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Sous vide lamb – smell?


TdeV

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I've just cooked two lamb shanks sous vide for 72 hours at 141F in separate bags. When I opened the first bag, the shank looked and smelled great.

 

The second bag, however, smelled bad (to me). The shank was covered in gelatinous red stuff. My husband is less smell-impaired than I, so he ate that one.

 

The two shanks were purchased from the meat market associated with the Department of Animal Sciences at the local university where the students will have butchered the animals.

 

I'm wondering if what's possible is that one of the shanks did not have all the blood drained out. And that the smell which I've associated with "bad" is actually the smell of blood.

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50 minutes ago, Shalmanese said:

To be fair, all sous vide stuff smells kind of gross coming out of the bag. If it smells vaguely bloody and organy, that might just be the juices that have leached out but not congealed due to the low heat.

But hard to understand, all things being equal as the poster said, that one smelled fine and one  did not.

From experience I know what spoiled lamb smells like and it took me years and years to get over it  so I can't imagine eating anything that smelled the slightest bit off. But to each his own.   Hope nobody suffered any consequences from this experience.

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The notable differences between the two lamb shanks were:

i) smell (one good, one "bad")

ii) gelatinous pale red stuff all over the "off" one. The congealed stuff was the colour of a good dark vin gris. That's what made me think of blood.

 

How long does one dip the vacuum sealed packet into boiling water (in order to kill off bacteria)??

 

Thanks.

 

As for consequences, we don't know yet.

Edited by TdeV
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Scooby's got it.  (I think)  

 

I went through the same thing with some beef ribs awhile back.  One or two ribs had a surface bacteria on them - no fault of the butcher no way to know.  I bagged and tagged and went for a 72 hr bath.  The morning of a demo, two of the bags were swollen and the whole kitchen smelled like something dead.   I put on my stupid hat and cut one of the bags open,  Don't do that.

 

I posed the question about what happened here and heard tales that I was not the first.  A wiser user attributed it to surface bacteria (even had a name for it) and suggested for any long SV to bag the product then dip the bag into boiling water.  No more than a minute will kill any growth on the outside of the product.reocc

 

I've been doing that since and have had no recurrence.

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Unless you are confident that the shanks came from the same animal and joint (front vs rear), it is entirely possible that one was not handled by the students in the same manner as the other, or from an older animal and in the case of rear shank there could be residual blood in the femoral artery or accumulated blood from hematomas if the animals got banged up on the way to slaughter.

 

Shanks are often better and safer braised conventionally above 170F anyway.  And you get the sauce.

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