nathanm

I generally do lamb loin for 2 to 3 hours total at 55C bath temp. You can do it for longer to get more tenderizing, but the lamb I get is already pretty tender, so it does not need more.

Skin sticking is easily prevented with gloves. Also the stuff is NOT like super glue, you have plenty of time to wash it off. I don't have any data on what it would to your lungs, but i am not anxious to personally find out. So, I use a respirator - just a simple disposable one like painters use - you can get them at any painting store, home depot etc.

Fish plywood works! I am still perfecting it, but as is unsurprising, Activa will glue fish together, regardless of the color.

I think is both that the meat is more tender (connective tissue) and the subjective issue of more fat.

Not surprisingly, it varies a LOT. I did some tests of choice, prime, and "kobe" (American grown Wagyu). There was a big difference between them, as one might imagine from the price! An a concrete example, I get both regular flat iron steak, and "kobe" and the there is a big difference in cooking times to get the same amount of tenderness - about 12 hours different.

The bright red that you get with a conventionally cooked meat is not always present with sous vide. The reason is that it requires oxygen. Try slicing the meat and holding it for a while at the same temp in air - it will redden.

This is a really good point. When you sear the outside at the end you want to make sure you don't overcook what you have carefully created via sous vide. I do as Doc suggests - reheat it in a water bath at a temperature a bit lower than my cook temp. Also, you need very high heat searing to get the outside browned without overcooking the interior - much hotter than you would use normally. The alternative is to sear first. In that case you don't actually have to grill to finish, just bring it up to 130F and serve. Or bring it up to 125F then lay it on the grill for just a minute. I generally like to sear right before serving so there is a crust. However, that is more important for a small piece of meat like a steak. For most beef roasts there isn't a crisp crust anyway - roasting juice is always present. So, you might want to consider searing before vacuum packing and sous vide cooking.

The time in the tables tells you the time to reach 130F. You then have to add the time you want it to spend getting tender. I have tried beef tri-tip and I think that 24 hours would probably be better, but it depends on many things. The Jaccard will help of course. As an aside, tri-tip is not my favorite - flat iron steak, or some of the better chuck roasts will come out better in my view. But by all means try it.

Sounds like you have the technique down. When I do turkey I cook for a lot shorter time at a lot lower temperature - say 140F to 145F, and then hold it there for an hour after the core reaches that temperature. Note that there are commercial products made to enhance browning - one is called "Gravy Master". It is basically non-sweet natural carmel coloring. It has a taste, but is not bad. Virually every food stylist or photographer uses it. Industrial food supply companies have many different shades of liquid and solid caramel color. If you still get blotches on poultry a blow torch works wonders. You are correct that the can will average out the fluctuating tempertaure. However, that is not the point. The can (and the food) see a fluctating temperature. This is OK for most foods but if you are cooking something temperature critical then the fluctations can spoil the effect. For example if you want rare beef, then a flucuation of 3 to 5 degrees can get you something different than you expected.

This depends a lot on the duck breed. The three kinds of duck breast you most often find in the US are Moulard, Muscovy and Pekin. Moulard duck breasts are often sold as "magret de canard" are large breast that are surplus from foie gras ducks. The moulard breasts often are tough. I have tried cooking them for a long time at 130F/54.4C but they frequently come out tough. Cooked at lower temperature - say 125F, they are a bit more rare, but are still tough. I've had more luck with Pekin. Muscovy seem to be someplace in the middle.

The WSJ article is a significant development. The Tokyo Mandarin Oriental incident isn't some struggling little restaurant - it is in a major business hotel, that is part of a major chain that relies on trademark and copyright. If another hotel called themselves the "Mandarine Orient" or other highly similar name and used similar design scheme etc, you can bet that lawyers from the M.O. parent company would decend upon them with cease and desist letters. In fact, many of the M. O. hotels are owned by entites other than the parent company - they license the brand name as part of a franchise or management agreement. Given all of this it is quite ironic that one of their hotels is doing the copying of Jose Andres concepts and menus. Getting this issue in the WSJ is an important way to expose that irony and get the major hotel companies aware of it. eGullet is a way to get chefs and foodies outraged about the copying, but as wonderful as eGullet is, it won't make many corporate CEOs or general counsels.

Interesting results. A combi oven can be used as a substitute for sous vide cooking if you use it in steam mode. Obviously, a combi oven can be used to cook bag-sealed sous vide. However, in most cases you can also just cook the same food in open pans in a combi-oven and get results that are comparable to sous vide. The only things that don't work this way are oxygen dependent - for example, endives and artichokes braise nicely sous vide (in a bag) and stay light colored, whereas they are prone to browning otherwise. Combi oven "pseudo sous vide" is great if you have a combi oven but do not have a vacuum packer. Note that combi ovens are NOT as accurate as a laboratory water baths - they typically vary by plus or minus a couple degrees during the thermostat cycle. This is not critical for a lot of sous vide cooking, but can be for some things - like salmon mi-cuit where a few degrees makes a difference. It also matters for rare red meat. Best approach is to check your combi oven with a very good digital thermometer. I do chicken thighs at much lower temperature 145F - either sous vide, combi oven in steam mode for 2 hours. I have tried as low as 136F (still within FDA guidelines). Ultimately this is just personal preference. 5 hours is a long time, unless you have really tough chickens. The milk is a good trick for browning. A sweet sauce will also carmelize well - for example teriyaki sauce works very well. Any other sweet sauce that will contribute sugar for carmelizing will work, such as a sweet barbeque sauce. In order to get the browning effect you want the sauce to be thin - thinning with water works well. If these are skinless thighs that is a good approach. If you have the skin on then you can brown with a very hot radiant broiler / salamander, or a blow torch.

Oven dynamics are quite complicated. There is no good cooking oriented book on the topic. JSolomon's math is only the beginning because when you get to forced convection the amount of turbulence in the air and other factors come into play. The ambient humidity does too - which is why combi-ovens control the humidity. An oven works by transferring heat to the object. Heat transfer depends on heat gradient (what JSolomon wrote) but it also depends on the heat capacity of the air, how fast it is moving, how much water is in the air, how much water evaporates from the food....it is quite complicated. I have been through all of this. In the end I think that the scientific treatment does give some insights for a chef. However, nobody has spelled it out in a way that is digestible by chefs. I have been thinking about writing something up, but so far I haven't gotten around to it. The key factors are: - The actual temperature of the food surface only somewhat depends on the oven temperature. The key factor is on how fast water in the food evaporates from the surface. The food surface is at the wet bulb temperature. - The moist part of food never goes above water boiling temperature - no matter how how the oven. It can't exceed boiling point, and usually is much lower (wet bulb temperature). - When food browns or burns in a very hot oven, the parts that brown have to first dry out by having the water evaporate from them - only then can they start to raise above wet bulb temperature. - This in turn depends on how fast you are carrying heat to the food, and how fast you carry water vapor away, which depends on convection speed. - Speeding up the flow rate speeds up heat flow, and water evaporation rate. The reason you decrease temperature is that with faster flow you can transfer the same amount of heat as lower temperature with still air. - However even with ultra fast flow there are limits - once the flow has "full developed turbulence" heat flow will level off. - A far better way to increase heat flow is to increase the moisture content of the air (humidity) this dramatically increases heat flow. Moist air cooks faster than dry air - and again you have to reduce the temperature. Steam cooks FAR faster than dry air. - As you increase heat flow, you can lower the temperature. However there is a limit to how you can put the temperature because you also want to brown things (carmelize sugars and/or malliard reaction), and this requires specific temperature thresholds. - Heat conduction inside the food is totally different story - it is quite slow. In an oven with too much heat flow too fast into the food, the outside can be burned before heat conducts in so the interior is undercooked.

In recent months I have visited a bunch of famous coffee places recommended in this thread, including two branches of Murky Coffee in Washington DC and Alexandria, and Intelligensia in Chigago. Murky Coffee in DC has decent espresso drinks. They have a location near capitol hill and one in Alexandria VA. The Alexandria branch has a Synesso. DC does not. Intelligensia is also pretty good, but I was not blown away. So far Sant Eustacio in Rome, and then Vivace and Victrola in Seattle are still my favorites. I need to try the places in Manhattan and Brooklyn that phaelon56 mentions. I haven't gotten to San Francisco or Portland recently, so there is still hope there.

That depends on your oven. In my area electricity is 7.5 cents per kilowatt hour. The maximum draw on a 1000 watt water bath for 24 hours would be $1.80 But this is a gross over estimate because the water bath is not drawing 1000 watts the whole time. It's probably less than 100 watts on average so the total electricity cost would be $0.18 Your oven has a higher maximum wattage, but what matters is how much it draws when maintaining the oven at 55C. It probably is no more than 100W on average, but of course it depends on your oven.

You are clearly using a cut of beef that is too tough to normally be served rare. If I was doing this sous vide, in a water bath, then I would try 24 hours, and go longer if that does not work. Most cuts of beef that I have tried will be fine at 24 - 36 hours. There are some cuts that need to go even further - up to 72 hours. If you are sealing in the oven and keeping at 55C, and sealing in an oven bag, then there is no reason that you couldn't try the 24-36 hours in your oven.

Sorry, but I don't have a good small quantity source myself. If anybody else has one, please let us all know. Sealed Air, the parent company of the cryovac brand is the main producer in the US but they mainly sell to very high volume vacuum packing operation. There must be someplace - for example a butcher supply shop - that sells in smaller quanitities.

That is interesting. EVOO is unheated and unrefined - that's the "extra virgin" part so it is not a high-heat frying oil. It makes intuitive sense that a long time at low temperature could cause some breakdown of the oil. This is a good discovery, thanks for positing it....

Yes, this works very well. One thing to keep in mind with a galantine or other stuffed product is that stuffing, farces or other mixtures are much more worrysome with food safety than other things. Also, the cooking time goes as the square of the thickness - see the cooking charts I posted previously. Large whole bird galantines start to get very long cooking times. It is difficult to get the cooking time short on really big galatines, such as "Turducken". This difficulty is present for any cooking method of course - but since sous vide is generally lower temperature you need to watch this. A key advantage of galantine sous vide is that the vacuum packing tends to help mold the product. You can get even more molding effect if you use heat shrink bags - you dip them very briefly in boiling water and they shrink a lot....

I regard 55C / 131F as medium rare for beef. For rare I will go down to 122F / 50C. There seems to be little or no agreement as to what temperature range corresponds to terms like rare, medium rare etc. Holding at 50C temperature overnight under the conditions I explained is not recommended - there are food safety concerns.

Sous vide does not overcook from a temperature perspective if you have it in a bath that is the desired core temperature. However, the cooking process for food is a combination of time and temperature, and over a long enough period of time you can definitely change the quality of the food. If it is tough, you tenderize it. But there is always the possibility of too much of a good thing...the heat causes too much collagen to break down ruining the texture. In addition other changes can occur. It is hard to accidentally overcook in sous vide because typically you have to leave it for many many hours to get a bad effect. But you can't leave it indefinitely.

Your motivation for the long cooking time seems to be to leave it cooking while you are at work and have it ready when you are back. I do this all the time for beef, lamb or other meats which can tolerate the cooking time. However, chicken breasts may, or may not be as suitable. The typical reason to leave meat in a sous vide for a long time period, like 10-14 hours is primarily to allow the collagen to denature into gelatin. Most toughness in meat is due to collagen, and it will slowly break down (denature) into gelatin. The lower the temperature, the slower it takes. If you cook red meat at 130F - 140F then you need quite a bit of time. Tender meats don't start with very much collagen, and they need some of it to have reasonable texture and mouthfeel. With very long cooking they can become so tender that it gives a mushy texture which is undesirable. As an example, you can easily ruin a fillet mignon (to my taste anyway) by having it cook for 10 hours. I have never tried cooking chicken breasts for more than a couple hours, and they are fine up to that point. It is not necessary to cook them longer to tenderize the chicken (unless perhaps it was a very tough old stewing hen). From a food safety perspective there is no problem with cooking food at 140F for 10-12 hours. In addition to collagen denaturation, there are other changes in the food over time, and ultimately the quality of the meat will degrade. I have cooked beef for 96 hours without trouble (if it starts out as a tough cut). However I have not explored this with chicken so I don't know what the ultimate limit is.

Most Combi ovens have a program that lets you hold meat for 24 hours at low temperature. What you want to do is maintain the oven so the internal temperature is 55C. The oven temp will be higher than this becaues there will be some evaporation from the roast. The exterior will dry out a bit but that should be OK because you'll sear it anyway. I can't say exactly what temperature to set it at to stabilze at 55C internal, it depends on the size of the meat and other factors. Alternatively if you seal the roast in a plastic roasting bag you will not lose moisture to evaporation. Roasting bags are sold in the supermarket - Reynold's Oven Bags are one brand in the US - I assume there must be a UK equivalent. Put the meat in the bag, and seal it with the nylon bag tie (included with the bag). In that case you ought to be able to cook it at or just above the desired temp - say 55C to 56C. Once sealed in the bag it is an approximation to sous vide. There is air in the bag, but in this case it really doesn't matter. The key thing is to seal in the moisture. The inside of the bag will be very moist - the air will be at 100% humidity - but that is what will stop the evaporation. Note that there is no food safety problem with having the meat at 55C overnight like this - at least according to US FDA standards. Also, 55C is low enough to still have decent meat color, but high enough that you should get some tenderizing effect. A similar product for containing the moisture is Reynold's Hot Bags - which are an aluminum foil bag. One could also attempt to tightly seal the meat in conventional aluminum foil, however in that case it is highly likely that you will have some leakage because you can't seal the foil as well as you can the bag. You can sear the meat either before or after. Put oil in a pan, heat it until it just starts to smoke, then put the meat in just long enough to get the desired sear color.

This looks like a good example of an on-off or "bang-bang" controller, which turns the item on or off depending on the temperature. This will be OK for many sous vide applications, but it isn't anywhere near as accurate as a PID controller which is more expensive. The advantage is that it is cheap, and easy to use because you just plug it in. If you wanted to do PID control, here is a site that has do-it-yourself instructions on adding a PID controller to an espresso machine. The process would be very similar for a crock pot, or improvised water bath. http://www.murphyslawonline.com/silvia/

Cole Palmer has it.