a gel. You add it to the wine (heated to 140F/60C) then you let it cool (without freezing) and sit 48 hours, then you filter it. To put this in perspective, to get a gel you use .5% to 1% or even gelatin, (and often much more), which is 5,000 to 10,000 ppm. Instead it just precipates out particulates. This sort of technique would also be possible, but it can only cope with fairly small amounts of particulate, and in any event is quite different than the freeze filtering.

Correct, I meant in the water bath. Actually, FDA rules do allow something to be out at room temp for 4 hours - but no more. However, I don't recommend that.

I do steaks at 125F for an hour. That is more than enough time to reach internal temperature - you don't need a thermometer as long as the steaks are not too thick. If they are super thick, then use the tables in this thread. Note that the 130F tables will be approximately correct even at 125F or 120F. If you are delayed then this can easily sit for up to 4 hours with no harm done. It is very good for having people over where you may need to adapt to the schedule a bit. I do NOT use a temperture higher than I want the core, because then timing is critical and you need to use a temperature probe with the foam tape etc. 125F is between rare and medium rare, but the texture and color will be more like medium rare. I think this is optimal for beef steaks, but that is personal prefence. If you want it more rare, then I would do 120F. If you want medium to medium rare then do 130F. I do not put anything in the bag, but you could but some seasoning. EVOO is only a flavoring mechanism, and frankly if that is what you want it is better to pour some EVOO over the meat after searing, since the searing heat will break down the EVOO. Upon removing from the bag, sear immediately and serve, either in a very hot pan with a high heat oil (safflower) or on a grill or griddle. Get it very hot (smoking oil) and sear for long enough to make a crust. I usually only sear the top and the sides not the bottom. Obivously, you could let them cool to room temperature but then you have this porblem of how to heat them up evenly. Remember that 125F, or even 130F is not that hot, so a quick sear will not change the core temperature. That is why I sear and serve very quickly. It is a wonderful way to make steak....the texture is much better than a fast high heat method.

Thanks for the paper! The great advantage of original research papers is that they tell you the straight facts. After that one can add some additional safety factor. I wonder why the FDA does not have a document saying how they came up with their rules citing original research studies like this. But they don't. I am in the process of collecting a lot of these papers for all of the important pathogens to put the information together for the book i am working on.

By the time you get beef cheeks tender enough to chew, you won't need to worry about any animal saliva! I do not have a time / tempertaure combination that I like, but I would start at 140F / 60C for 48 hours. You may need to go up as high as 180F - I would try that for 12 hours. If I were you I would plan on pulling them out, testing them, and then sealing in a new bag if not tender and putting them back.

If you use wine in sous vide, it is best to boil it first to drive off the alcohol. Beef cheeks can be be VERY tough - so you either need very long times, or high temperatures or both. I like braised beef cheeks. I have tried them sous vide and not found a time / temperature combination I like yet.

Your results are very interesting, and show the great amount of variability in the FDA regulations. The 2005 FDA Food Code, Chapter 3 has a table that is used for most meats - the lowest temperature is 130F and the time is 112 minutes - here is the link - look at page 74 (page numbers on bottom of each page, not the PDF page number). This is clearly contradictory with your table, which goes down as low as 120F, and which calls for 30 minutes at 130F. So, who to believe? Which is correct? It is very hard to say, because each is an official guide. One possible answer is that Section 318.10 is only about tricinosis prevention. It does not say that these temperatures are adequate for other pathogens. Does that mean that this table is safe for general use? It is very unclear. This sort of contradiction is not new. I previously posted a US FDA poultry table that went down to 136F, yet the 2005 Food Code on page 73 says that Poultry must be cooked to 165F for 15 seconds. Again, there is clear and total contradiction. The pork table is a detailed technical guide for producers of meat products. So was the chicken table I previously posted. The Food Code is an overall guideline that is less detailed. That might explain some of the difference. So, the more detailed publications are probably technically correct, but of course the risks you take are up to you.

I wish I had a perfect answer. Neutral fluids - neutral oil (like canola), water or dry all seem to have the same effect. All sous vide is poaching - either from liquid in the bag, or liquid that inevitably comes out of the bag during cooking. Flavored fluids matter a lot. Fat or oil soluable flavors are best carried by an oil in the bag. Water soluable fluids by an oil. Vinagrette carries acids and flavors best dissolved by acids. You need to be careful about flavor in a sous vide bag - it gets stronger than you may think. So, if you want flavor, add teriyaki or the like. Be careful about too strong a flavor or marinade. If you don't want extra flavoring, you don't need to do anything - dry in the bag works very well.

Vacuum is required for some aspects of sous vide, not others. The original motivation was for stored sous vide - where you cook, then hold the product chilled until later reheating. This can be several days later if refrigerated, and months if frozen. In that case you want to preserve freshness and vacuum helps with that enormously. If you do immediate service sous vide, vacuum is still important for a couple of reasons. Bags with air in them tend to float in a water bath. Not the end of the world, but it is inconvenient. You can weight them down or use a rack to keep them submerged. However note that the air bubble in the bag can still cause uneven heating - the portion of the food that is in contact with the air in the bag will not get the same heat flow as portions that have a tight contact between the bag and the food. Again this is not a terrible problem, but it should be recognized. The second major issue is that some products oxidize when cooked in air, and don't with a vacuum. An an example, artichokes or endives will not discolor when cooked in a vacuum bag. This is a special case - for most food it is irrelevant. Apart from those cases you can do immediate service sous vide without a vacuum. In fact you can cook with results that are indistinguishable from sous vide without a bag at all! You put the food in open steamer pans in a combi-oven and use the low temperature steam mode. Any product that is cooked immersed in low temperature oil (i.e. confit) can be done with or without a vacuum. Most restraurant chefs (and many amateurs) that use sous vide do both immediate service and also some stored items. Plus the vacuum packing system is really handy for lots of other things, so once you have one there is little motivation for not using it for all of your sous vide. However, you can cook most immediate service dishes in sous vide style even if there is a bit of air in the bag. Zip lock bags are not ideal as several people have mentioned. At low temperature - for example salmon mi cuit at 38C/100F - it works pretty well. It doesn't work at all when you get to higher temperatures. I believe that one could design a zip lock bag for sous vide - it would be formulated out of a thicker and more heat resistant plastic, and would have a heavy duty sealing flap that could withstand heat without leaking. This would be useful for any kind of immediate service sous vide. However I don't know anybody who makes such a bag. The volumes necessary to make plastic bags are pretty daunting, so I am not that hopefully that Ziplock or other manufacturers will come out with them. We practitioners of sous vide are not exactly a huge market. But think of the marketing slogan they could use "Sous Vide that Doesn't Suck"

I have been traveling (went to El Bulli) and have been off eGullet for a while. No problem on posting anything about sous vide here, as far as I am concerned. As BrianZ says for most things +-2 degrees F, or 1 degree C is fine, and you can get by with even more . Agitation/circulation is always helpful but probably not required if you have only one item in the bath.

Actually, there is a waterbath thread, and at least one other sous-vide related thread that has do-it-yourself waterbath plans. Laboratory water baths are ideal, and are not expensive if you get them on Ebay. There is no doubt that one can do a homemade version - this has been discussed extensively on the other thread. Lab water baths are expensive mainly because they are sold in a market where price does not matter much. So they are typically overenginnered for cooking purposes (0.1 degree resolution, huge temperature range including above boiling...). But the nice thing is that they are very tough and reliable. At some point somebody will make a cheap cooking oriented waterbath - there is no reason they should not exist in the same price range as deep fat fryers, rice cookers or just a bit more than a crock pot ro similar appliance. Circulation is important if you have a lot of things in the bath at once, or somethnig large. You need to expose the food to the water evenly, and circulation handles that. You can get by without it if necessary, but in that case be careful not to load it very full, and not to allow the bags to touch or pile up.

Because the temperature in this case is WAY BELOW the temperature where long term cooking will sterilize. Human body temperature is 98.6F/37C and we are talking about cooking just above that temperature. This makes it a perfect temperature to incubate germs that could infect you. US FDA rules, as discussed in previous posts in this thread, and a couple others, put the minimum temperature for sterilization at 130F/54.4C - and you need at least 112 minutes at that temperature. Here we are talking about MUCH lower temps. It is within the FDA rules to cook Salmon mi cuit - or even serve salmon sushi or sashimi that is totally raw. However, you should not cook it for an extended period of time. Techincally, FDA rules would say no more than 4 hours total time between leaving the refer and being consumed, with cooking as part of this. Also, as a technicality, if a health inspector questioned salmon mi-cuit as being proper, the answer is that it would qualify as RAW salmon (which happened to be warm) rather than cooked. Although 4 hours is within the rules, I personally would not risk taking it this long. There is no hard cut off, but I generally size salmon mi cuit so that it cooks in about 20 minutes - which means 1 inch thick or less. I would do up to an hour, but no more than that. Which means you should have a salmon fillet or steak. I would NOT try to do a whole salmon, or a large chunk from one. My favorite cut of salmon for this kind of cooking is the belly meat, which is very thin anyway. The rich fat in the belly meat makes this method particularly attractive. Salmon mi cuit can be perfectly safe, so don't let this dissuade you. Incidentenally, this is a FANTASTIC thing to do with a fish called Escolar, sometimes called "white tuna" by fish markets. Just incredible this way. It is also very good with tuna. Try it with tuna also, particularly toro - bluefin tuna belly. Some would say it is sacrlidge to heat toro, but doing it this way it is really amazing - the warmth brings out the flavor.

Some intellectual property comments. Patents can apply to truly novel food production techniques, and even recipes, but it is highly unlikely that one could patent conventional pastry recipes. As an example of a patentable food product, here is a US patent on using a special protein called "anti-freeze protein" originally found in arctic fish to keep their blood from freezing. The protein can be used in ice cream to improve the texture. Many jokes are possible about how this sounds rather fishy.... and to top it off the inventors work for the Good Humor ice cream company. However, similar proteins are found in winter wheat, which certainly sounds more appetizing. Here is a US patent on making Dippin' Dots - ice cream particles frozen in liquid nitrogen. This is clearly a pastry technique, and there is some overlap between this and the sort of techniques innovative chefs like Homaru Cantu, Wylie Dufresne and Sam Mason, Ferran Adria or Heston Blumenthal do. Really novel ideas like this can be patented, but having a particular combination of traditional ingredients is not going to result in a patent. In addition, it is very expensive - generally at least $10,000 and often a multiple of that. Unless there is high volume industrial scale usage - like Good Humor or Dippin' Dots, it is not worth it. Copyright covers some aspect of recipes - you can't just copy somebody else's cookbook for example and claim it as your own. You certainly can USE the recipes however - that is implicit in offering the book for sale and would be covered by the "fair use" doctrine. However, exactly how far you can take fair use is controversal. Google is engaged in lawsuits with book publishers about topics related to this. Whether an employee of a bakery can destroy or take a written set of recipes that they developed while an employee is complicated, and an attorney should be consulted. On one hand, unless your contract included an intellectual property clause (as a previous post mentioned) your employer probably cannot claim to own any intellectual property. On the other hand, an employer could argue that maintaining a list of recipes on site is part of the job - particularly of a senior employee managing others, so the employee can't just take it away precipitously and leave their production in the lurch. In this case there are plenty of other factors. I doubt that intellectual property law is really the key issue. If the quality is going down the tubes, then even leaving the recipes isn't really going to matter, is it?

Salmon turns color at about 104F /40C. So you want to be below that. Salmon "mi cuit" (barely cooked) in oil is a pretty popular / trendy dish that has appeared in a number of cookbooks, including French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller and Formulas for Flavor by Joe Cambell. A similar dish is in Joan Roca's Sous Vide book. Various chefs use sligthly different temperatures. Roca recommends 38C / 100.4C. Keller and Cambell 102F/39C I usually cook it at 38.4C/103F Best bet is to cook it sous vide, with some oil (usually flavored) in the bag. Use a lab water bath to accurately maintain the temperature. Next best bet is to cook it on the stove. Put oil in a pan, bring the oil to 39C (using an accurate digital thermometer to check it). Note that a hot tub or hot bath or shower is probably about the temperature - this is not very hot. If you have trouble keeping the oil at that temperature, use indirect heat, or a double boiler. Then poach the salmon in the oil until the internal temperature is 39C or so. Use a thin cut of salmon - this temperature is so low that a thick piece will take so much time to come to tempertaure that there would be food safety concerns. It will look dead raw, but won't be. Either serve it that way if your guests will accept it. Or, sear the outside using an incredibly hot pan with smoking oil, for just a moment. I don't think that your oven would work very well - most ovens have very poor temperature control at the extreme low end of their range.

I was very optimistic when I bought the Thermomix. I am less thrilled now because some of the things that I hoped it could do, it is less than perfect at doing. For example, you can heat while you blend, but the heating is not very accurate so it is hard to use to heat something precisely - like creme anglais. Yes, you can do creme anglais in a thermomix, but whereas I had hoped you could set it and just let it run and not watch it until it beeped, the fact is that you need to monitor the temperature carefully and stand over it. Even if you set the temperature at 180F, it will easily overrun to 190F, or be too low at 170F. That said, it is a very good blender. Very high speed, very solid construction... If you compare it to a very solid commercial blender like VitaMix, I think it comes out very well. And the heating is useful for some things. I miss being able to watch things blend through a a clear container, but the stainless steel is very sturdy and is easy to clean. The lid is NOT easy to clean - it has a web of struts on the underside of the lid which can't be cleaned or scraped with a spatula. Cooks Illustrated (I think) just rated blenders and they found thermomix was the best at all of their tasks - however they did not fully test it because they thought it was too expensive. Which is the truth - it IS expensive. So, I have it and I use it. With a more accurate temperature sensor and temperature control system it would be much more useful to me.

I called a number I found online for the US. They wanted to give the demo, I said no, just send it to me and ultimately they relented....

The sommilier at Tru is FANTASTIC. I did not get the pairing - instead I asked the sommilier to recommend two great, but lesser known small producers that I would not have heard of. I often do this. He chose two really incredible wines (white and red). Both were quite inexpensive, and were things I had never heard of...

As discussed above the pink "smoke" ring is actually caused by the meat reacting with nitrogen compounds (primarily nitric oxide gas) in the smoke (see here or here.) Many barbeque partisans believe that a smoke ring essential to true barbeque. This belief comes from the fact that many traditional barbeque methods tend to (but do not always) produce incomplete combustion that favors nitric oxide production. Smokers that use smoldering chips or sawdust do not usually produce enough nitric oxide to make a smoke ring - you need the right combination of temperature oxygen content, which usually onlys occurs with burning chunks of wood. The reaction is similar to the way that nitrate curing salts turn ham and other cured meats red to pink color. The smoke ring in barbeque is grenerally much lower concentration than what you get with nitrate salts. In fact, one can get very good quality barbeque without nitric oxide or a smoke ring. However, it is hard to convince some traditionalists of this. Partly this is superstition (the smoke ring is widely believed to be a hallmark of quality), and partly it is style - if your favorite method produces a smoke ring then it is natural to think it is the ring that is important, when it may just be a side effect. As pointed out by Harold McGee and others you can get a pink ring without any smoke if you cook over another source that produces nitric oxide (such as a gas oven with a badly adjusted flame). In addition, nitrate curing salts can give the same effect. The salts will penetrate deeper (particularly if you put them in a brine, or if you vacuum tumble) and they will also be more intense.

Yes, that is pretty much what happened. Excellent service. Wonderful recommendation by the sommilier. The food was well executed. Overall the dishes were not as spectacular as say, Alinea, but it was well done.

180F for that time period wolud be more like it. At 190F - 200F, do it for shorter 6 to 8 hours. I find that searing in pan works very well for pork belly. The only issue is that after being cooked sous vide it will be soft and could come apart, so handle very gently. Broiler also works well, but has the problem that you want very high heat to crisp the outside. Many broilers are not hot enough to do this - they get hot, but the heat diffuses in and overcooks the interior by the time the exterior is crispy. However, you are unlikely to actually ruin pork belly this way.

So, I was planning on dining at Tru tomorrow night. I heard from another chef that Rick Tramaunto was definitely not at Tru anymore, and that the menu had changed. On one hand, many celebrity chefs leave their restaurants while they do other projects or travel. I don't really care if the owner is in the kitchen. What I am curious about is whether the restaurant has substantially changed recently. Anybody know?

This depends a lot on the precise cut of chuck roast - there are several. Also how tough the beef is. If you would do short ribs from the same meat source for 36 hours, then that is what I would try for the chuck roast.

Exactly! If you want to match traditional confit texture then you need to be 170F / 77C to 180F / 82C, and generally for at least 6 hours. The exact time depends on how tough the meat is (which cut etc). You can up to 12 hours, especially if you got at the lower end of the scale. In general I don't like to cook hotter than 82C in a water bath because the water evaporates too fast. However you can cook confit-style items up to 212F/100C. This is convienent in a combi-oven. Or you can use a pot of boiling water on the stove (which will generally be below 212F) but if so be careful the water does not evaporate. Or, a conventional crock pot on High will usually cook around 180F. I have not detected much of a difference in cooking confit at 212F versus 180F. However the cooking time will be shorter. If you leave it in too long the meat can just fall apart, which is sometimes the idea, and sometimes not. You certainly can cook pork at 130F/54C - the US FDA food code approves of that from a safety standpoint as long as you hold the meat at that temperature for longer than 112 minutes. As predicted above, the texture will be totally different than confit. Connective tissue will still be tough, and fat will not render. So for a tough or fatty piece of pork the low temperature approach is not a good idea. However, it works well for pork tenderloin.

With a good combi-oven you can get a similar effect. Rational ovens have a special program called overnight roasting that will sear the outside at high temperature then cool down the oven and hold it at low temperature for up to 24 hours. It will hold the temperature accurately at 125F or whatever else you set it at, and it uses humidity to prevent the roast from drying out. So, with that set up you can get something similar to sous vide. However, with a conventional oven you have three big problems. The first is that the temperature does not go low enough. The second is that conventional ovens have poor temperature control at any temp. Even at a setting of 350F many are off by 10 or even 20 degrees up and down over the course of time - too high when the heat comes on, too low when it goes off. At 500F it does not matter that much if you are cycling between 520 and 480. However, plus or minus 20F matters a lot if you are trying to keep it at 128F as in the example here. The third problem is control of humidity. In a conventional oven, the humidity is not controlled. Unfortunately, the temperature seen by the food depends on the humidity, because the food "sweats" - it is not really sweat, but the effect is similar - water evaporates from the food, which lowers the effective temperature. This makes temperature control very poor, and it also dries out the food. In a combi-oven this is solved with humidity control. In sous vide it is solved by putting the food in a bag, which is in effect a form of humidity control - inside the bag it is 100% relative humidity. In previous posts I recommended using an oven bag to control humidity. This works, but it still leaves you the other two problems of accurate temperature control at low temperatures.

45C or 113F to 114F is what I use for lobster Time depends on the thickness - look at the tables.