11 hour eye of round, sous-vide.

I’ve cooked roasting meats to 16, 24, and 48 hour sous vide, and after a number of these experiments, tend to the following rules of thumb:

1. 12 hour range for softer steak-like roasts (round roasts).
2. 24 hours or so for cuts with more connective tissue, such as chuck roast.
3. Tri tip roast, lacking connective tissue of any kind, optimal around 2 hours

This one was an experiment in overnight cooking, and times were more or less set by when I started one evening (I had an afternoon appointment) and when I normally would get up in the morning. The span of cooking was 11 hours, the technique more or less identical to this link. The meat used was a supermarket eye of round. All the spicing was dry spicing this time, though I added a touch of ground cumin to this one.

Eye of round, dry spiced and later placed in a vacuum seal bag.

After I woke up, I fished out the meat and cut. The meat was, by this point, notably tender.

A lot of the color of these roasts bleeds into the bag juices, thus they tend to be pinker than steaks cooked by the same method.

I taste tested with my daughter. She thought it a little too soft, I thought it was fine. 8 hours wouldn’t hurt this meat, and the 8-10 range, I would guess, seems about right.

 

Cauliflower “mashed potatoes”

This is something my wife is experimenting with. We like cut up cauliflower microwaved to “just cooked”, often a minute or two less than the microwave bag would recommend. For cauliflower mashed potatoes, she cooks the cauliflower a little longer and softer (but not to mushiness), and then mashes the vegetable with the tines of a fork.

You can also use a potato masher, as shown here.

buffalo sirloin, asparagus, cauliflower, and cauliflower “mashed potatoes”.

The asparagus is also microwaved minimally, and the buffalo sirloin we described here.

 

Tri Tip Roast and Steaks, Sous-Vide

Kroger these days is selling tri tip roasts in the 2 pound range. Trader Joes often has meat sales that involve tri tip steaks.

These we’ve added to the sous vide pot. The tri tip steak was an impulse buy because they were inexpensive, and the roast a somewhat later choice, when wanting a couple pounds of meat to last the week.

Tri tip steak at 4.5 hours was a little soft.

We cooked the steaks about 4.5 hours at 131 degrees. I didn’t mind the texture, but my daughter thought it was “granny food”. When looking about information for the roast, I saw times as short as an hour and as long as 52 hours. Obviously what you like in meat counts. One point of view, worth noting is:

Tri-Tip Roast is a tender cut of beef, mostly comprised of protein and fat. As a result, is best cooked by bringing it up to your desired temperature, but not letting it cook for an extended period of time.

Consequently, I cooked the roast about 2.5 hours. And it was just about perfect. There was no real need to go further with this roast.

Tri Tip roast at 2.5 hours and 131 degrees was just about ideal.

Both meats were dry spiced and cooked at 131 degrees. But if I were to do the steaks again, I’d keep them cooking no more than 2.5-3 hours.

 

Sous-vide on the 4th of July

To my readers, a belated apology. My wife has been ill, my house has had power and aircon issues, and when your house is broken, it becomes hard to cook and write about food. So we’ll talk a little sous-vide, things that have been building up, stuff I’ve observed, and the occasional incidental that may only pertain to the Snellville GA area as opposed to the much larger world of sous-vide cooking.

Gogi Brothers has closed. I enjoyed my stay there, but I was about the only one I know of who had a positive experience there. If you can’t please customers, it’s hard to stay open.

Fung Mei, which for a while was missing its Sichuan chef, has one now, and their version of “Shan City chicken” (Fung Mei calls it E1 on the Sichuan menu) is exceptionally good right now.

Fung Mei’s “E1″ was blow you away good this last Father’s day.

Concerning the dish dry fried green beans: can anyone explain to me the move from spicing with Sichuan peppercorns to a less fiery garlic based set of ingredients? The garlic flavored green beans are good. but not as insanely good as the green beans I had on this visit to Fung Mei.

For the 4th, I prepped a pair of buffalo sirloins. This 8 ounce cut is rapidly becoming my go-to when I want a steak I don’t have to think about. Reliability, tenderness, rich flavors, and serving size about right are driving this. 3 to 5 hours at 131 with dry spices, and these meats are good to go.

Buffalo sirloins are grass fed and very reliable in a sous-vide pot.

When spicing more than one piece of meat, it’s faster if you’ll spice all of them at once on one side, flip all of them, and spice the other side. This approach saves time. Keeping a pot around on the stove, with scalding hot water, also makes it faster to equilibrate the sous-vide pot.

Bottom round roast, 16 hour sous-vide.

Recently I worked up another roast, this time a bottom round roast. I was going to cook it 30 hours, but cut the time short, to about 16 hours, when I found this article on a 10 hour bottom round roast. It ended up a nice cut of meat, some chew but definitely more tender than a stove roasted meat.

I’m beginning to think the 10-24 hour time frame is best for these kinds of meats, regardless. You’re guaranteed something you can eat and not think about it. The longer you go, the more likely it is you’ll get meats with a sawdust texture.

The malty chocolate overtones in this beer make it a creative alternative to another American pale ale or an overhopped IPA.

If you like malt forward beers, you might want to give New Belgium’s 1554 a try, whose malty chocolate overtones make it an alternative to yet another IPA.

Finally, for those of you who are interested in monitoring electricity use, or do some minor electrical work on your own, let’s introduce the common current clamp. Versions of these are available at Home Depot or Lowe’s, or can be purchased for about 50 dollars on Amazon.

A current clamp. It can be more useful to the cook than you might imagine.

The current clamp above came with this temperature probe. Claimed range is less than or equal to 400 C, plus minus 2.5 C.

This one, an Amazon purchase, comes with a temperature probe. That’s what lifts it above the fray for the interested cook. It becomes a dual purpose tool. The accuracy of this probe is 2.5 C, and that’s yet another way to double check the accuracy of your sous-vide device.

Triple checking the temperature in my sous-vide pot.

It could also be used as the main temperature probe in a beer cooler sous vide setup (see also here).

 

A 22 hour chuck roast, sous-vide

I had previously done a roast to a 48 hour limit, and found it to be good and tender, but also to suffer from a sawdust-like flavor and texture, a product perhaps of too much drying. I was also interested in Stefan Gourmet’s finding that sous-vide juices are much more usable after being heated and strained (Stefan also has a very usable vegetable stock recipe as well).

The roast used was a 3 pound chuck roast, which I squeezed into a quart Food Savr bag. It would have been better to use a custom bag, as the quart bag was a little small and it took work to seal it. Spicing was pretty simple. Onion and garlic powders, various peppers (cracked black pepper, red and cayenne pepper powder, paprika, crushed red peppers), slivers of garlic inserted into folds in the meat, thyme and rosemary, sage and parsley. Dry spices were used, as to not overpower the meat.

This was cooked at 131F for 22 hours. A buffalo steak was added at the same time, and fished out four hours later. The final product looked like this coming out of the pot.

The juices were saved, and looked a bit like this.

We heated the juices to almost a simmer, the pot turning into a scummy brown. This we then strained, using a collander and a pre-moistened paper towel (pre-moistening reduces liquid loss). We tried skimming, but as the scum retains considerable liquid, we later put everything into the collander and let it drain. This gave us perhaps a cup of clear colored liquid. This we treated as if it were a beef stock. It was sealed in a jar and placed in the refrigerator.

In the fridge, after a day, this liquid will turn cloudy. That’s not because of any bacterial growth, but the product gels a bit in the refrigerator.

Good roast. Some chew left, but tender and flavorful.

The roast we started eating immediately. It was good warm, perhaps better cold. I was lucky to have prepared it when I did, as the capacitor went out in the air conditioning and it was a couple days before we could get the aircon fixed. So, once the house was cool, we went about making a reduction of the liquid. To note, the liquid was gelatinous when fetched. Heat got rid of that in a couple minutes.

We set a pot on a simmer, and towards the end of the liquid loss, added slices of garlic, some dry thyme, some cracked pepper, some red wine, and some butter to the pot. The final product looked good. If I have any warning, taste test what you add to your liquid, and taste test the reduction itself. That would allow you to adjust for any off flavors.

Cold slices of roast with the final reduction.

 

Buffalo Sirloin sous-vide

The local supermarkets, perhaps encouraged by Nam Dae Mun, are now offering a more interesting selection of meats.

Buffalo sirloin.

I was curious about bison. Ted’s serves it, as did the now closed Ruby Tuesday. It tends to be tastier than beef, but in the portions shown, a bit expensive. 8 ounces of buffalo steak cost me about $6.80, close to 14 dollars a pound.

I prepped the steak in a traditional way, dry spicing before sealing in a pint bag. This went into the sous-vide pot for four and a half hours at 131 F. The result?

This was the most tender steak I’ve ever prepped by this method. Utterly delicious.

 

lamb steak sous-vide

This is a topic, I’ll note, covered nicely on the Sous Vide Supreme blog, in a recipe supplied by Richard Blais, but my take on lamb as steaks is that you can treat them pretty much the way you would treat beef steak. This lamb was something of an impulse buy. I’m short of fresh herbs, so I made do with the powdered stuff I usually use on steaks these days.

I sealed the meat in a Food Saver bag. This isn’t necessary, a good Ziploc will do.

The steak was cooked at 130 for two hours, then 131 the remaining three. Note that with my setup (a PID controller), I have a peak temperature initially 2-3 degrees higher than my nominal setting. This steak peaked at 132 F. Afterwards it was spiced (kosher salt, cracked black pepper, garlic, onion powder, a little cracked red pepper)

then finished on the stove, 45 seconds a side at a high heat. With a red wine reduction, the final result looked something like this.

As a side, I tried a steamable edamame I found at the local grocer.

This product tasted better than it looked coming out of the microwave. Be warned.

 

More soon dubu, more sous vide

Tried soon dubu again, this time with clams and some sirloin, and real home made soon dubu paste. The difference between home made and the commercial paste is pretty astounding. There are notable color differences, and all the futzing we did with flavor in the last batch almost completely went away.

Made with home made soon dubu paste.

One more chicken sous vide note: worked with a chicken breast at 146 degrees, starting from frozen, a breast that was frozen with three kinds of peppers, onion and garlic powder, and a little salt, and this was the best product yet. It was left in the pot for 1 hour, 50 minutes (1 hr 20m + 30m to defrost), and was uniformly juicy and flavorful. There was one ‘bad’ spot, a little bloody and I suspect near a vein of some kind. But otherwise, quite excellent.

 

Some notes on sous-vide chicken and temperature calibration.

I have an accuracy issue with my Auber temperature sensor, and it goes something like this. I have a separate thermometer, and when the Auber is first on, the rwo agree within a degree. As the Auber probe remains in the pot however, the difference in measurements increase, until after some time, I see this.

Pot equilibrated to a measurement of 144, a few minutes after adding chicken. Note the temp difference between the two probes. Who to believe?

So who to believe? I’m concerned the Auber is underestimating temperature, because of the beef color of cuts like this, which was supposed to be cooked at 130 to 132 degrees F.

Nam Dae Mun ribeye, sous-vide and plated. Cooked perhaps 4 hours at Auber nomimal 130.

The above, sliced. Does that look medium rare to you?

So yes, I’m looking into how to accurately gauge and calibrate temperature with this setup. I’ve also been playing with higher temperatures, in part so I can cook chicken, which is a substantially smaller portion of meat than some of these big steaks I’ve been eating.

Jimmy (@EatItAtlanta) tweeted before my experiments that he wasn’t happy with the meat near the bone of chicken cooked at 140 F. Since I’m using a PID controller, and it overshoots temp by 2 degrees during the first couple hours, then the kinds of temperatures I’m looking at for my setpoint are 2 degrees below the cooking point. But if it’s actually running 3 degrees cool, I need to compensate by 5 degrees. Does that make sense?

PID controllers overshoot and then narrow in on their target temperatures. That first overshoot peak defines the actual cooking temperature for my controller. In practice, I overshoot by about 2 degrees F. Image above from Wikimedia, and the PID controller article on Wikipedia.

The French Culinary Institute’s PDF on sous-vide recommends 1-2 hours for chicken at 65-66C (149-151 F), and that means the two Auber temperature settings I needed to test are 144 F and 147 F. So we tested those.

Nam Dae Mun chicken thighs. Note the price.

Spiced and sealed. I used cracked black pepper, red pepper, crushed red pepper (pizza pepper), some onion and garlic powder, and a dusting of poultry seasoning.

Cooked 90 minutes at 144 from room temp and plated. 2.5 hrs at 147 from frozen has a similar appearance. I prefer the flavor and texture of the hotter product.

Results? I liked my chicken better at 147 than 144. The looks are about the same at both, and at both, you really do need to trim off the chicken fat, because unlike frying, the fat that results from this technique isn’t much fun to eat. The chicken is amazingly juicy, and you might find it not cooked enough for your tastes. If so, just keep ramping up the temperatures until you’re happy with what comes out of the controller.

As for me, I need a better way to calibrate my device. I would like to nail a good medium rare on the steak side. For now, I have a useful working temperature on the chicken side.

 

Home made soon dubu

My wife is, once again, recovering from surgery and she was wanting soon dubu, or silky tofu soup. I didn’t think it would travel, and  offered to make some for her. She was skeptical. She had us buy pork chops at the same time. Well, pork chops are for another day, because the soon dubu experiment was a success and it wasn’t hard either.

Start with a heated ceramic bowl. Add oil, and sear your meats in the oil.

Add veggies and brown. Add soon dubu paste, do not burn. Later, add broth, taste, adjust flavors, and let it reach a boil. After a few minutes, add tofu, meats, seafood.

The cooking is done in a ceramic bowl. Those bowls can be had at Super H Mart; ours cost us about 10 dollars or so. You heat the bowl, and when it is hot,add some oil to your pot and add your meats. We had leftover meats, a sous-vide flat iron steak, and some baked chicken breast. We seared briefly, removed the meats, added veggies (chopped bok choy, some onion, some bamboo shoots) and cooked until browned. We added hot pepper paste (a commercial variety), heated and mixed until thoroughly worked through the veggies, then added beef stock. We then adjusted for taste. The original recipe (here) called for soy sauce, which added considerably to the flavor. We added some garlic powder, some salt, but 2-3 pinches of dried coarse hot pepper powder finally turned the trick. In retrospect, it is better to make your own soon dubu paste from hot pepper powder itself. The flavor will be significantly richer.

After simmering a minute or two, finish with an egg and add scallions.

While all that was going on, we had also purchased cooked frozen crawfish as our seafood component. We split the crawfish into two batches, one of which went into the freezer, the other sealed in a pint Food Saver bag and popped into a 130 degree pot to thaw.

Silky tofu is labelled soft tofu at Super H, and if I recall, 30 ounces of soft tofu runs about a dollar. Since you’re using leftover meats, whatever stock is handy (32 ounces of stock at Publix runs about a dollar as well), whatever veggies you can find, some spices, this whole meal is incredibly affordable.

Once the soup boils, you add back your meats and your seafood. The crawfish were nicely warm by the time we needed them. If there are any juices that the crawfish leave in a Food Saver bag, just pour them into the soup as well. After a minute or two with meats and seafood, you can add an egg if you like, and definitely add some chopped green onions.

Jimmy, of Eat It Atlanta, has a nice video of making soon dubu.

John Kessler has a video of an egg cooking in soon dubu.

Serious Eats has the recipe we mostly followed for our soups.

The “Food and I” blog has a good looking vegetarian soon dubu.