Problem cooking sous vide brisket

[rotuts]

Ive never had 'gas' in any of my bags.

 

Ive been 'bagging' for quite some time.

 

Plenty of 'gas' else where, just not in a bag.

[haresfur]

I'd file this under 'shit happens'.  Like rotuts, I would suspect something in the aging which then was exacerbated by the rolling and low temperature cooking.  Try again with unrolled meat and be sure your temperature is accurate.  You are in the range where a degree or two can make a big difference to the pasteurization time.  If you look back through the SV threads, I think there are a few examples of fairly random problems like this.

 

If you still have the problem, cook the meat a different way or find a different butcher. 

[pbear]

It's always dificult to troubleshoot something like this at a distance, but I'm inclined to one of two theories: the calibration of the Anova is off (an issue flagged by dcarch) or something went wrong in the handling of the meat before it was bagged (mentioned by several posters).  FWIW, I've been doing SV/LT long cooks for many years without having run into spoilage or off odors even once.  Something went wrong here, obviously, but it's unusual.

 

Unlike others, I don't think the rolling of the brisket was the problem.  Yes, obviously this meant that a likely contaminated surface was furthest from the water bath, but the roll would have had to be extraordinarily thick for this to matter.  Even then, my limited experience with very thick cuts (a couple of hams monitored with a probe thermometer) was that while it took them six hours to come to temp, it also took a couple hours before the core temp budged from full chill.  Nor do I think the temp was too low.  See Baldwin.  Importantly, six hours to pasteurize isn't the same thng as six hours in the danger zone.  Again, see Baldwin.  IOW, whatever was the problem here, it was neither the temp nor the time.

[Shalmanese]

Non pathogenic organisms are far less studied in food science than pathogenic organisms and food safety guidelines are centered around toxicity, not palatability. Once in a while, you hear something funny going on with SV foods and it's likely some kind of thermophilic bacteria that's non-toxic but is producing all sorts of funky compounds during it's brief reproduction period. Remember, it doesn't take much to make food smell unpalatable, concentrations in parts per million are enough to be detected by the human nose.

[jmolinari]

Did you look up any tables to calculate how long it would take for the center of the meat to reach 130F?

If it's longer than 4 hours that's a problem.

How that relates to outer surface grossness, i'm not sure, but it sounds like a key step in safety for sous vide was missed.

[paulraphael]

Non pathogenic organisms are far less studied in food science than pathogenic organisms and food safety guidelines are centered around toxicity, not palatability. Once in a while, you hear something funny going on with SV foods and it's likely some kind of thermophilic bacteria that's non-toxic but is producing all sorts of funky compounds during it's brief reproduction period. 

That's exactly right, and is one of the points made in that study I cited earlier. They basically said, "here's what little we know about some of this stuff."

 

It's surprising we don't hear more random spoilage stories from long, low-temperature cooks. I may add a blanching step just as a matter of routine insurance.

[Lisa Shock]

Approximately how large was the diameter of the roll? Which direction was the brisket rolled up?