Sous veni, sous vide, sous vizzle

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

You said: "If sous vide would be a food safety issue with large cuts of meat so would low & slow BBQ."

The two situations are too dissimilar to draw any such conclusion. The differ by temperature, time, pH, salinity, which have all been mentioned, and there are other differences that haven't been mentioned (e.g. enzymatic activity).

It is also false that it isn't about surface contamination. It's always about surface contamination because that's where almost all of your risk originates, and contamination that starts out on the surface can end up elsewhere due to handling or cooking.

And your surface contamination problems don't go away at s-v temperatures. They don't even necessarily go away if you submerge the food in boiling water. It depends on the pathogen and its response to the environmental stress--C. jejuni, for example, gets much more heat tolerant after surviving a thermal shock.

spankmeister posted:

Exactly, anyone who's ever put a probe in a piece of meat being smoked knows it takes hours and hours for the center to come up to temperature.

Hours and hours to hit your target temperature, yeah. But internal temp of meat in a 225 smoker'll hit 140 in a couple hours. Here's a random graph from a bbq forum that's conveniently labelled:

That's ~40F to ~140F in a slightly under temp smoker in ~2 hours. Compare that to a s-v time vs thickness chart:

# ¿ Feb 6, 2021 11:16

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 22:48

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

Erwin posted:

Isn't trichinosis the main issue with pork, and found throughout the muscle?

It's one issue, although it's mostly wiped out in commercially-produced pork (although it's been making a bit of a comeback due to small farm pork and wild pork). But all you're worrying about with trichinosis is ever hitting a safe temperature (and holding it for long enough)--it's not something where you're creating a problem if the meat stays in the "danger zone".

With most foodborne pathogens what you're worried about is that the food contains some contamination (e.g. spores of some kind of bacteria that'll make you sick), and that the food will linger in a temperature range between ~40 F and ~140 F for long enough for the spores to germinate, producing a population of active bacteria in the food, that population reproduces producing more bacteria, and eventually when the food is consumed the larger population of the pathogen causes sickness.

Trichinosis is a roundworm, and the thing you're worried about is consuming viable cysts which can then develop into larvae in your GI. You want to hit 165 F for at least 15 seconds to kill them (and/or hit some similar point in a time/temp curve), but if the food loiters just under 165 for awhile you're not going to have T. spiralis (or whatever) roundworms breeding all through your pork butt. So the risk (from trichinosis) doesn't change much, assuming you eventually hit your target temperature.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2021 22:49

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

life is killing me posted:

I mean if you�ve killed the worm(s) already, wouldn�t it even be safe to skip the ice bath and put directly in the fridge since there would be no living roundworms left to propagate/reproduce?

If trichinosis was your only concern that would work, but trichinosis shouldn't be your only concern.

Say you've got some random bacteria on the surface of the meat. You check the time/temp pasteurisation table and hit that number. What does that mean? It means that you've reduced the number of active microorganisms (usually some specific pathogen that's most of concern for the type of meat you're looking up, or sometimes some amalgam of common pathogens) by some specific factor--6.5 log₁₀ or 7 log₁₀ being common, representing a survival of only 1 in ~3M or 1 in 10M (respectively) viable bacteria. This means that, assuming your food wasn't a petri dish swimming with C. whatever in the first place, it's safe to eat now.

But give it another trip through the danger zone and maybe you're going to get that 1 in however many millions that did survive the chance to reproduce and make you sick. Or maybe the specific foodborne pathogen sporulates when it receives an environmental shock, the spores can survive the cooking temperatures, and so you've got no germinated bacteria on the meat but a whole field of bacteria seeds waiting for the opportunity to sprout. Or whatever.

The big punchline is that things like food safety are always stochastic processes--under the hood they're deterministic, but the large-scale behaviour (which is what you really care about) is the net result of millions or billions of individual rolls of the dice. So what you're always trying to do is rig the dice in your favour, and mininimise the number of times they get rolled. Keeping food out of the "danger zone" is one way of doing that.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2021 23:25

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

ColHannibal posted:

There are a few clarifications food safety wise, dropping a frozen hunk of anything into a tepid bath is a bad idea as you are kinda just keeping it at the danger zone.

Nah, you're just adding a couple minutes to the cooking time. Here's the data Baldwin presents:

...versus for fridge temperature:

So for a 25 mm/1" thick slab of animal protein at typical s-v temperature's you're adding ~15 minutes to the cook time.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2021 21:46

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

ColHannibal posted:

So I agree, what falls apart is reheating which is what my comment is directly related to. For rehearing your normally only concerned with temp less cook time.

The time/temperature curve doesn't know or care whether you are heating or reheating.

Edit:

For clarity: you're saying to thaw in the fridge and then reheat in the puddle machine. So the meat's going to spend several hours going from ~0 F to ~40 F, and then if it's e.g. a 1" thick steak it'll spend ~1 1/4 hours going from ~40 F to your target temperature.

If you take the same 1" steak straight out of the freezer at ~0 F and put it in the puddle machine, it'll spend ~30 minutes going from ~0 F to ~40 F, and then precisely the same ~1 1/4 hours going from ~40 F to the target temperature that it would using your method.

Literally the only difference is the amount of time the meat spends going from freezer to fridge temperatures.

SubG fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Feb 21, 2021

# ¿ Feb 21, 2021 01:02

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

Skyarb posted:

Been trying to do sous vide hollandaise for eggs benedict, but it never turns out right. I just tried anovas recipe and my sauce just always seems to break. Does anyone have any suggestions? I know it'll come out lumpy but even after immersion blending it comes out thin and broken and not at all thick like how I imagine hollandaise.

Is it breaking or is it just thin? If it's runny but not broken then it could just be the eggs are too old. If you get the same result from immersion blender mayo (1 cup oil, 1 egg, 1 Tbsp of mustard if that's how you roll), that's it.

If that's not it, try boiling some water and adding like a Tbsp and whisking like a motherfuck/hit it with the blender. If that fixes it then your emulsion was either too cool or your eggs were low on lecithin.

Comedy molecular/modernist option: buy a bag of lecithin powder and add a pinch to see if that helps.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2021 06:39

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

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

My concern is that the water is being heated during the thawing process, and if the water bath is large enough that could mean a substantial amount of time in the danger zone.

I think you mean if the protein is large enough. Because the larger the water bath, the less the temperature will be lowered by dropping a meat ice cube in it. But unless you're really overcrowding your puddle or your puddle machine has a busted heater it's not really something you need to worry about.

Baldwin gives tables for the time to get meat up to temperature from fridge temperature and from frozen, for various shapes and thicknesses of meat. For a 25mm/1" slab the difference is ~half an hour, for a cylinder it's ~15 minutes. That is, to within rounding error (and with a couple asterisks about the size and shape), the length of time it takes for the meat to get from freezer temperature to fridge temperature. The time spend in the danger zone will be roughly the same.

Why? Those tables are to get the meat to within 1 F/0.5 C of the water temperature, and they're relatively independent of the water temperature. And why is that? Because the rate of change of the meat temperature is proportional to the temperature difference. So the curve ends up looking pretty much the same over large temperature ranges. Baldwin says that the tables are valid for the range between 110 F/ 45C and 175 F/80 C.

What are you cooking your chicken parts to? Like somewhere between 140 and 160, depending on the part of the bird and your personal preferences on poultry texture. If you're putting a couple chicken breasts in your puddle machine and it's dropping from 140 to below 110 holy poo poo get a bigger water bath because you're doing it wrong. If you're not doing it wrong and you're using a remotely sane amount of water for the food you're trying to cook, not even an issue.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2021 22:17

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

I have an old SVS that I've been using on average a couple times a week for over a decade and the only time it's hosed up is when the GFCI on the outlet it was plugged into tripped.

# ¿ May 27, 2021 21:00

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

swickles posted:

I had some ground beef vac sealed in the freezer and pulled it out. Can I just toss it in the bath and cook it whole, then shape it into burgers, or cut it (its roughly cylindrical in shape) and sear it that way, or should I u seal it, for patties and re-seal? I really don't want to do the latter because it requires a lot of digging things out of storage, to the point I will just defrost and cook on stove top if sous videing wont work.

Cooking ground beef and then trying to form it into burgers is a terrible idea that won't work and you should absolutely give it a try and report back because I'm curious about just how bad it would go.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2021 21:45

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

Entropic posted:

Rare poultry will always look gross to me I don�t care how supposedly safe it is when prepared correctly.

That's duck. If you cook duck until it looks like cooked chicken you've overcooked it.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2021 22:27

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

Hasselblad posted:

Ugh, sous vide thighs and then microwaving them? Really hoping this is a weird attempt to troll.
In case it is not, for all that is good, please do not ruin perfectly good thighs. Thighs really suck when puddled, moreso puddled then microwaved.

Forget all that if you like your thighs a rubbery mess.

If you're doing chicken thighs s-v and they're coming out rubbery you're probably using too low a temperature. From a food safety standpoint you could do 'em at 55 C or whatever like you would some other slab of protein, but most people are going to prefer the texture/consistency somewhere around 70 C for ~an hour or so, plus or minus depending on preference.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2021 15:57

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

Hasselblad posted:

I cannot think of a single reason to SV a thigh (and then microwaving them for god's sake). Sorry, it just makes them worse than simply cooking them on high heat.

Cook them however the hell you want, I don't care. You just said that they were coming out of the puddle machine rubbery. That almost certainly means you were using too low a temperature.

Thighs are pretty forgiving for chicken meat so yeah you can cook them in any number of ways other than s-v and they'll come out fine. But it isn't like there's some magic to cooking chicken thighs less precisely or whatever. If you're using an appropriate time and temperature doing thighs s-v gets you what cooking s-v generally gets you--consistency and a high degree of control over the final product. Whether or not you think that's worth the additional time/setup/whatever is up to you. But if you're getting rubbery chicken thighs, that's not because you're doing them s-v, it's because you're using the wrong time, the wrong temperature, or both.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2021 17:06

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

Most of the poo poo I do s-v is basic slab-of-protein stuff and almost all of the time I use a vac sealer for that. I still occasionally use the water displacement method for liquids.

But I also use a vac sealer for enough poo poo other than s-v that I'd pick one up even if I decided to give up s-v for some reason.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2021 11:23

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

For something like a steak you're not getting a lot out of putting poo poo in the bag that you wouldn't get out of basting in the pan when you sear before presentation and/or mounting the pan/bag sauce with a compound butter.

If that's too fiddly you could also just throw your seasonings in a sachet before putting them in the bag. If you're doing a super lean/dry cut you might want to throw in a little fat/oil of some sort to make sure there's enough liquid, but if it's just a random sirloin/ribeye/strip/whatever the gently caress then it'll take care of itself.

If you don't have anything to use as a sachet already, you can get little empty teabags that work pretty well for the amount of stuff you're likely to throw in with a couple steaks.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2021 02:29

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

Putting frozen meat in a cold water bath is literally what you do if you want to defrost the meat rapidly.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2022 03:10

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

Lawnie posted:

The problem with this approach is that the exterior surface of the food, which is where the dangerous stuff lives, spends almost the entire time in the danger zone while you wait for the entire piece to thaw.

What? No. Not unless you're using boiling water or something. A slab of frozen protein in a bowl of water is going to cool the water just as effectively as the water is going to warm the slab of protein. Give it long enough the water and meat will end up in equilibrium with each other (and the environment), but if you're just defrosting a couple steaks or whatever then you're leaving them in contact with each other for like an hour, during which time the water is going to be something like 10 C and the meat, even at the surface, is going to colder than that.

ulmont posted:

This is literally from food safety basics. 40-140F (roughly 4.5-60C) is the range where bacteria grow most rapidly. Accordingly, you need to keep food out of that temperature range for more than 2 hours or so. Now, sure, this is USDA so there's going to be some room for error in this recommendation, but if you gently caress around enough you'll eventually find out.

https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safe...0140%20%C2%B0F.

I guess this is technically true, but it's pretty misleading. You can say that ~4.5 - 60 C is "the range where bacteria grow most rapidly", but for e.g. Salmonella the area under that curve is mostly around 35 - 37 C and almost none of it is under e.g. ~5 - 10 C. As in a doubling occurs in ~half an hour at ~36 C and over the course of days at ~7 C.

It's more accurate to say that 4.5 - 60 C is, with a couple of caveats, the temperature range in which most foodborne pathogens reproduce at all, with most rapid growth for most of them occurring somewhere in the mid 30s.

If foodborne pathogens reproduced as well at 55 C as they do at 36 C then sv in generally would be comically dangerous and poo poo like 72 hour shortribs would be a fuckin' death sentence.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2022 11:00

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

Lawnie posted:

The environment warms the water though, it�s not a closed system of the frozen protein and the cold water. Sure, one hour in cold water is probably fine, other guy is talking several hours at a time.

I think we're agreeing then. I wasn't endorsing Hasselblad's approach, I was explaining why he was mistaken. He was comparing leaving frozen meat in a cambro (or whatever) of water for several hours as being like thawing something in the fridge, I was pointing out that thawing meat in water is literally what you do when you want to thaw things faster than they thaw in the fridge.

ulmont posted:

Yes, it's a curve, and yes the difference between 5-10C and 36C, or 36C and 55-60C, is part of that "room for error in this recommendation," but the main point of "don't leave poo poo out at room temperature indefinitely and expect to avoid food poisoning" and the subsidiary point "keep food out of 4.5-60C and you'll be fine" both stand.

I mean I understand the point you're trying to make. But "keep food out of 4.5 - 60 C" isn't a particularly good generalisation for the sous vide thread, which not only occasionally but characteristically involves keeping food at temperatures in that range for hours if not days. Like that's kinda the whole gimmick.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2022 19:55

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

Yeah, poo poo like short ribs. Keller's original technique, which is one of the major factors that put sous vide on the map in terms of modern prestige cooking, was 48 hrs @ 62 C followed by another 24 hours @ 79 C, but most sources these days suggest lower temperatures because most grocery store short ribs will end up mush following the Keller/Myhrvold technique to the letter. Here's one from Anova's recipes, for example, that calls for 48 hours @ 55C.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2022 04:27

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

Zarin posted:

Alright! Overnight best? Or just a few hours in the fridge ahead of the steam chamber?

Doesn't actually matter. If what you're worried about is getting the salt into the meat, you're not going to see any measurable difference between salting the night before versus salting immediately before putting the meat in s-v.

If you were going for more of a cured thing (and so where applying salt over many days/weeks) or if you were adding salt for koshering then the salting earlier will make a difference. For just normal seasoning it doesn't.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2022 22:12

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

Zarin posted:

Yeah, just looking for seasoning. My struggles with salt have been along the lines of:
� Putting the salt in the bag with the meat and freezing it gave it a weird texture
� Following a recipe and having something be too salty
� Following a recipe and not noticing the salt at all
� Trying to brine something and not really noticing the difference

To the point where I've almost given up and been like "gently caress it, salt it at the table to taste". But I know that getting salt right during the prep stages can really pay dividends! I've just apparently really sucked at it all this time haha.

I'll do some research on salt per pound for steaks and try applying it when I'm getting things prepped for the steam box.

Yeah, then you don't really have to sweat it in terms of when you're adding the salt.

Salting the night before works as a sort of poor man's dry aging (koshering the meat slightly, making it drier and therefore purportedly the flavours are more intense) but that's based on the assumption that you're going to be cooking in a dry environment like a hot pan over the course of a couple minutes, which is not the kind of environment you're cooking in when you do s-v. Pretty much any hunk of animal protein done in s-v will retain more of its original weight of water than an identical hunk of protein done in a pan.

And as far as the diffusion of the salt into the meat, that's a function of time and temperature and so (unless you're curing the meat over a very long timeframe) almost all the movement it's eventually going to do is going to happen while the meat's cooking. And particularly with s-v cooking (with much longer cook times) the difference between the penetration of salt applied 12-24 hours before cooking and salt applied immediately before cooking is going to be negligible.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2022 22:50

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

You can absolutely s-v from frozen, but I dunno how you're planning on curing frozen fish. Unless you're expecting to do that in the puddle machine, in which case yeah that would work. Theoretically add like 15 minutes to the puddle time, but I'm guessing if you're curing it's going to be a long enough cook time that you don't have to sweat the extra minutes.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2022 05:20

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

The meat isn't giving off gas, either it's just a weird shape and so you're trapping some air when you seal the bag and it's expanding as it heats, or you've got surface bacteria that you're incubating. If the bag's puffing out within an hour, it's almost certainly the former.

If it's a small amount it's no big deal, but if it's enough to float the bag in the water bath then you might try using thinner/more flexible bag material. If it's a super weird shape you can also try extreme measures, like putting together some braising/basting liquid, putting the weirdly-shaped protein in it, freezing it all together, and then bagging the frozen block.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2022 21:20

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

BigHead posted:

What should I try next? I have some salmon and moose in the freezer. Maybe pork butt tacos. I'm so excited.

Fish and poultry done s-v are generally crowd pleasers. In addition to what you get from doing any generic slab of animal protein s-v (simplicity and consistency), fish and poultry are things you can get a lot of different textures/mouthfeels when done s-v. And even if you're not into that (a lot of people get squicked out by fish and poultry that aren't roughly the same firmness you'd get out of cooking them via other methods), doing them s-v is much more forgiving than doing them in a pan or oven.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2022 17:21

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

Kwolok posted:

I'm dumb and my Google is failing, what is an apo?

Anova Precision Oven.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2023 05:34

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

The whole gimmick in s-v versus a conventional "air" oven is that it's easy to use a PID to maintain water at a constant temperature, and water in contact with food provides a better transfer of heat than air does...so if you put a slab of meat @4 C/40 F from the fridge into a 54C/130 F water bath, it'll come up to temperature faster and stay in the "danger zone" for a shorter time than it would in air of the same temperature.

Steam isn't as good at transferring heat as water is, but it's still much better than air. And it's reasonably easy to provide a stream of steam at a desired temperature (usually by generating steam at a higher temperature and then mixing it with air from the environment to hit your desired temperature, but I don't know how the APO does it). And s-v cooking temperatures are under 100 C/212 F (because above that you're just boiling the food), so there's no situation in which you can't just make the steam hot enough or anything like that.

It's basically the difference between when you check to see if a dry pan has heated up by holding your hand an inch or two above it, and holding your hand over a pot of boiling water. Holding your hand over a dry pan at 100 C/212 will feel vaguely warm. But if you've ever worked over a pot of boiling water, you know that the steam can and will burn your hands if you're not careful, even though the water isn't any hotter than the 100 C pan.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2023 02:53

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

I think baking is the killer app for the APO. The "bagless s-v" thing is just lagniappe.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2023 05:30

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

Kwolok posted:

If it's really better, I just don't understand why I'm not seeing people latch onto it. I've been heard a peep about these sorts of ovens from Kenji, or any other popular food science people.

The APO specifically, or...? Because it's not like the APO is new nor novel technology, it's a (somewhat expensive) consumer-grade appliance that puts something that had only been used in commercial kitchens with reach of home cooks.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2023 02:23

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 22:48

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

Potato Salad posted:

Or is this a maxwellian thermal distribution thing where cooking at 134 still allows for some collagen to turn to gelatin at the statistical upper edge of the bell curve?

It's this. Baldwin gives the lower end at which this happens as 122 to 131 F (50 to 55 C):

Baldwin posted:

Prolonged cooking (e.g., braising) has been used to make tough cuts of meat more palatable since ancient times. Indeed, prolonged cooking can more than double the tenderness of the meat by dissolving all the collagen into gelatin and reducing inter-fiber adhesion to essentially nothing (Davey et al., 1976). At 176�F (80�C), Davey et al. (1976) found that these effects occur within about 12�24 hours with tenderness increasing only slightly when cooked for 50 to 100 hours.

At lower temperatures (120�F/50�C to 150�F/ 65�C), Bouton and Harris (1981) found that tough cuts of beef (from animals 0�4 years old) were the most tender when cooked to between 131�F and 140�F (55�C and 60�C). Cooking the beef for 24 hours at these temperatures significantly increased its tenderness (with shear forces decreasing 26%�72% compared to 1 hour of cooking). This tenderizing is caused by weakening of connective tissue and proteolytic enzymes decreasing myofibrillar tensile strength. Indeed, collagen begins to dissolve into gelatin above 122�F to 131�F (50�C to 55�C) (Neklyudov, 2003; This, 2006). Moreover, the sarcoplasmic protein enzyme collagenase remains active below 140�F (60�C) and can significantly tenderize the meat if held for more than 6 hours (Tornberg, 2005). This is why beef chuck roast cooked in a 131�F�140�F (55�C�60�C) water bath for 24�48 hours has the texture of filet mignon.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2024 21:12

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

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