So I was cruising amazon.de yesterday (don't judge) and apparently there is a new sous vide book coming out in German.
Needless to say, I'm like "dang!" According to Google, the title translates to "SOUS-VIDE BASIC COOKBOOK: knowledge and recipes from top chefs and experts." 220 pages in German, and supposed to come out this month. Now I really wish I had paid attention in high school German class . . .
My first (and maybe last - pitching stories is so not my forte) magazine article was published in the newest MIX magazine - yaaaay!
It's all about cookin' sous vide and stuff. Check it out! There are recipes too.
My story made the cover (sorta - they used a pretty pic of Louisa, which she hates):
We walked into a magazine shop together today looking for an ATM (so we could go wolvey at a downtown food-cart pod) and there was Louisa staring at us! We each bought about 5-6 copies. I was telling everyone in the store "Look! She is on the cover! ZOMG etc." Nobody gave much of a shit. Jaded motherfuckers!
It was sort of a lame "smackdown," in that there was no real winner. I'm just glad I didn't lose . . .
The photo shoot was the funnest part. Here are some "behind the scenes" "production stills." "And stuff."
My prep list and garnish:
Editor Martha Holmberg and photographer Lee Emert talking strategery:
Louisa cooking with her bizarre cavewoman methods:
Martha fussing over Louisa's plate (she plays favorites):
Lee going vertical to shoot my beautiful plate (don't tell OSHA):
More sous vide hazing in the mainstream press: Stephen Gandel of TIME no likey the sous-vide apparently.
(via TIME)
I'm not sure why he was cooking chicken breast for 8 hours or steak for 24. Oh well. He explains in the accompanying video that he doesn't like his chicken to be juicy. Can I have his PolyScience circulator then?
If you read stuff you may have read about the Sous Vide Supreme kitchen-counter water bath appliance. Heston Blumenthal is pimping it and they are apparently giving loaners to tons of food writers.
(via sousvidesupreme.com)
Most of the reviewers are pretty into it, but Monica Eng of the Chicago Tribune put it through its paces and kind of took a poop on it and said she didn't really want one.
Let's look at her reasons:
5 reasons to cook with the SousVide Supreme
1: Round roast remains tender and juicy, especially in the middle.
2: Soft boiled eggs slide right out of the shell ready to eat. [yes]
3: Salmon cooks up velvety soft, and the kitchen doesn't smell fishy afterward. [cooking smells are a big deal to Monica]
4: Sucking air out of a bag with a bag vacuum gun can be fun. [true]
5: After three days, short ribs emerge steaky and tender enough to eat with a spoon. [this is reason enough to own one, right?!]
5 reasons not to cook with the SousVide Supreme
1: Slow braised meats don't perfume and warm a home. [awww]
2: A rib-eye steak takes three hours to cook — and that's one of the quickest meats. [actually an hour is plenty for a 1-inch steak but going over is no biggie (unlike other methods). also you can use the timing to your advantage - put the meat in when you have time and it's ready when you are.]
3: Heating plastic next to fat-soluble foods for hours makes some people nervous. [yes - someone needs to get to the bottom of this issue]
4: If you have to slow simmer and then sear it in a pan and/or create a separate sauce, sous vide can add to your work and cleanup. [undeniably true]
5: Because temperatures must be precise, it's hard to cook more than one type of food at a time. [this is true of ovens, toasters, crock pots, etc. Also you can cook the higher thing (veg) until it's done and then drop the temp and throw the lower thing (meat) in . . . ]
Of course it's a personal decision, but definitely sign me up for spoon-tender short ribs!
I am happy with my two rigs, and I built them for way less than $450. I have more flexibility, and the SVS doesn't do anything extra (it's not a water circulator). But it is definitely sexier-looking. I would strongly consider it if I were just starting out with sous vide. And I wouldn't complain if they wanted to loan me one to test.
How to Cook Something in the Dishwasher:
(via Lifehacker)
We used to do this in college with eggs in the Hobart, but they have taken it to a whole new level. Cool.
The Baltimore Sun published a nice article on how to cook salmon sous-vide in a ziploc bag on the stovetop. The article suggests sticking to fish, because it cooks quickly and you don't have to fiddle with the heat as long. Seems like good advice.
(Baltimore Sun)
Overall it's pretty cool, until the part where they discourage home sous vide:
"To me, that's a little scary," said Todd Eucke, senior marketing manager for Cuisine Solutions, an Alexandria, Va., firm that prepares sous-vide cuisine for hotels and restaurants across the country.
I don't want to say that guy might be biased, but that guy might be biased. Thanks for the fear-mongering!
So my pal Tara wrote a cookbook called "Almost Meatless" and instead of an annoying book tour with all the pesky luxury hotels and messy paperwork, their publisher is sponsoring a "Virtual Potluck" to promote the book. That means a bunch of bloggers are each cooking a recipe from the book, and posting about it today. In return we get a free copy of the book, so certain bloggers in the group can stop repeatedly checking it out from the Multnomah County Free Library (we know who we are). No strings were attached - i.e. we're allowed to slam the recipe if it sucks, etc.
I jumped at the chance, mostly for the opportunity to nerd out hardcore on sous-vide without ODing on meat. In the book, Tara and Joy recommend braising a big-ass pork shoulder when you have a little free time, and then freezing portions for later use in a variety of recipes. I'd been looking for an excuse to mess around with pork sous-vide, and although Almost Meatless isn't a sous-vide book, Tara was down with me adapting it. We agreed that I'd make the Posole Burritos with Escabeche Slaw using sous-vide pork shoulder. Posole (or pozole) is a Mexican hominy stew often made with pork. Escabeche is traditionally fish cured/pickled with vegetables and acidic ingredients, but in keeping with the less-meat theme, this slaw is vegetables only. It was an easy recipe to make, and a very substantial meal despite having "only" 2 ounces of meat per serving. My family dug it like a shovel.
Here's how it went down. I bought a big-ass (5.2-pound) pork shoulder (on sale!):
I thought about cooking the whole thing in one chunk, but I was worried about getting even heating in the water bath. Also, splitting it in two would let me experiment with different cooking times and temps, so, booya:
The fat strata on top look awesome - almost like pork belly. The pork shoulder recipe from the book calls for a simple braise with salt, pepper, garlic, and chicken or ham stock. I decided to play it pretty straight. I poked holes and jammed them full of garlic pieces, as instructed:
I generously salted and peppered the two halves:
I skipped the searing step since I wasn't doing a traditional braise -- not a huge tragedy because the cooked pork is sauteed before going in the stew, so I can still get my sizzle on. I also decided to skip the chicken/ham stock because liquid in the bag makes it harder to seal, and it would essentially be cooking in its own pork stock anyway. Before I sealed the bags though I couldn't resist one small embellishment, a couple of tablespoons of rendered bacon fat I had in the fridge:
Everything went into two Food Saver bags for sealing. I got a decent seal without too many air pockets (always a challenge with the Food Saver):
My first real challenge was picking the cooking temperature. Tom Keller (in Under Pressure) specifies 180F for cured pork belly, but temps in the 150s for baby pork shoulder. My shoulder wasn't cured and wasn't as fatty as belly, so I let it go overnight (12 hours) at 155 using my (ugly) backup temperature controller (it has a more robust temperature probe - I am afraid to use my pretty controller above the 130s ever since I had a probe failure):
(If you find a woman that puts up with all this shit being in the kitchen, marry her)
I was a little worried the next morning that the pork had dried out because there was a significant amount of liquid in the bag, so I pulled it at 12 hours and started the other half at 144F. It turns out I had nothing to worry about -- fatty cuts of pork can apparently give up a lot of juice and still be fine.
That afternoon I prepped for the burrito recipe, starting with the slaw:
I "toasted" (burned) a dried pasilla and guajillo chile:
The recipe calls for one or the other but what can I say, I am an over-achiever. I definitely burned these (they ended up blacker than shown) and would use lower heat next time. I was able to fish them out of the stew before serving so nobody got a mouthful of bitter charcoal.
The stew of tomatillos, hominy, onion, and tomatoes looked and tasted great:
Next, the moment of truth -- I opened the first bag and removed the shoulder roast. Despite the lost liquid, it kicked ass. There was still plenty of moisture in the meat, and unlike a true braise it still had a pink color and slightly firm texture:
The texture is similar to a thick pork chop cooked medium, but with all the flavor of braised pork belly. Maybe it's what pork chops tasted like back in the day before modern pigs were bred to be leaner. (Did that really happen? It screams Urban Legend or at least Incomplete Story). The garlic and bacon flavors are definitely present, although they are probably lost in the larger flavor party of the posole.
Relieved, I measured out 8 ounces of pork, cut it into big (3/4") cubes, seasoned it per the recipe (cumin, coriander, ancho), sauteed it very briefly, and added it to the stew. I didn't want to overcook my carefully-done pork, so gave the posole a stir and served it immediately. The family went to work building burros:
It's always more fun when you get to make your own, right?:
The posole burrito is a very successful dish. The stew is tangy from the tomatillos and tomatoes, which balances the richness of the pork and hominy (you heard me - hominy is downright meaty, at least in this dish). The slaw and cilantro are bright and crisp and keep the texture interesting. The colors are great too -- red stew with yellow hominy, green cilantro, and purple slaw. I cut mine open to enjoy the show (briefly):
Yum-donkulous. Thanks to Tara for including little ol' me with a bunch of bigtime bloggers!
A recent Instructables article demonstrates beef ribs cooked for 48 hours at 135F/57C.
(photo from Instructables)
I prefer to do mine at 131F for 72 hours (I will post on that eventually), but these look pretty awesome.
On Chadzilla's blog I first read about the idea of cooking vegetables (potatoes, in that case) at 182F/83C in order to dissolve the starch but not the pectin. I checked Keller and he is in the same range for potatoes - 185F/85C.
I decided to mess around with beets and radishes to see how they behave at and near these temperatures. I prepared three bags, and filled each with large diced beets & halved radishes, along with canola oil and salt. (I've found that water (and water based liquids like stock) tend to waterlog firm starchy vegetables when cooked sous-vide.) I labeled the bags 170F, 182F and 192F:
(There's also some diced daikon in there but I can't remember what happened to it). I cooked them for 2 hours each (in my Auberins/Sanyo rice cooker rig) at their labeled temperatures. The oil stayed clear, but enough water leaked out of the vegetables to transfer lots of beet dye to the radishes:
(This is a different bag than the 192F bag shown above - the vegetables didn't fight and rearrange themselves during cooking). So obviously don't cook beets with anything else unless you want them dyed red . . . (I didn't mind for this project).
On to the results:
BEETS - Despite all the beet color in the bag, the beets didn't appear "cooked". There was a nice progression of textures and the different temps, and none were unpleasant. 170F beets are very firm with a hit of crunch, like an al-dente (underdone) potato. 182F beets were firm but yielding - definitely my favorite. 192F beets were noticeably softer but not mushy or overdone. However, something fundamental changed in the structure because the beets were very salty -- the salt had penetrated throughout the beet. Maybe this was from pectin breakdown? The 170F and 182F beets were nicely seasoned. 182F = the winner.
RADISHES - It was clear that the radishes had been cooked, as most of the color leeched out of the skin (and was replaced by deep red beet color in some cases). 170F radishes were the best, firm but no raw crunch, and nicely seasoned. 182F radishes were okay, but some are too soft. 192F radishes were too soft (mushy) and VERY salty similar to the 192F beets. 170F = the winner, but I would like to play around some more in the 170-180F range (although I'm not sure my rig is precise enough to break that down too finely).
(photo via imagesme.net)
Fun story on Eater from Corton's Restaurant Director Arleene Oconitrillo:
It's not clear whether this was a private jet or a commercial flight, but I guess it kinda had to be a private jet. Hmmm, maybe I could be a co-pilot/chef . . .
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