Sous-vide cooking - a fucking culinary miracle

Ken's picture

I started learning this technique of cooking meat/fish some time ago from Heston Blumenthal (Science of Cooking) and it's a culinary miracle.

It's quite simple to get started, get yourself a vacuum pack device, they can be had quite cheap.

Now let's say you'r cooking a chunk of meat, if you want this to be tender and medium rare you traditionally cook it so the inside is medium and have the outer meat get's overcooked and dry.

With sous-vide, you drop whatever spices and salt pepper on the meat, then vacuum seal it. For medium rare meat you want to cook it to a temp. of 56C. So all you do now is heat a large bowl of water to 56C, drop in the vacuum sealed meat and let it cook for around 4-12 hours depending on the width of the meat. seal in your temperature probe inside the meat to monitor the internal temp, once it's reached your meat is done. If there's a lot of collogen (The white chewy stuff) then the meat needs 12 hours, it doesn't matter, as long as you hold the correct temp. you can cook it for days and it will be ok and it can't dry out because it's vacuum sealed.

After it's done you have a piece of meat that's the same pinkish color from the outside in, perfection.

We have a problem now, no browned layer outside so less flavour due to lack of Maillard reaction (The flavours comming from browning)

So grab a kitchen gass tourch and brown that fucker up good, there's your delicious outer crust.

I can go and buy any piece of meat now, cheap shit that would be as tender as a shoe and it will be tender enough that it almost falls apart.

If you want to go one extra step, brine the meat first, say a large chunk of meat you need to soak it in a 5% salt solution with some vinegar overnight, chicken and pork less time, around 4+6 hours, due to osmotic pressure the meat will reach equilibrium with the salt solution and will be perfectly salted all the way and not just lots of salt on the outside like normal salting, and the osmotic reaction will have drawn water inside the meat so it will be extra extra extra juicy and tender.

Yay for science!
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