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Advice on Sauces for Sous Vide Proteins


Kim Shook

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I think about this subject fairly often, but especially when I am thinking about converting a slow cooker recipe to sous vide.  While I love the texture and juiciness I get with sous vide, I find that I often want a sauce.  And I have quite a few slow cooker recipes that I know have good sauces, but the meat tends to be a little on the dry side.  Thus my ideas about converting.  I thought this might be a topic with legs if other folks are having the same questions.  

 

I'd like to make this recipe: Cranberry Pork Roast.  I found a nice little pork loin roast (2.88 lb.) and have rubbed it with Penzey's Ozark seasoning and sucked it (family lingo for vacuum bagging).  My thought is to sous vide it and make the sauce on the side and just serve it with/in/on top of the sauce.  Advice?  Thoughts?  Warnings?  Also, if you think that this is more of an IP thing tell me that, too.  And, considering that the sauce is sweet, would you do it in steps in the IP?  

 

Thanks so much!  

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I'm no expert but I thought of a possibility when mulling this over.  Suppose you like your pork at 140F.  Could you sous vide it to 135, have the rest of the ingredients hot in the slow cooker, transfer the 135F roast to the slow cooker and pull it when the internal temp reaches 140?

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The juices put out by the meat contain delicious flavour so don't throw them away.

 

For beef, they contain osmazome. See this link for a pictorial I did on creating this using mince.

 

I quite often make sauces/curries/vegetable stews separately and add the cooked meat afterwards. In the case of curries, you can pre-prepare both, add the meat to the sauce and refrigerate it overnight so the flavour infuses into the cooked meat and then simply reheat to eat.

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Nick Reynolds, aka "nickrey"

"The Internet is full of false information." Plato
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I have been fiddling with making terrines with chicken, pork & beef minces, wrapped in bacon. (I add boiled egg quarters, asparagus, bell pepper slices, beans, peas).  I make it as most would make it normally, but then vacuum bag it (in its dish) with the intention of compressing the meat.

I then SV it for 6 hours or so then remove it from the bag and cook in the oven as normal but for a shorter time.

Where its relevant to this topic is that the meat initially shrinks and produces a fair amount of liquid. This is probably osmazone and fat.

I poured off the liquid, allowed to cool and removed the fat once it solidified. I added half back to the terrine in the oven. The remainder I put in the fridge to cool further and it solidified into a gel. It was pinkish in color and had a lot of flavor. It would make a wonderful sauce but it also improved the terrine by adding it back after the final cook. It formed a wonderful gel (i guess like a pork pie).

 I may have to investigate further the idea of cooking mince simply to obtain ozmazone

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As far as the original topic goes I have also been working on converting older recipes into SV methods.

So far the best approach seems to be to make the sauce on the stove top, cook completely, cool and use it in the SV bag to cook the meat.

 

It is not quite the same because the meat juices are added during the SV. The sauce will be thinned down by the SV cook, so needs to be fairly thick to start with.

 

So far It is not the same as the older slow cook but perhaps adding osmazome might make a difference.

 

Trouble is I don't have a dog so what to do with the mince. Perhaps make chilli adding lots of peppers so all you taste is the heat?

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As I use a relatively cheap Food Saver vacuum sealer, it's difficult if not impossible to vacuum seal a bag with protein and sauce inside. I have done specifically pork loin roast just in the way someone upthread suggested, SV'ing it to within 10 degrees of the finished temperature I want, then cooling, then putting in a baking dish with sauce and finishing cooking in the oven. If I still had a slow-cooker -- I gave mine away when I got my IP, and now don't slow-cook much of anything with that -- I suspect I could use that just as effectively.

 

I suppose you could also use a zip-lock bag and the displacement method to seal it with sauce in the bag.

 

 

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3 hours ago, kayb said:

As I use a relatively cheap Food Saver vacuum sealer, it's difficult if not impossible to vacuum seal a bag with protein and sauce inside. I have done specifically pork loin roast just in the way someone upthread suggested, SV'ing it to within 10 degrees of the finished temperature I want, then cooling, then putting in a baking dish with sauce and finishing cooking in the oven. If I still had a slow-cooker -- I gave mine away when I got my IP, and now don't slow-cook much of anything with that -- I suspect I could use that just as effectively.

 

I suppose you could also use a zip-lock bag and the displacement method to seal it with sauce in the bag.

 

 

I'm not sure how easy this will be to explain without using pictures but it's worth a try.

 

You need to have the liquid in the bag below the vacuum sealer (e.g. with the food sealer on a shelf and the clamped bag dangling below it. Press the vacuum and watch the liquid. All air will be sucked out first. When the liquid starts rising, hit the seal button.

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Nick Reynolds, aka "nickrey"

"The Internet is full of false information." Plato
My eG Foodblog

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6 hours ago, kayb said:

As I use a relatively cheap Food Saver vacuum sealer, it's difficult if not impossible to vacuum seal a bag with protein and sauce inside. I have done specifically pork loin roast just in the way someone upthread suggested, SV'ing it to within 10 degrees of the finished temperature I want, then cooling, then putting in a baking dish with sauce and finishing cooking in the oven. If I still had a slow-cooker -- I gave mine away when I got my IP, and now don't slow-cook much of anything with that -- I suspect I could use that just as effectively.

 

I suppose you could also use a zip-lock bag and the displacement method to seal it with sauce in the bag.

 

 

 

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14 hours ago, nickrey said:

I'm not sure how easy this will be to explain without using pictures but it's worth a try.

 

You need to have the liquid in the bag below the vacuum sealer (e.g. with the food sealer on a shelf and the clamped bag dangling below it. Press the vacuum and watch the liquid. All air will be sucked out first. When the liquid starts rising, hit the seal button.

 

That makes sense. I'll try that.

 

5 hours ago, Duvel said:

You can also freeze the sauce and bag your protein with an icecube of frozen sauce ...

 

That would require more forethought that I generally use.

 

10 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:

 

H'mm. Similar to NickRey's suggestion. Must see if I can make that work. Perhaps with a turkey leg, after I dismember this critter.

Don't ask. Eat it.

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3 minutes ago, kayb said:

That would require more forethought that I generally use

 

I think that if you are after a braise-like SV preparation, you will be aiming for the 24-48h timeframe. In that case at least I need to plan ahead anyway ...

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I do this a lot, I’ll cook the vegetables at a higher temp then add meat and cook at a lower temp since the protein cooks so much lower effectively the vegetables don’t continue cooking. 

 

I make all the vegetable parts together chill then bag (either into a fresh bag or more often go from a pot) with the meat I’m using and let it cook. I also reduce the amount of liquid going into the bag by evaporation or starting off with less liquid because the meat will put a lot into the bag too. It is a far better way of cooking and when bagged properly can sit in the fridge for a week without problems and freezes really well. 

 

Always bloom spices in a pan with oil though, Oven roast mushrooms before adding to the bag, sauté onions well, be careful with the herbs and spices sometimes you don’t need as much as for a slow cooker version. Careful with the liquids you can always add more at the end but taking it away by boiling destroys all the effort you went too.

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On 11/24/2019 at 7:35 PM, kayb said:

As I use a relatively cheap Food Saver vacuum sealer, it's difficult if not impossible to vacuum seal a bag with protein and sauce inside.

 

In nearly every case yes -- but in this *particular* case, I bet canned, jellied cranberry sauce would be solid enough before cooking that you could get away with it.

 

The juice could be added at the end and the sauce reduced.

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I made confit from 50 duck marylands sous vide for a lunch yesterday. The bag contents were strained and put into a container in the refrigerator. This morning I scraped off the duck fat, which is in jars at the back of this picture. The large mass at the front is duck jelly.

 

IMG_7204.thumb.JPG.7788596ec9fdbe863c848f82aab20514.JPG

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Nick Reynolds, aka "nickrey"

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My eG Foodblog

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That's a good day at the office...

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“Who loves a garden, loves a greenhouse too.” - William Cowper, The Task, Book Three

 

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@Kim Shook

 

I look at your question this way :

 

Slowcookers cook meat in a similar manner to cooking them in the oven in a covered pot.

 

you have noted :  "  the meat tends to be a little on the dry side. "  from a crock pot.  its also that way w

 

a traditional braise or stew.   the meat contracts at the final ' pot ' temp , which is greater than 130 F 

 

possibly as high as 170 to 180 F

 

that squeezes out moisture and fat, from the meat.  that's where you gravy flavor comes from.  Braises are better the next day

 

as the meat muscle relaxes and some of that Jus goes back into the meat.  but its still going to be ' drier ' than

 

that same meat cooked SV  130 F +   as you add more SV temp , the muscle contracts a little more and thus

 

more Jus in the bag.  I like to try to keep at least most of the jus in the meat.

 

so :  cook your meat SV to your desired temp , and BTW you get tenderness in tough cuts but picking a longer

 

SV time.  use the jus in the SV bag for your gravy   .   it looks awful , but it will taste fine.

 

the conflict here is that at say at SV 140 F   you will have less Jus in the bag , than say at 180 F

 

but at that higher temp , you will get ' braise ' meat , ie a little dry

 

you can not create flavor out of nothing.   so if you want a full flavored gravy , and want tender succulent meat

 

( SV 130 - 140 F )  you need to find a flavor supplement that does not come from the meat.

 

this seems complicated , but is not.

 

 

Edited by rotuts (log)
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