Sous Vide: Recipes, Techniques & Equipment, 2011

[BillyBon]

A superhot pan will work if the surface of the meat is perfectly flat.But irregular surfaces like those on short ribs will not get evenly seared. This is not the case with the chimney method. A glowing hot chimney will sear every bit of the surface.

Edited March 16, 2011 by BillyBon (log)

[Anna N]

Time & temp?

Bumping this hoping for an answer. Thank you. Anna N

Edited to clarify that Chris A is asking the question of Rob Babcock.

Edited March 17, 2011 by Anna N (log)

[Todd in Chicago]

Meredith....

We just had the Momofuku short ribs last night and they were great! That marinade is awesome! I have fryed them in peanut oil before (due to a "near miss" the wife has temporarilty banned me from frying..... :-( ). I did use the Iwatani on them and they were still fab! The leftover sauce/broth can also be used with other meats to decent effect.

Cheers....

Todd in Chicago

[Anna N]

Update on sirloin steak S-V. Yesterday I pulled a sirloin steak out of the freezer that I had packaged with salt, pepper, a slice of garlic and a wodge of butter and tossed it in the S-V. I cooked it at 55C for two hours. After drying it off and searing it in some clarified butter I finally had the sirloin steak I knew was possible. It was done just a little closer to medium-rare than rare but was amazingly tender compared to previous efforts. What changed? This one I cooked from frozen. This one had butter in the vacuum pack. This one I cooked longer. It came from the same package of meat as the others. I am mystified but very happy.

[mkayahara]

So I'm not completely sure this is the right thread for this question, but I couldn't think of a better one, so here goes... I've got some short ribs that I'm planning on doing sous vide. (36-48 hours at anywhere between 55C and 60C seems to be the consensus, yeah?) I've got it in my head that they'd be good with hoisin sauce, only I've never really worked with hoisin before. Can anyone give me any pointers? Should I be coating them with hoisin (and maybe other stuff?) and cooking them that way, or is it something I should work into a separate sauce that gets added at the end?

[paulpegg]

So I'm not completely sure this is the right thread for this question, but I couldn't think of a better one, so here goes... I've got some short ribs that I'm planning on doing sous vide. (36-48 hours at anywhere between 55C and 60C seems to be the consensus, yeah?) I've got it in my head that they'd be good with hoisin sauce, only I've never really worked with hoisin before. Can anyone give me any pointers? Should I be coating them with hoisin (and maybe other stuff?) and cooking them that way, or is it something I should work into a separate sauce that gets added at the end?

I think that hoisin sauce is sort of one dimensional for a dish that will be remembered by all with a little more work invested.

here is a link to a recipe for momofuku short ribs SV. Momofuku recipe.I substituted cranberry juice for the pear juice and it came out fantastic. This was one of the first things I did after I built my SV system and it is the one that keeps getting requests for more. Try it, you will definitely like it!

I put the meat and marinade in the bag and then froze it overnight before sealing it. This prevented the Foodsaver from sucking the liquid out of the bag. There have been many posts about using Foodsaver bags for long cooking periods so I double bagged it (and continue to do so as a matter of course whenever the recipe will run for more than 8 hours). I have never had an outside or inside bag leak so I guess it is not as big a problem as Indicated elsewhere. In any event, safe is better than sorry and bags are cheap.

Good luck with your ribs.

Edited March 18, 2011 by paulpegg (log)

[KennethT]

I've done lots of long-time cooking in foodsaver bags and never had the bag leak, per se... so I don't see the need in double bagging.... double sealing, now that's different! Seals can definitely leak, whether you're cooking for 1 hour or 48 hours, so I usually double seal on anything other than something that was dry before going in the bag. Any type of liquid or oil gets the double seal.

I've also used ziplocks for a 36 hour flank steak with no leakage, btw...

The funny thing with ziplocks, and to a smaller extent with the foodsaver bags, is that the plastic is slightly permeable to certain odors... So, for instance, I'll smoke a piece of pork shoulder in the stovetop smoker for 20 minutes prior to cooking for 30 hours in the bath (at say 150F - just off the top of my head). After several hours, you can smell the smoke smell in the waterbath water, and then later, it permeates the entire kitchen! The seals have not leaked as the waterbath water is clear, and the juices are held in the bag with no leakage, but the odor molecules definitely get through the bag. When the meat comes out, it is still has the smoky flavor, but it is less intense than after only a few hours.

I gather the thicker plastics of commercial vacuum bags don't have this problem.

[paulpegg]

I've done lots of long-time cooking in foodsaver bags and never had the bag leak, per se... so I don't see the need in double bagging.... double sealing, now that's different! Seals can definitely leak, whether you're cooking for 1 hour or 48 hours, so I usually double seal on anything other than something that was dry before going in the bag. Any type of liquid or oil gets the double seal.

I've also used ziplocks for a 36 hour flank steak with no leakage, btw...

The funny thing with ziplocks, and to a smaller extent with the foodsaver bags, is that the plastic is slightly permeable to certain odors... So, for instance, I'll smoke a piece of pork shoulder in the stovetop smoker for 20 minutes prior to cooking for 30 hours in the bath (at say 150F - just off the top of my head). After several hours, you can smell the smoke smell in the waterbath water, and then later, it permeates the entire kitchen! The seals have not leaked as the waterbath water is clear, and the juices are held in the bag with no leakage, but the odor molecules definitely get through the bag. When the meat comes out, it is still has the smoky flavor, but it is less intense than after only a few hours.

I gather the thicker plastics of commercial vacuum bags don't have this problem.

I have also adopted the double seal and have experienced the aroma of my ingredients as they cook in the bath. I am using somewhat thicker bags and it still is apparent but not as strong. The double seal may be a weak defense since it is only the inside edge of the inner seal that needs to fail to have a problem. The likeliest one to fail is the one that has some pressure behind it. This is easily the inner one if the ingredients gas off and bulge the bag. A double bagged set will be protected if the inner seal on the inner bag fails. Since it hasn't happened to me yet I have no further advice on this issue.

[nickrey]

I asked ages ago in the old sous vide thread if anyone else had experienced this. For me it tends to happen when there are cloves in the marinade of whatever is being cooked. It's interesting to hear that it happens to others as well.

[gfweb]

Cloves and allspice seem to pass thru plastic when I sv corned beef.

Sent from my Droid using Tapatalk

[Todd in Chicago]

So I'm not completely sure this is the right thread for this question, but I couldn't think of a better one, so here goes... I've got some short ribs that I'm planning on doing sous vide. (36-48 hours at anywhere between 55C and 60C seems to be the consensus, yeah?) I've got it in my head that they'd be good with hoisin sauce, only I've never really worked with hoisin before. Can anyone give me any pointers? Should I be coating them with hoisin (and maybe other stuff?) and cooking them that way, or is it something I should work into a separate sauce that gets added at the end?

I think that hoisin sauce is sort of one dimensional for a dish that will be remembered by all with a little more work invested.

here is a link to a recipe for momofuku short ribs SV. Momofuku recipe.I substituted cranberry juice for the pear juice and it came out fantastic. This was one of the first things I did after I built my SV system and it is the one that keeps getting requests for more. Try it, you will definitely like it!

I put the meat and marinade in the bag and then froze it overnight before sealing it. This prevented the Foodsaver from sucking the liquid out of the bag. There have been many posts about using Foodsaver bags for long cooking periods so I double bagged it (and continue to do so as a matter of course whenever the recipe will run for more than 8 hours). I have never had an outside or inside bag leak so I guess it is not as big a problem as Indicated elsewhere. In any event, safe is better than sorry and bags are cheap.

Good luck with your ribs.

I'll second the vote for the Momofuku marinade....I could probably put that on my shoe and the shoe would be delicious!

I have a SVS and their vaccuum sealer which of course doesn't handle liquids well. When using the Momofuku marinade, I use the ol' "ziplock back underwater" trick to get the marinade in with the ribs with almost zero air. I then seal that in my regular SVS bag. For some crazy reason I've gotten into the habit of triple sealing ALL my bags. I guess my thought process is that it doesn't cost any more and only takes a few moments longer to do.

BTW; I love that Momofuku book! What a hoot to read!

Todd in Chicago

[Paul Kierstead]

I recently used some liquid smoke + brine with some skirt steak using the zip-lock method. The next day the smell of smoke was fairly noticeable, but I could not locate any leaks in the zip-lock bag. I've observed it with other spices with the zip lock bags as well. With foodsaver bags, I've only notices a smell once or twice. All were on long cooks, and in all cases I've not found evidence of a leak. Doesn't mean there wasn't one, of course.

[KennethT]

I have always smelled aromas through the bag when cooking SV post smoking. I can't think of too many other aromas that I always get it with. I remember a long time ago, when Nick mentioned that he smells clove through the bag... I have an interesting experiment going on right now - I'm doing a wagyu flank steak for 24 hours that has been smoked with oak/mesquite. I took some of the wagyu chunks of fat (a "gift" from the butcher with my purchase of the flank steak) and put them in a hot pan to render/brown, and put the results of that in the bag with the steak. It's a ziplock freezer bag with double seal btw.... so, my experiment is that I am keeping the seal of the ziplock bag out of the water, so it is impossible to leak. Even still, the water smells smoky, and you can smell smoke when you lift the cover off the pot... So I have to assume that the odor is getting through the plastic.

[lstrelau]

I find garlic odour will migrate through the bags and other spice smells too. My understanding is that the bags are slightly permeable to small molecules. However I have been using 3 mil vacuum bags until I got some boilable bags recently. Don't know if they are as permeable to odors - will experiment with them now too.

[vengroff]

Sous vide tables, like these are a great help when it comes to planning and executing dishes. But with modern tablet computers we can do even better. This is especially true if you want to use water temperatures or food dimensions that don't appear in the tables.

A while back I wrote a program to calculate sous-vide times by numerically solving the heat equation. I think it's basically the same thing Nathan Myhrvold and Douglas Baldwin did to create their time and temperature tables. Over the last couple of weekends, I wrote an iPad app around it. An iPad is more than powerful enough to solve these necessary equations, typically in under a second.

Here's what the app looks like:

It's a simple UI. On the left, you can choose your food, the dimensions of the food, the initial temperature, desired temperature, and water temperature. Defaults for all three are available, or you can choose to customize them, as I did with the initial food temperature above. One the right, you see a projection of how long it will take to cook and a graph showing how the temperature will change over time. Hit the start button when you drop the food into the water bath, and the app becomes a timer that counts down the time and tracks the estimated temperature. Here is a snapshot from a little over halfway through the cooking time:

The blue dot represents the current time and temperature. It moves slowly up the white line as time goes by.

Using the app, you can play with a wide variety of scenarios, and see what makes sense and what doesn't without wasting a lot of food. Here's an example with an extra-hot water bath:

We immediately notice that although the steak will quick very quickly, the temperature will not level off like it did in the previous examples. This means that we have a very small window of time to take it out of the water without overcooking it, and even if we do pull it right when the core reaches 54.5, it will still drift upward while it rests. To get it right, we would actually have to pull it out well before the core hit the desired final temperature. The app doesn't calculate that for you, because I don't think many people cook that way, but I suppose it could.

Anyway, I've been using this app on my iPad and it has worked well for me. I'm contemplating cleaning up the UI a bit over the next few weekends and then putting it in the app store. But I thought I'd throw these screen shots out for feedback before I do. Please let me know what you think.

[Anna N]

I am now the owner of a cheerful red Demi thanks to 3 special people. My sister was the source of the cash in birthday/Christmas gifts, a generous eG society member took delivery of it in the US and Kerry Beal carried it across the border and delivered it last evening. Further, Kerry had dropped into a charity store and found a never-out-of-its-packing FoodSaver (V2840) for $4.99! I had an older FoodSaver but it was reaching the end of its useful life and gave me no end of grief so this one is a real treat. I won’t retire my beta version of the SousVide Magic PID and rice cooker combination as having two options is just great. I let the Demi run all night with just water in it and today I will be tossing in a chuck eye to see what miracle can be wrought.

[JBailey]

Vengroff, your application looks fascinating. Best luck in getting it out to users as I am certain it will be most helpful. However, I have a question. It has been my belief from what I have read that meat cooked sous vide will not exceed the temperature of the water. In your post you say

We immediately notice that although the steak will quick very quickly, the temperature will not level off like it did in the previous examples. This means that we have a very small window of time to take it out of the water without overcooking it, and even if we do pull it right when the core reaches 54.5, it will still drift upward while it rests. To get it right, we would actually have to pull it out well before the core hit the desired final temperature.

.

Once the mass of the meat reaches the surrounding water temperature, how can it continue to rise? Isn't there an equalibrium? I would have imagined that terminal temperature is terminal temperature. Also, while some may rest their meat after sous vide, I was under the impression that there is no distinct advantage to resting as one might after cooking conventionally.

Edited March 22, 2011 by JBailey (log)

[bmdaniel]

JBailey - it looks like he is cooking in a bath hotter than his target temp in that example

[lstrelau]

Vengroff,

Your app sounds great - will it work on an iPhone (and will you port it to this platform) or would the size of the screen simply be too small to be functional? Don't have an iPad yet (spending my cash on things like MC, SV Supreme and chamber vacuums!!!)

[vengroff]

JBailey - it looks like he is cooking in a bath hotter than his target temp in that example

That is correct. The example was just an illustration of the app showing you why you probably don't want a bath that hot. What happens in this case is that the surface temperature gets quite a bit higher than the center, so after you pull the food out the temperature equalizes somewhere in between the core and surface temperature at the time it was pulled. A second curve showing the surface temperature might help illustrate this.

[vengroff]

Vengroff,

Your app sounds great - will it work on an iPhone (and will you port it to this platform) or would the size of the screen simply be too small to be functional? Don't have an iPad yet (spending my cash on things like MC, SV Supreme and chamber vacuums!!!)

Thanks. I'm looking into it. I tried to structure the app so it can run effectively on different display sizes. The iPhone port is a future weekend project.

[JBailey]

Vengroff and bmdaniel, thank you for the clarifications. Now that I know what you were trying, it actually becomes an even more helpful tool. There have been times when I have raised temps when I did not have as much time available as I may have prefered, but this would help me keep within core margins. I hope you also consider a way to share this for my laptop as well.

[cbread]

Any chance that very useful looking app will ever be ported or written to run on a plain ol' desktop PC?

[DouglasBaldwin]

vengroff: You're quite right, numerically solving the heat equation is exactly what Nathan and I did.

I'm very glad to see that you're using Robin rather than Dirichlet boundary conditions. In my home experiments I've measured that my PolyScience immersion circulator has a surface heat transfer coefficient of 155 W/m^2-K and my SousVide Supreme 95 W/m^2-K. You might want to include an option to set the water bath type and default to my measured surface heat transfer coefficients and also allow the user to set h.

What shape are you assuming in your calculations? If possible, it'd be nice if the user could set a parameter based on the shape of the food that they're cooking. I'd think most people using your app will want to use it when cooking large items, like a roast, and being able to specify the shape is crucial for large items.

The tables I use the most are those that give pasteurization times. You might want to consider adding a second line on your plot that also shows the log reduction of Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli, etc. You can find the equation and most the D- & z-values on my website. Please feel free to email me if you need any additional details.

I wish you the best of luck on your app.

[vengroff]

Thanks Douglas. Your web page is quite informative and helped me a lot.

I realize now that it's not obvious from what I showed, but when you select a food you can also select a shape. The data model has a different beta for each shape, but I've mostly only tested with the flat slab (beta = 0) case. By the way, do you have any experimental evidence for a good beta to use for a chicken breast? I suspect it's somewhere in the 0.3 to 0.5 range. What about a squat not-quite cylindrical roast--the kind of large cut one might tend to sous-vide? Somewhere in the 1.5 range?

I initially tried Dirichlet boundary conditions but the results were disastrous. I tended to get times that were way short of the mark.

The other thing I tried more recently, based on the tables you and Nathan put together, was to reverse engineer the constants you used by doing a Levenberg-Marquart least squares optimization over the parameter space. I could get good fits if I held h and k constant, but if I didn't there was a gradient that drove them off in very weird directions.

Adding a Pasteurization curve is also a really good idea. I'll look into it. I'll also add an option to select between your two h values.

Thanks again for the help and pointers.