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.

 

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.

 

A sous-vide flatiron steak

There are cuts of meat known as restaurant cuts, because they are tough when not handled properly, but have plenty of flavor if cooked in the right way. Among these cuts are hangar steaks, flank steaks, skirt steaks, and flatiron steaks. The flatiron steak is well described here, and as the local Kroger has been offering this cut for 6 and 7 dollars a pound, I was curious how well it handled via sous-vide.

Kroger sells this steak in 1.5 pound sealed packs. I bought one, sliced it roughly into 4, vacuum sealed the meat, and froze it. This particular example sealed the most poorly; you can see some air in the pack. This will tend to make the plastic float. Just take the pack and shake it a little, once unfrozen, so the air pushes one end of the plastic up and the steak can sink into the pool of water. You don’t need total immersion, just temperature equalization, but in my case, a little shaking allowed the whole of the steak to go under water.

Five and a half hours later, 30 seconds of sear a side, some spices, and the steak looked like this. There was some chew, some mouth resistence, but no toughness. The steak was pleasantly tender.

 

48 hour eye of round, sous-vide

Surprisingly tender, almost too tender.

It was a good meat hot, a better meat cold. It makes great steak sandwiches, when sliced about a quarter to half inch thick. But as much as I like it, I agree with the poster here that perhaps 30 hours would be a better time.

 

Low temperature results, Beer Advocate, etc.

Most of my low temp gear arrived last Tuesday, and I used Tuesday night to calibrate it. Yesterday I did some steaks using the gear. One calibration run, and 4 steaks later, these are the notes that I have. I’m using an Auberge controller, and a Hamilton Beach 8 quart slow cooker as the base. Since the vacuum sealer hasn’t arrived, I’m bagging food in freezer Ziploc bags for now.

Auberge controller, 8 quart slow cooker. Socket has a circuit breaker.

Calibration with this setup takes about 5.5 hours. Yes, it is worth it to calibrate your device. By calibration, there are a couple steps you’ll want to do.

1) Take ice (plenty of it) and let it melt halfway into a large container. Place the probe in the ice water bath. Best to use meltoff water instead of adding your own, as ice-water baths with tap water won’t be temperature equilibrated.

2) Follow the instructions to calibrate PID parameters with a pot full of the amount of water you’ll use for cooking. In my case, it took perhaps 5.5 hours for the system to figure out what the correct PID parameters were.

With this setup, and in using a PID controller, as opposed to PD controller, there will be overshoot for a couple hours. In my experience, the overshoot is about 2 degrees, with it settling in to accuracy around the 3 hour mark.

In terms of safety, this is a pleasing setup. The water could probably hurt you if you immersed your hands in it for a length of time, but brief fingertip exposure to 131 degree water doesn’t hurt. You can easily handle the lid of the slow cooker without harm. The Auberge defaults to a timed setup. Once the time is met, the device shuts off power to the slow cooker. I made sure to plug into a wall socket with its own circuit breaker, so any electrical short would flip the socket breaker.

Steaks? One thing I have found out is that with a thin steak (circa 0.5-0.75″ thick), one minute of sear on both sides can easily turn that medium rare steak into a medium well steak. 30 seconds of sear per side after the fact preserves the cooking much better. Since steaks can go anywhere from 2-6 hours (I do not recommend cooking steaks for less than 2 hours), adjusting your controller to compensate for the overshoot seems reasonable.

2.5 hours with Auberge controller at 131. Mostly cooked at 133 for that period. 30 second sear each side.

Beer Advocate: I don’t know much about these guys, other than second hand exposure to the collateral damage they’ve done to people they’ve kicked off their forums (oh yes, and delete years of info these beer hounds have collected forum wide). Now, after decades of exposure to every forum “wizard” there is, many with serious delusions of grandeur, I have no tolerance for the self appointed dictator types. But as it’s their forums, and not mine, why am I mentioning this?

It’s because the Beer Advocate folks don’t stop at tossing people out of their forums. They then proceed to taunt the people they’ve tossed off their forums on Twitter. And in that lies the crux of the tale, the reason the generic food blogger needs to be informed.

Don’t go. Don’t get involved. Start a beer blog instead. You might get 1/100th the comments on your pages, but you will be read, and you will be much happier about your treatment. And if you have to do the forum routine, strongly consider Rate Beer instead.

One final beer note: The early months of the year, winter, tend to feature stronger beers, such as barleywines. Sierra Nevada comes out with Bigfoot, and Sam Adams comes out with Griffin’s Bow. I’m not a fan of extreme beers, but Bigfoot is worth some trouble, and I suspect Griffin’s Bow will be as well.

 

Notes on sous vide and low temperature cooking

I’m not entirely sure why I’ve gotten interested in this (other than a vision of an easily prepared, perfect medium rare steak). In retrospect, this kind of gear occupies space, lots and lots of space. Nothing has arrived, plenty has been ordered and after looking at how large a 6 quart slow cooker can be, I’m wondering where I’d have the room for an 8 quart.

Maybe I stash the toaster oven in the basement for a bit. My wife wouldn’t like that but it would make sense during a ‘sous vide’ run.

Ok, so what’s sous vide, really? Specifically, though sous vide is used in the vernacular for a style of low temperature cooking, soud vide by itself only means using a vacuum to cook, and doesn’t necessarily mean a low temperature technique. Sous vide can be employed at high temperatures. You can do low temperature cooking without any vacuum, and one of the best sites on the Internet for technical detail on sous vide, low temperature, and related technique, the blog of the French Culinary Institute, puts it this way:

While I love a commercial vacuum machine, about 90% of what a cook wants to accomplish with low temperature cooking can be achieved without a vacuum machine. When Nils was at restaurant Aquavit he did a lot of low-temperature work with a circulator, but didn’t have a vacuum machine. Back then restaurants weren’t required to have a HACCP plan; he didn’t have a commercial vacuum because they cost too much.

Today many home cooks use the Food Saver vacuum for low temp. I don’t use my Food Saver any more. I use Ziploc bags, without a vacuum. I find Ziplocs easier than the Food Saver – I don’t have to hunt down the special bags, I can easily bag sauces (a pain with the Food Saver), I can bag hot foods (foods to be vacuumed need to be cold – more on that in the next primer installment). My Food Saver has been relegated to potato-chip-bag-resealer.

To note, the FCI has a number of primers on their site, on things like transglutaminase (meat glue), and at least three primers on sous vide and low temperature (charts with explanations, part 1, and part 2). The chart info is also combined into a nice little PDF that you can download and keep. I think the temperature charts, particularly the ones that discuss low temperature food safety, are worth the download.

On the Kindle, I have the book Beginning Sous Vide, and if I’m reading my twitter feeds right, Jimmy of @EatItAtlanta is currently reviewing Under Pressure, Tom Keller’s book on sous vide and low temperature cooking. On the blog Curious Cook, Harold McGee has a warning about the dangers of leaving food out too long at too-low temperatures. Temperature control is a serious component of any low temperature cooking foray. I recommend the PDF I mentioned earlier. Download a copy and memorize the bacterial safety charts.