Sous veni, sous vide, sous vizzle

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Goons with Spoons > Sous veni, sous vide, sous vizzle

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Ultimate Mango posted:

Any reason why a whole brisket would be unsafe to sous vide? I know that very thick cuts will not hear to core safely, but I figure a brisket is thin enough to not be a problem.

I am actually doing this for tamales. I am thinking of doing the chile sauce first and putting a little in the bag with the meat. Last year I smoked the brisket for tamales and they were great and I think sous vide will be even better.

It isn't unsafe in principle to put a brisket in the puddle machine. You probably only want to smoke the flat of a trimmed brisket. The fat cap would probably just come out gross and it's the least well-behaved part of most briskets (in terms of geometry) anyway.

The downside of doing a brisket sous vide as opposed to smoking is that you get neither a smoke ring nor bark. If you just want a bunch of beef to shred that's probably not a big deal. But it's worth pointing out that it doesn't really produce a similar result.

Some people are happy adding liquid smoke or the equivalent to try to replicate the flavour of smoked meat. I'm not a fan of this, but your mileage may vary. You can also smoke a brisket for the first couple hours and then finish it in the puddle machine---smoke ring formation only happens before the meat hits around 140 F/60 C so if you put a probe in the surface and pull the brisked when the first quarter inch/cm or so hits temperature you'll get all the smoke ring you'd have gotten if you'd done the whole thing in the smoker.

Bark formation, however, is something that needs a lot of time in a fairly dry environment to get all those proteins to polymerise. I don't know any way of faking/expediting the process.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2014 03:51

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 19:29

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Chemmy posted:

I get niman ranch pork rib chops and vizzle at 135 for an hour or so before searing hard like a steak.

That's basically what I do for random, not tarted up (stuffed or whatever) pork chops.

In other news, my cheapass Rival sealer went tits up. Vacuum pump is still working fine, but the heating element isn't heating up at all. According to my amazon history, I bought it a little over four years ago.

Just got another one. The low end model (or at least the cheapest one you can get from amazon) is different today. It's a little smaller all the way around. The vacuum pump seems stronger---evacuates a bag much faster. That's theoretically an improvement, but somewhat counterintuitively I prefer the weaker pump, because it makes it easier to bag up eggs, sauces, and other wet poo poo. The heating element also seems to take less time to seal. Overall the build quality seems a little better all the way around.

Just throwing that out there because I've spoken favourably about the US$30 Rival sealers before. I can definitely deal with getting four years of continuous (several times a week) use out of a US$30 kitchen appliance (it's nothing compared to what I've spent on rolls of bags in the same time), but YMMV.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2014 04:26

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Jeoh posted:

Is making black garlic sous vide a thing? I figure it'd keep my house from smelling like garlic for weeks. And the bacteria should die off after 2 weeks of 50C, right?

How did black garlic suddenly enter the public consciousness? I'm actually curious. It's not like it was exactly a secret or obscure or whatever, but it seems like it's suddenly getting a lot more play lately.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2014 01:38

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Steve Yun posted:

I think I posted about it a few times in GWS, is it popping up elsewhere?

Seems like. And I don't think it's just me:

# ¿ Dec 23, 2014 05:41

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Tres Burritos posted:

I had to look it up since I had no idea what you nerds were talking about :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_garlic_%28food%29

wikipedia posted:
According to Korean Scott Kim he developed black garlic in 2004 and created a distribution company named Black Garlic, which distributes in the US, and is based in Hayward, California.[13]

I must've been hallucinating all those bowls of mayu ramen I ate decades before 2004.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2014 23:42

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Phanatic posted:

What are your favorite things to do with boneless skinless chicken breasts?

Scaloppine/piccata, although that's not really something you'd do with a puddle machine. In terms of showcasing what you can accomplish by doing them sous vide, just doing a couple chicken breasts rare, whipping up some pressure cooker stock, making gravy, and then doing something like a traditional roast chicken presentation only with the chicken rare is a pretty good crowd pleaser. Assuming your crowd doesn't freak the gently caress out just because the bird isn't dead white or something.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2014 23:33

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Cockmaster posted:

The main concern I'd have with that one is that there's no moist/dry setting or low-speed vacuum (as far as I can see), which sounds like it may be a problem with certain recipes. Plus there's no roll storage, which could be a turn-off if you like to minimize clutter in your kitchen.

Is internal storage really a thing? My dinky little Rival sealer is smaller than one 50' roll, much less the one I'm using and the spare I always have on hand because gently caress getting half way through bagging a bunch of poo poo to discover you've just run out.

Cockmaster posted:

Would there be anything particularly unwise with finding a good deal on a used Foodsaver on eBay?

The thing that's going to break on a vac sealer is the pump (well, and maybe the gaskets, but that poo poo's easy to fix) and it's going to break eventually. I wouldn't roll the dice on a used one because I don't think the price could be low enough to justify the unknown but unavoidably decreased service life.

But that's just me. I also can't really see the argument for anything but the cheapest `it works' vac sealer until you start talking about chamber vacs. At least not if you're buying one just to use with a puddle machine.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2015 04:49

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Mikey Purp posted:

I think a lot of the discrepancies have to do with sous vide being a relatively new cooking method in the realm of the amateur chef. You see a lot of people experimenting and while there are definitely some leaders in the field (Doug Baldwin, Nathan Myrvold, Kenji Alt-Lopez), there's also a lot of static of different people of wildly varying expertise either knowingly or unknowingly trying new things.

Naaaaah. I mean there's some of this, sure. But despite what anyone might have told you, even when you're cooking in a puddle machine you're still just cooking and when you're cooking you're dealing with personal preferences and individual variations in ingredients more than you're solving an equation or doing a controlled experiment. Follow a recipe to the letter and you're loving up, because the recipe can't tell you about the poo poo that's sitting on your cutting board versus every other portion of what is nominally the same poo poo, and it can't tell you how you're feeling about it right then. This is even true about poo poo like battery farmed eggs, which are about as close to an analytically solved problem in sous vide cooking, where you're still just using a rule of thumb for what is inherently a stochastic process involving a shitload of different proteins that individually behave with perfect predictability but which in an actual egg are something you can at best just statistically model.

This kind of poo poo has always been true and it's something everyone's more or less aware of, but with more modernist or molecularist or whatever the gently caress poo poo getting into the mainstream there's this tendency to believe cooking has suddenly become all lol science all caps exclamation point. And that kinda leads to this expectation that every dish can be reduced to a beep boop formula that always produces beep boop identical results. But that's never going to be true until you have identical cooks, identical ingredients, and ideal spherical people eating. And gently caress that.

# ¿ Jan 15, 2015 02:52

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Phanatic posted:

FWIW, I just tried short ribs. According to the waiter at Ma Peche, where I've had the best ones I've ever tasted, they do them there at 143F for 36 hours.

He's a liar. Either they did them at a higher temp or for a longer cook because these came out like steak. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I was hoping to get to the fork-tender succulence of the ones as the restaurant.

M� P�che sources better beef than you did.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2015 00:12

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Steve Yun posted:

Yeahhhh costco's boneless short ribs aren't really rib.

Like I said, I don't trust anything that isn't bone-in anymore at a regular grocery

Keep in mind that a bone isn't a guarantee. In the US the chuck primal is the shoulder back to and including the 5th rib.

The rib subprimal cuts off the chuck are usually called something like chuck ribs or country-style ribs. Or at least that's what I remember usually seeing them marked as---there's no universally accepted nomenclature for subprimal cuts. But I assume anyone willing to mark chuck as short ribs would be willing to mislabel (or at least misleadingly label) chuck ribs as well.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2015 02:11

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Ola posted:

The easiest thing is to try hotter temp and see if you still like the yolk, but since the whites and yolk set at different temps you might want to try preboiling for a minute before vizzling. I don't think more time helps it set firmer.

It will unless you're way the gently caress off with the temperature.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2015 23:23

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Ola posted:

What's the right temp/time? I'd like to perfect my sous vide egg, in the past I've only ever gotten nice yolks.

Depends on the egg and how you want it to come out. What I'm saying is that for whatever temperature you're using, the longer you leave it in the firmer the egg will be (unless you're running your puddle machine too cold to cook an egg at all).

You know how if you're cooking something in the oven you're aiming at one target internal temperature but when you're cooking in a puddle machine you end up looking for a much lower number? That's because the number you generally use for oven cooking is the one that gets you, in principle, an instantaneous 6.5log₁₀ (or whatever) reduction of whatever pathogens you're worried about. And when you're doing it in the puddle machine you're getting the same reduction from a lower temperature but over a longer time. And what that's telling you is that at your sous vide temperature at any given moment you might have just killed a random individual pathogen that might be in the food, but the chances are small enough that you have to keep rolling those dice for a couple hours until you're confident that all of those pathogens (or all but one in 10^6.5 of them) have crapped out.

When you're looking at something like the texture of a vizzled egg you're looking at basically the same game, only with a couple of particular bonds in some proteins in the white or yolk. So any temperature that will denature those proteins at all will, mumble mumble some caveats you really don't give a poo poo about in the kitchen, eventually denature enough of them to set the eggs however the gently caress you want if you give it enough time.

Looked at a slightly different way: you can still overcook poo poo in the puddle machine, it's just that at the kinds of temperatures you're usually using in a water bath the window for correct/desired doneness is wide as hell because the processes you care about are going slower than Christmas compared to `conventional' cooking.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 13:58

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Mr Executive posted:

Is it worth the effort to sous vide shrimp?

Most shellfish come out quite well butter poached, which is what you get if you throw a shitload of butter in the bag before you throw it in the puddle machine.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2015 23:25

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Mr Executive posted:

I just tried it and, although good, I don't think it was really worth the extra effort. I threw the shrimp in a bag with some butter, lemon zest and a little garlic salt. Vizzled for 30 minutes at 140. When it was done, I tossed the bag juice (butter) with fettuccine, sauteed eggplant, lemon juice, lemon zest, and parmesan. Then I added the shrimp and ate. Like I said, it was good, but I don't think it was very distinguishable from normal sauteed shrimp.

Yeah, the main advantage you get out of doing shellfish in the puddle machine is that it's falling-off-a-log easy and consistent. But you're generally not going to get a wildly different texture out of it (unless you're used to overcooked shellfish) because you generally want the same level of doneness that you'd be going for in a `conventional' cook.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2015 03:53

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Bob_McBob posted:

I have a Demi and several ICs, and I actually think the Demi would be preferable for many people simply because it's a compact self-contained appliance.

It also has no moving parts. Several people have pointed out that it isn't a circulator as if that's a negative. It is not. If anyone wants to come up with an actual real world situation where the difference in performance is relevant I'd love to hear it.

From an engineering standpoint I think the existing crop of ICs are probably ICs only because they're low-end copies of ICs used in a laboratory environment (where the difference in performance of an IC and something heating via liquid convection is relevant, and where the liquid is not necessarily water). For home cooking you'd probably be better off, from a maintenance standpoint, getting rid of the pump entirely and using a larger heating element (like an aquarium heater).

# ¿ May 14, 2015 22:20

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Fortunately my soul isn't stainless.

# ¿ May 15, 2015 07:22

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Mr. Wookums posted:

Nestle also has lead and MSG in MSG free noodles sooo they're sorta the worst company ever.

Crapping out on process controls is crapping out on process controls and I'm not going to downplay that, but lo loving l at MSG-free noodles.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2015 15:49

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Argyle posted:

Huh. Mine were brown and well-done all the way through, right out of the water.

I hope it's not my Anova. I even double-checked the water temp with a second thermometer to confirm that 135 = 135.

If you actually did them at 135 F they weren't well done; colour just isn't a good indication of doneness, particularly with something like ground meat. In very simple terms, the more surface area you have, the darker/greyer the meat will end up when cooked to any given temperature.

Basically when you see grey or brown meat what you're looking at is myoglobin that's denatured and formed one of a couple different compounds, depending on what the iron in the myoglobin happened to bind with. What the iron was bound to before the myoglobin was denatured is one of the factors that determines what happens when it does denature, and it also influences how likely it is to denature at any given temperature. Oxymyoglobin, which is the pinkish colour of the surface of raw meat in air, will (all else being equal) denature into hemichrome (which is the greyish colour you probably associate with well-done meat) at a lower temperature than deoxymyoglobin, which is the more purplish or bluish colour you see in the interior of meat. Since ground meat is nearly all surface, nearly all of the iron in the myoglobin will be in the form of oxymyoglobin, and so will turn greyish sooner than meat a cm inside e.g. a steak (where the myoglobin will mostly be in the form of deoxymyoglobin) even if the two are at exactly the same temperature and doneness.

So tl;dr: don't rely on colour to judge doneness.

If your burgers were coming out too tough at 135, chances are it was either just poo poo ground beef or it was just plain too lean. You can do a lot with lovely ground beef and very lean ground beef, but a burger, even done in a puddle machine, really isn't one of them.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 08:26

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Jarmak posted:

This sounds dumb as hell, vapor pressure inside a crimped tinfoil cover will do way more to slow evaporation then ping pong balls floating on the top.

That's not what vapour pressure means. Vapour pressure is a function of temperature. If what you're trying to say is that you think a foil cover will allow the pressure over the surface of the water to rise and [something], no. You can't make a pressure cooker by tenting foil over a cambro.

Foil (or a lid) will not affect evaporation at all per se---you're just relying on the lid to allow the water vapour to condense and drip back down into the container. Putting ping pong balls (or anything else) in the water will be less effective as a condenser than foil, but unlike foil it will actually change the rate of evaporation in the first place: the rate of evaporation is directly proportional to the surface area of the water. Ideal space packing of uniform circles on a flat plane is around 91% (ideal hexagonal packing) and absolute worst case (each circle inscribed on a square in a uniform grid) is around 75%, so the balls are going to reduce the amount of evaporative loss by about that much.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 16:48

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Jose posted:

I'm sure someone could manage to use ping pong balls to burn their kitchen down despite being in water

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj0GTJnR_HI

A `real' ping pong ball is celluloid, which is highly flammable. Almost everyone using them in a water bath is buying the cheapass plastic `practice' ping pong balls, which are a lot less combustible, even out of water.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 17:10

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

The Midniter posted:

That was MUCH more entertaining than I expected.

The industrial process that used to be used to produce celluloid resulted in a slightly acidic residue in the final product. This caused the celluloid to slowly degrade over time. One of the ways this manifested itself was increased shock sensitivity, which would sometimes result in ping pong balls spontaneously igniting when struck.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 17:18

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Phanatic posted:

Sure it will, because it's increasing the humidity of the volume of air over the water.

Yeah, but this will only affect evaporation in proportion to the delta between the mass of water vapour trapped under the cover and the corresponding mass of water in the same volume of air over the uncovered surface. Even if we assume that the difference is between some elevated RH under the cover and ambient RH, that's not going get you anywhere near a 80-odd percent change in the rate of evaporation. And in an actual s-v setup the difference in RH over a tented and non-tented water bath is going to be even smaller (because even uncovered the RH over the surface of the water isn't going to be the ambient RH unless it's being actively ventilated or something).

# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 17:49

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Number 1 Sexy Dad posted:

Household metal foils will not really reflect wavelengths of thermal energy at temperatures that water will reach in your kitchen[...]

Actually aluminium foil has really good reflectance that part of the IR spectrum. But the function of foil tented over a water bath isn't thermal insulation so it's not particularly relevant.

Jarmak posted:

No, vapor pressure is a function of atmospheric pressure versus the hydrogen bonds of the liquid water. Temperature of evaporation is a function of vapor pressure.

No, vapour pressure is the pressure at which the vapour is in equilibrium with the material's condensed phase, and is a function of temperature. There is no such thing as a temperature of evaporation.

Perhaps the thing you're trying to get at is partial pressure?

# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 18:28

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Jarmak posted:

I wasn't using "temperature of evaporation" as a term of art, I couldn't remember the exact term I was looking for. You're right, it is partially a function of temperature, I was forgetting exactly how its measured, but its also a function of the inter-molecular forces which govern a given substance, which in the case of water is hydrogen bonds.

No, vapour pressure is a function of temperature because of intermolecular forces. They're not a separate variable.

Jarmak posted:

What I should have said was that the atmospheric pressure from being covered will be far above the vapor pressure.

The atmospheric pressure is not appreciably different as a result of a foil tent. A foil tent will not turn your cambro into a pressure cooker. And of course the vapour pressure will be below atmospheric pressure. The condition where the vapour pressure equals atmospheric pressure is boiling. Which is not what we're talking about. Or at least it's not what I'm talking about. I'm not entirely sure I know what you're talking about and I have a sneaking suspicion you don't either.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2015 02:55

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Steve Yun posted:

You should cover the water with a thin layer of water to keep the water from evaporating

You joke, but that's almost exactly what happens naturally and why evaporation isn't much of an issue for most s-v setups. The boundary layer that regulates the rate of evaporation is actually air saturated with water vapour, but that's pretty much what happens.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2015 07:28

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Jarmak posted:

Holy poo poo guy, evaporation occurs when individual molecules become sufficiently energetic to escape the IM of the other molecules, thats why ln(P2/P1)=(ΔHvap/R)*(1T1−1T2). You don't need a loving pressure cooker to achieve pressures and gas concentrations which significantly slow evaporation at temperatures that are nearly half of the boiling point. Doing some really rough math in my head that should be something like 1/5 of the vapor pressure at 140 (which would mean its ~1/5 atm).

Hey, you're the one that said it: `What I should have said was that the atmospheric pressure from being covered will be far above the vapor pressure'. There is no change in atmospheric pressure from being covered. If instead of objecting to my comments to that effect instead you intended to say...well, I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say. It all looks more or less like aggressive backpedaling from your original comment:

Jarmak posted:

This sounds dumb as hell, vapor pressure inside a crimped tinfoil cover will do way more to slow evaporation then ping pong balls floating on the top.

...which I replied to in part by pointing out that that's not what `vapour pressure' means. I guess if what you meant to say over the course of the past page is `yeah, that's not what vapour pressure means, I meant to say the partial pressure of the water vapour' then that's fine.

I mean it's still wrong, but at least then it wouldn't be the not-even-wrong the original statement was.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2015 23:18

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

MasterFugu posted:

It wouldn't take that much time to thaw in a waterbath(more so if you have a circulating SV setup), though the usefulness of doing this would depend on the amount of time between steps 2 and 3, i.e. not very useful if it's all being done the same day.

Heat/chill/re-heat can also be useful if you're working around a variable serving time---don't know when guests will be arriving, everything's waiting on some labour-intensive kitchen task, whatever. Or if you've got more than one thing you want to do s-v (steak & eggs, say).

It's not really a time-saving thing so much as a time management thing---get it done ahead of time so it's one less thing to worry about later.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2015 23:36

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Captain Bravo posted:

So this popped up in my facebook feed today, and seemed pretty relevant to the discussion at hand. In 2016, this company is planning to release a $400 hands-off sous vide machine. It chills the water inside it, so you pre-load it with the food you want, and use an app to tell it when to start heating the water and preparing the food. Honestly, I think it looks pretty neat, and it would be awesome to just toss some food into it before I go to work, and have it ready to eat by the time I come home, what do ya'll think?

Seems like paying between two to four times as much as competing sous vide products just to automate the simplest goddamn part of the entire process isn't much of a pitch. And you're adding in additional points of failure (refrigeration!) which, all else being equal, are going to reduce the service life of your more-expensive appliance relative to a similar device without them.

I mean I'm totally not the target market for this thing (Michael Pollan endorsement lol) but it like they're trying to be the breadmaker of the sous vide market.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2015 10:58

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Jarmak posted:

Anyone got a source for the " acid makes pasteurization take twice as long?" It seems to run directly counter to everything I do with fermented charcuterie where acid means safe.

Pretty much any food science text will cover it, but here's an article on PubMed if you're actually skeptical.

The behaviour is due to a mechanism called acid tolerance response (the search term you want if you're looking for one) or ATR in bacteria. The simple version is that any time a bacteria is exposed to an environmental shock it'll respond by trying to produce proteins that will enhance its survivability. If the shock is large enough (like if you're dumping the typical foodborne pathogen into distilled vinegar) it'll just kill the bacteria outright. But in something like a marinade you're typically not lowering the pH throughout the dish enough to kill all the bacteria. The surviving bacteria produce ATR proteins, and as a result are more resistant to other environmental stresses (like heat).

On the other hand when you ferment something, you usually start out by making sure conditions favour proliferation of the fermentation bacteria---making the environment artificially saline, adding a culture of fermentation bacteria, or using something with a high natural prevalence of the bacteria you want (like cabbage). So initially you're just relying on the good bacteria to outcompete the bad bacteria. Once they get going they're eating sugar and making GBS threads acid---that's what makes them fermentation bacteria. Initially the pH isn't low enough to retard bacterial growth, but that's okay because all the bacteria are your guys. Eventually the acidity will retard and stop the activity of the fermentation bacteria, but then you're reasonably confident that the pH is low enough to prevent other bad poo poo from getting a foothold---because you know that the pH is low enough to gently caress up your fermentation bacteria.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2015 02:33

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

nuru posted:

I was thinking of pre-cooking some cut up chicken breast pieces before breading and frying them in a pan. Should I do less than the normal cooking temperature due to the added heat from the frying step, or is it fast enough that it doesn't really matter?

Take the bag out of the water bath and throw it in the fridge if you're worried about it. Whether or not you really need to depends on how hot your oil is and what you're going for with the breading. If you're just throwing it in lava hot oil for under a minute I wouldn't bother loving with it any more than I would if you were just planning on searing it off.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2015 01:31

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Random Hero posted:

So I bought some flank, skirt and flat iron steak today that I plan on sous vide'ing tomorrow or Saturday at my family's house and I'd like to prep and vacuum seal them before so I have less to take with me. What seasonings (s+p, herbs, butter, oil) can go in with the steaks up to a day before actually starting the cook? I figure butter and dry herbs are fine, but I'm more concerned with the salt. Any advice here?

Butter's fine. Dry herbs are fine but you don't want them to be in contact with the meat as that will result in flavour spots. Some people don't seem to give a poo poo, but it's easy enough to either arrange the herbs in the bag so they're just off to the side or to make a little open sachet (e.g. out of the vacuum bag material) to put in the bag.

Salt's fine assuming you aren't adding enough to cure the thing. In general you want to either salt immediately before searing or an hour or so (or more) before searing. The former gets you slightly better crust and slightly less of a flavour boost from the salt (that is, not just saltiness, but the general flavour accentuating action). The latter gets you better flavour enhancement. You don't want to salt in the window in between `immediately' and `about an hour' because you'll be giving the salt enough time to draw water out of the meat but not enough time for it to be reabsorbed. I believe Our Lord And Savior Kenji did a blog post about it and I'm sure someone will be along presently to link it.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 00:40

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Jarmak posted:

Butter's no good according to Kenji at least, supposedly it pulls the fat soluble compounds out of the meat and into the butter.

http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/06/food-lab-complete-guide-to-sous-vide-steak.html#addfat

That's probably technically true but irrelevant unless you're doing your steaks the way Keller does lobster---using the butter as the s-v medium and putting the protein directly into it. Because if you're just throwing a couple pats of butter into the bag (like something like the amount you'd use for mounting butter sauce in the pan) there's just not that much fat for poo poo to be soluble into. And in order for it to pick up all those fat-soluble compounds it's got to be getting into the meat. Which means that some portion of it is going to stay in there, and presumably that stuff's going to assist the flavour in the predictable ways.

I mean I'd love to see actual data on it, but this really sounds like too much theory not enough practice.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 01:34

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Chef De Cuisinart posted:

Kenji's right, added fat is bad. If you were to put 1T of butter in a bag with your steak, which is about what you'd use for a pan sauce, you will dilute herby flavor compounds.

Depends on the herbs and how much of them you're using in proportion to the butter/oil.

I mean I wouldn't put butter in with most meats and I really don't `get' trying to use a bag in a water bath for poaching or braising (since poaching and braising work perfectly well for what they do in their `traditional' forms). But if you're trying to argue that oil in the bag is bad you really have to account for the fact that all kinds of poo poo is oil soluble but not water soluble, so in addition to whatever notional dilution you're causing you're also releasing a lot of poo poo that you wouldn't otherwise be. I mean you wouldn't try to bloom spices in water versus oil, would you?

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 02:05

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Jarmak posted:

Yeah that might work if your goal is to make the butter taste better, but it doesn't matter how many compounds from the herbs get dissolved if they all stay trapped in the butter along with the compounds that would have dissolved without it, as well as pulling fat soluble compounds out of the meat.

Also no fat is definitely not penetrating the meat.

The goal of making the butter taste better, if you want to think of it that way, is precisely the same as if you were e.g. mounting a compound butter in the pan. That is, the butter is in contact with the meat and therefore flavoured by it. If you are arguing that this isn't the best way to flavour a piece of meat I have no particular argument, but as near as I can tell that isn't the claim.

Further, you can't have it both ways. If the oil isn't penetrating into the meat then there is no mechanism for it to `pull fat soluble compounds out of the meat'. A solvent can't dissolve poo poo where it ain't. That said, essentially all techniques based on submersion of meat in flavoured liquids (brining, marinading, braising, and so on) are predominantly surface phenomena.

So if your argument is that you're probably better off doing whatever you're going to do with butter while the steak (or whatever) is in the pan rather than in the bag I agree. But that's not what Kenji was saying, and that's not what I was responding to.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 03:29

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Choadmaster posted:

In fairness to Kenji, you're actually arguing against Jarmak's slightly-off paraphrasing. Kenji doesn't say butter pulls flavor from the meat, but that it absorbs the flavors of the herbs and seasonings you put in with the meat, such that you're flavoring the butter (most of which isn't going to make it to anyone's mouth) rather than the meat.

Kenji actually phrases it as a kind of throwaway but his comments include by implication both fat-soluble compounds in the meat as well as any other flavourings added to the bag:

Kenji posted:

Intuitively you may think that adding a flavorful fat like butter or olive oil will in turn help create a more flavorful steak, but in fact it turns out that you achieves the opposite goal: it dilutes flavor. Fat-soluble flavor compounds dissolve in the melted butter or oil and end up going down the drain later. Similarly, flavors extracted from aromatics end up diluted. For best results, place your seasoned steak in a bag with no added fats.

Jarmak says this more strongly, and Chef De Cuisinart's comments were specifically about the favour of herbs added to the bag.

I think the dilution of herb flavour is a non-issue (just add more herbs) and, as I commented in my first response on the subject, I'm sure the dilution of fat-soluble flavour compounds from the meat is something that happens. But it's almost certainly irrelevant (because it's not going to happen much---because it's largely a surface phenomenon and therefore can't possibly affect the overwhelming majority of fat-soluble flavour compounds in the meat), and to whatever extent it is happening, it is necessarily happening simultaneously with the transport of fat-soluble flavour compounds from whatever herbs are there into the meat.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 04:43

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Chef De Cuisinart posted:

It does become an issue of cost in a commercial environment.

Okay. I don't think that has anything to do with either Random Hero's original request (about what is and is not okay to seal up in a bag a day ahead of time before cooking for his family) or Kenji's comments.

Chef De Cuisinart posted:

It isn't a largely surface loss, if you're salting before bagging because osmosis. Bottom line, there's no reason to add fat to your bag, and at least 1 definite reason to not add it.

A couple of things here. First, osmosis is more or less by definition a surface phenomenon because you've got to have a semipermeable membrane for it to happen at all. But that's kinda a side issue since osmosis is effectively irrelevant here. When you put salt on meat and it draws water out that's mostly diffusion at work, not osmosis. There's some small portion of the water that's actually being drawn out from the cells on the very surface of the meat, but that's rounding error compared to the water that's coming e.g. from between the muscle fibres, and none of that is due to osmosis. And effectively all the transport back into the meat is pure diffusion.

But all that diffusion is almost entirely at the surface as well. Ever cured a piece of meat? Observed how you can literally pack a piece of meat in salt and yet it still takes weeks or months to dry out? That's because the diffusion of salt through the meat is that slow. And salt is pretty small and well-behaved so those Na+s and Cl-s get transported about as well and as quickly as anything will. Certainly more quickly than any bigass organosulfur compounds (like you get out of aliums) or god help you diterpenoids (from e.g. rosemary or some of the fat-soluble poo poo in the meat). So no, really, all that diffusion is primarily a surface phenomenon.

And I want to point out, again, that I'm not arguing that you should add butter (or anything else) to the bag when you're putting meat in the puddle machine. Just that people keep throwing out theoretically science-y sounding arguments that contain fundamental errors.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 15:50

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Chef De Cuisinart posted:

I mean yeah, what you're saying makes sense, but you also cure meat in a dry environment, not a wet one. Not to mention that curing happens between 45 and 60F, whereas sous vide is 120-150F. Transfer of fat soluble compounds certainly happens much faster at higher temperatures, infused oils and whatnot. You can even SV some fatback with your aromatics and salt to have a quick 1 day lardo, as opposed to waiting a week.

Yeah---and if you salted a steak like it was lardo and left it on for 24 hours I'm sure you'd get great transport of salt through the meat. But I really don't think that's what Kenji was talking about.

Chef De Cuisinart posted:

Not trying to throw around science-y arguments, this is just literally my experience with cooking, and I'm sure it's all been tested and documented somewhere.

Yeah, transport of poo poo through meat's pretty well explored territory in meat science. That's kinda my point.

And hey, new title, sweet.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 16:36

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Random Hero posted:

So I have done flank for 24hrs and 8hrs, and I definitely preferred the 24hr cook. What is the recommended time on skirt?

A fairly by-the-numbers approach to either skirt or flank is 24 to 48 hours at 131 F/55 C. In general if you're looking at a skirt and a flank off the same primal the skirt will be the tougher cut. But there's enough variability between animals that you'll run into flanks that are tougher than skirts. Point being that if you're after a specific texture there's always going to be an element of just eyeballing it.

What temperature were you using, and was it the same in both the 8 and 24 hour cooks?

# ¿ Jul 25, 2015 03:14

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Jarmak posted:

This is dead wrong, curing takes that long because of the drying process not because of salt transport, which happens incredibly fast. The actual curing process only takes a day to a week to finish depending on the size of the meat, the rest is drying, if it actually took a month for the salt and nitrite to transport you'd be loving dead.

Drying time is certainly a factor, but unless you're talking about a relatively thin cut of meat diffusion of salt will take longer than a day or so at curing temperatures. The process is wildly nonlinear and is dependent on temperature and the molecule being transported, but in any event, the rate of transport drops off fairly rapidly. Here's a graph of salt diffusion distance from a guy who actually did some experiments on the subject (all the journal articles I turned up from a quick search are behind paywalls):

Note that this is for salt in a wet brine, not a rub (as noted in the text).

The reason why food safety isn't an issue is because (assuming you're using a properly-prepared piece of meat from a healthy animal) spoilage is going to happen, just like curing, from the surface in.

Jarmak posted:

Seriously gently caress off with your "I'm going to read a straw man into this four word statement so I can wave my scientific dick around and distract everyone with the fact my advice was wrong". I paraphrased the article from memory and forgot it was the herbs and not the meat that was the issue, the point was don't put butter in the bag. My scientific training may not be as good as yours but its good enough to spot a jackass who's very good a one field or another so thinks he knows everything about everything and uses bluster and jargon to bludgeon people who don't know any better into thinking they know what they're talking about.

Sorry you're taking it that way.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2015 21:13

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 19:29

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Jarmak posted:

24 hours is for something like tasso, tocino, duck breast or sausage, things like brisket or bacon take a week (sometimes 10 days). The longest part of the curing process is the drying, not the salt transport, you don't even hang the stuff until its fulled cured. That link stops at 24 hours so its pretty useless for this discussion, also he's talking about brining, which is a super inefficient method of curing because of equilibrium issues with the solution unless you continuously add more salt (which you know you're supposed to do if you're trying to cure something big with salt in a brine, and he didn't), not to mention you said "packed in salt" which is how I do all of my cured products.

Man, I don't even know what you're trying to argue but if it makes you feel better we can pretend I never uttered those incendiary words, `butter's fine'.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2015 10:48

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Goons with Spoons > Sous veni, sous vide, sous vizzle

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