Anova Precision Cooker - cook sous vide with your iPhone.

[glitch]

Sounds interesting re compressing. Haven't thought about that as a use for my sealer.

Not going to happen unless you have a chamber sealer. Atmospheric pressure reduction is needed and edge-style vacuum sealers will not do that.

And you can forget infusion as well, that is unless you have an ISI siphon and either their Rapid Infusion kit or a zip-loc bag and some water.

 

[glitch]

I bought the eiffel sealer and want to get a big stock of bags or roll, what retailers /range do people recommend.

I bought my first batch of bags from Fresherpack, my second batch (and the set I'm still using) were from here.

 

[glitch]

30cm x 40cm - lol, so big. Have never used one. Could feed an army.

Have you ever tried? I thought the Eiffel couldn't handle 30cm wide?

 

[glitch]

Where did you get 72° from?! That's massively OTT for a leg - you should be aiming for something around the 60° mark.

Shoulder is the far tougher cut to cook, be that sous vide or otherwise, so you either aim for the same 60° and cook for a lot longer (20hrs works well) or go higher but for a shorter time. I've done shoulder at 76° for 8 hours and it was superb.

 

[glitch]

Sorry for the delay - took me a while to find my notebook from last year.

The best results I had were using a deboned, 700g skin-on shoulder cooked for 8 hours at 78°. Bag sealed with a little olive oil in there along with some rosemary and crushed garlic, plus seasoning.

 

[glitch]

Neck or shoulder, cut into large cubes.

Spices and such toasted first then added along with salt. Seal the whole thing up and leave it for as long as you like. Then cook at high temp. Probably 75C for 4 hours ish (I'm guessing here but given the size of the cubes that should be enough time to breakdown the connective tissues).

Youll need double that amount of time, if not triple, to break down neck so that it will flake. Size of the cubes won't matter much as even a whole neck filler will get up to temp pretty quickly.

I love lamb neck but if you're trying to get that texture out of it, my experience with it has found that braising is the superior method of cooking. Especially if you're trying to get flavour into it from spices, etc.

Lamb neck low and slow (56° for a day, etc) is another story, however. But you won't get that flakey texture you're looking for from a curry.

 

[glitch]

Agreed re braising.

I'd put pressure cooking before sous vide when it comes to lamb neck if the end result is going to be flaked for a dish or needs to be super tender.

Thinking about it more you're probably lying right about the time for the lamb being on the low side. However, I wasn't aiming for completely fall-apart meat and as it was cubed rather than a whole piece I don't think 16 hours is realistically going to be required. Maybe 8 though possibly less with a higher temp.

Whole or cubed won't matter a jot - with the temps and timings we're dealing with there's plenty of opportunity for a whole fillet to do its thing. I just think that sous vide is the wrong method for the result we're aiming for here.

I spent far too long trying to replicate a Jason Atherton recipe which involved sous vide lamb neck (78° for 8-hours) and eventually switched to braising it on the advice of his sous chef, who I happened to meet at a thing one weekend. The lamb neck on this particular dish was supposed to be so tender you could cut it with a spoon and it would just melt in your mouth, but have enough body to it that it stayed as one whole piece.

If memory serves me correctly, Alex mentioned they cooked the lamb for 18-hours at 76° and it was only through doing this that I achieved the texture I was looking for and that I'd had when I eat the original dish.

But having experimented to the point where I didn't want to eat lamb neck again for a very long time, I found that braising for 3-hours at 135° gave me the exact texture and flavour I'd been craving.

To be honest, most of the time I'll stock up on lamb neck fillets when they are reduced and use the pressure cooker. An hour or so in there and they are meltingly tender, but you don't get the same infusion of flavour that you will from a braise. Easy enough to sort that post-cooking though.

 

[glitch]

I was being lazy and cooked some chicken breast under the grill (in a cast iron skillet)...dry as a desert and I cooked it on the lowest heat as well.

It's amazing how much juice is lost.

That says more about your capabilities as a cook and your choice of method, which is possibly the worst way to cook a chicken breast - but is a fantastic way to do skin-on thighs!

The amount of moisture retained by a chicken breast, or any other piece of meat, is related primarily to the temperature it was cooked to and not how it was cooked.

 

[glitch]

There is a Valentines sale on with £30 off (I can send you my code) which is better than nothing, but not quite at the level of the previous offers.

 

[glitch]

It's not a modernist technique, it's a resurgence of a cooking methodology originally conceived two centuries ago thanks to the rise of technology. But I get your point.

It will be forever destined to be a fad for the masses and only really embraced by foodies unless someone can make it foolproof and reduce the barrier to entry.

Sous vide cooking takes too long and is too fiddly for most people to want to bother with. What we are seeing is an increase in the amount of food being cooked this way that ends up on our supermarket shelves - which bodes well for the future.

What we need is pre-packed foods that can be easily cooked sous vide and an affordable, reliable and simple way of people cooking them. Currently it's still a niche product and it'll be hard to change that.

People have less and less time to cook, so they want faster and easier results. Sous vide is the antithesis of that. But it can still appeal to a wider audience with the right approach.

 

[glitch]

That's a passable combination of temperature and time, but for a cut like sirloin I'd be looking at a smidge higher. But I doubt it would make that much difference - you make or break a sous vide sirloin during finishing.

What about the end result didn't wow you? What about it do you think it was lacking? Have you water-bathed a steak before with better results or was this your first time?

For showing off sous vide, I'd usually resort to something simple that can be cooked in a way that is extremely tricky to pull off via conventional methods. Pork can be a good choice or protein as there's plenty of scope for experimenting - everything from chops to cheeks can be spectacular with sous vide.

 

[glitch]

The quality of the steak would have a huge bearing on the final result, but as I said before it's mainly the finishing where things are won or lost. How long did you sear it for and what was your aim - colour, flavour, texture or all three?

Interesting you mention seasoning - not sure why the cooking method would change the amount you needed, but that does lead us back to the steak itself perhaps not being as amazing as you might have thought.

What are your plans for the next dish? Anything you struggle cooking under normal conditions that sous vide might give you the edge with?

Oh, and pink peppercorns > green for steak sauces!

 

[glitch]

Has anyone experimented with using fish sauce or similar to fake dry age steak?

e.g. http://seattlefoodgeek.com/2015/08/...e-steak-aging-sauce-and-sansaire-searing-kit/

If it is anything like the other stuff Sansaire are peddling, it'll be something you can already buy that they have rebranded and whacked the price up on.

If it imparts any amount of flavour that is reminiscent of a dry-aged steak, I'd be amazed. It certainly isn't going to alter the flavour or the texture of the inside of the steak, so I don't really see why you need to cook with it in the bag and not just lightly brush it on the steak before you finish it off.

 

[glitch]

My man bugbear with it is the name - steak aging sauce sounds like it's doing something to the meat rather than being something that imparts an aged flavour.

Still, that minor annoyance aside it doesn't seem too hard to replicate. Soy sauce, fish sauce, Worcestershire sauce, mushroom ketchup and balsamic glaze seems like a decent set of ingredients to start experimenting with.