I have been using my Sous Vide several times a week for a. couple years now. I love that I can cook from frozen. As a single dad with teenage boys to feed, I can grab a bag of chicken, pork, or beef right out of the freezer and set it to cook it for a few hours. I use a few different rubs and a few marinades in the vacuum bag. The important thing is to watch the salt. It’s VERY easy to over-salt the food when it’s cooking in its own juices.
My par excellence is a 3" thick tomahawk ribeye. Sous vide for 2 hours to medium rare, then into an ice bath and kept cold overnight. Then smoke it back up to medium rare temp and sear it on my Blackstone as hot as it gets. It was awesome if I do say so myself.
I have it in my mind that the sous vide allowed for the medium rare texture throughout the cut, with far less time on the smoker to bring it back up to temp. Only problem was that I didn’t have any bags large enough for the entire rib as included from the butcher.
Tried shrimp this evening; 15 minutes at 135 degrees.
Probably could have gone a little longer however, I finished them off on the stove with some butter and they were delicious!! Seasoning was just just garlic and herb.
The last couple of chicken breasts that we’ve done have come out a little strange compared the first few. They’re a weird combination of stringy and moist. When you bite them they’re weirdly tough, but still super juicy, which is odd. They also don’t slice cleanly and instead just kinda separated into stringy pieces. We’ve tried 62 degC and 62.5 degC for 2 hours which is pretty much what we did for the first ones.
It was worse for the lemon/thyme ones than the maple/soy ones but still noticeable in both.
So far the theory is that the 2 hours the first time may have been a bit short due to impatience and then later a bit longer due to being more organized, so could have gone from 1:45 to 2:15-2:30 instead. The other thing is that we vacuum packed them and left them sitting in the fridge for 4-5 days which may have done something.
I will need to double check mine but I found the same thing, turns out I like well done chicken. That texture was odd to me until I get it into the well done range.
Only takes 9 minutes to pasteurize chicken at 63 degC internal temperature. I’m pretty sure 2 hours and that temp has use well sorted!
Was just reading about sous vide chicken breast sometimes coming out stringy. Turns out it might be due to ‘woody chicken’, which is apparently a huge thing that I had never even remotely heard of. Apparently it’s a result of accelerated growth and poor living conditions causing a long term stress/inflammatory response and basically making the chicken breast a significant portion of scar tissue. Urgh. Apparently it’s only really noticeable in the breast meat and is somewhere in the region of 5-30% of the US market, depending on state etc. Yikes.
Ours were a decent premium free-range brand but time to try a different one, just in case. Things got a little weird here because our usual free-range brand is all but impossible to buy because 100% of their production goes to supplying Costco. No problem providing I want to buy a small genocide’s worth of chicken breast in one go…
My sister raises chickens in her back yard up in Basalt (near Aspen, up in the Colorado high country). Eggs are amazing and stay fresh a long time, chicken is a whole different experience from factory ‘farm’ chicken. Which is to say horrible living conditions, horrible meat.
I hadn’t heard of “woody chicken” but believe this to be a thing.
Update on the Ribs…
They turned out great! We did run into a snag with keeping a check on the water level (getting too low) which increased the cook time. I had to pull them early from the bath and finish them for an hour in the oven at 350. But they still turned out delicious.
Served with corn bread, green beans and shells and cheese. Yum!
