Back on prime day 2 a-holes talked me into spending money on a Sous Vide. Tonight I used it for the first time to cook some Ribeye’s. While I think they were far from as good as they could have been, they were still real good!
So in light of the Smoking Meat thread, I figured why not start a Sous Vide thread!
I need all the tips and tricks. What’s good, what’s not. Hit me with it all!
FYI the a-holes were @vicious1 and @niget2002 And they aren’t a-holes at all, I’m glad they talked me into getting it!!!
Not just for meat - in home cheese making, it’s a preferred way to achieve/maintain temps via a water bath. Way easier and more accurate than trying to do it on the stove with a double boiler.
I make sous vide in my beer brewing machine! It’s super useful for sous vide, except for the big size… the thermostat is precise, and the mashing pump is great for circulation. I have a Grainfather 30
I’ve found it a mixed bag for beef. Have had an amazing ribeye out of ours, some nice sirloin and some disappointing t-bones.
What we’ve really been loving it for is chicken breast. We wouldn’t typically eat it because it’s hard to cook without becoming dry and stringy. We’ve been making a marinade of 50/50 Maple Syrup/Kikkoman Soy Sauce and putting a few tablespoons in with a single chicken breast and then vacuum sealing it. Keeps for a week in the fridge, but should freeze well, too. 2 hours at 63 degrees C (145 degrees F), pull the chicken breast out and give it a quick sear then remove it from the pan and pour the liquid from the bag into the pan and quickly reduce it over a high heat to make a sauce.
We’ve been having it sliced thinly on rice with stir fried mushrooms/broccoli and some coleslaw with a bit of Kewpie mayonnaise to make a donburi. It’s pretty glorious.
Personally I wouldn’t even bother with the searing but my fiance thinks it’s necessary to be a bit more appetizing. I think I can bring her around to not needing it because the marinade darkens the outside and makes it look less like boiled/poached chicken anyway…
We are trying our first chicken in it tonight. I don’t believe she has any plans of searing it. Hoping it turns out well. I have gotten pretty good at cooking chicken on the BGE and watching it close with a thermometer to keep from over cooking. But this way I don’t have to stand out in the blasting heat to cook on the grill lol.
Will be interested to see how you like it. Are you adding anything in with it?
I haven’t used it for anything other than chicken breast, but in my experience it’s night and day between any other cooking method or this. It’s juicy and tender the whole way through, vs a regular cooking method where you’re always drying out the outer third to get the inside cooked, the result is like an entirely different type of meat or entirely different cut than it is a different cooking method.
We also tried 2 hours at 61C and 62C initially but my fiance didn’t like the texture as much, found it a little too like raw chicken. I liked it a little more but 63C had a much more consistent temperature.
We did another one with lemon juice, lemon zest and thyme that was also tasty but the maple/soy marinade has been the best so far.
She put it in a marinade this morning and vacuum sealed it. Glad we already had the nice vacuum sealer since we will be using it even more for this lol
I’m not sure what marinade she used but I will try to find out and be sure to post the results after dinner lol
Yeah, a chamber one would be much easier for marinades etc. The suction one we have is a bit tricky. Gotta just pulse it until the liquid is almost at the top then seal it a couple of times to make sure it takes. 100% success rate so far with only needing to clean the thing out the first time we tried.
Edit: Picture of the result. Super moist and tender with tons of flavour from the marinade. Quite pleased.
I just use gallon ziplock bags when doing juicy stuff. Throw the meat in, dump in bbq/whatever, then mostly zip the bag and submerge up to the zip, then finish closing the bag. A little air in there won’t hurt.
The reason for why marinating is so great with vacuum is that the air gets sucked out of the pores in the meat and the juice fills up the “empty pockets”. Making the vacuum in a vacuum container is one way to solve it.
@MakerJim That’s 100% a concern, for sure, I’m right there with you on that one. I don’t know how it’s going in the rest of the world but in NZ most supermarket meat comes on plastic trays and shrink wrapped now. I’ve cooked about 1/3 of the things in that. No ‘extra’ waste, but then I got to wondering about what heating does to those plastics.
@barry99705 Yeah, the suggestion of a zip lock bag is one that we’ve used before and that’d make it re-usable at least a couple of times, in theory, too. It’s less waste due to being thinner, for sure, but also lighter and I split a big with a sprig of rosemary which was a disaster. Boiled steak! Hadn’t thought to try it again for stuff that’s less pokey. I’ll do that.
@turbinbjorn I’m not so sure, I should A/B that, actually. I don’t think a chicken breast has a whole lot of empty air in it, but maybe… I was thinking it might actually be worse because it presses the marinade away from the surface of the chicken.
Until the chicken turned out so well I was going to stick to it being just for expensive cuts of meat under the idea that a big chunk of red meat is probably the bigger environmental concern than the plastic its in, so I might as well invest a little more waste in making sure it’s as close to perfect as I can get it.
Now that the chicken is looking like a weekly thing, I’m trying to figure out how to minimize that (cooking 2 at a time and having it over 2 nights, that kinda thing.
So yeah, no good answers for that one, I’m afraid. One thing we do have here is soft-plastic recycling as an option. It’s one of the few things that actually gets recycled, although I think it’s very much a ‘one more use’ type recycling, not a fully circular type of recycling.
I was thinking about playing with this idea. I have a vacuum sealer that I use so that I can buy stuff in bulk and throw it in the freezer. For stuff that I need to take out of the bag and put the rest away (cheese slices, notably) I often cut the bag too big, so that I can cut the seal off, take some out, then re-seal it. This works pretty well for keeping the cheese from drying out or molding. I think this is less wasteful than throwing out food in the long run.
Sometimes I’ll seal marinade in with the meat, but I haven’t tried cooking it that way, which is the point for Sous Vide, isn’t it? I should try it…
Tonight’s dinner was thin cut bone in pork chops. Marinated in Kevin’s Korean BBQ Sauce. Cooked the chops at 140 degrees F. for an hour. Proceed with a light searing.
One thing I’ve read about doing steaks in the Sous Vide is to not cook them too long. It only takes an hour or two to bring the meat up to the correct temp depending on if it’s frozen or not. If you cook it too long, the steak can start to get mushy.
The ribeyes I’ve done so far I’ve done for around 3 hours from frozen. I finish mine in a very hot skillet.
I may try using large ziplock bags and sealing them under water instead of using my vacuum sealer.
As far as me being an a-hole or not… that’s completely up to who you’ve talked to today
And they aren’t a-holes at all, I’m glad they talked me into getting it!!!
