Sous vide-ing liquids with the la.va V.300 vacuum sealer
I got a really cool trick today from the guys at la.va. I always wanted to be able to vacuum seal liquid,without having to freeze it before, for the simple reason that you have to plan ahead, pretty much the day before. The other reason I don’t like to freeze is that you drop the temperature of water bath quite a bit when you submerge your pouch or you have to wait – again – for the frozen liquid to get back to temperature.
I contacted la.va and asked them if they had a trick that could help me solve that problem and indeed they had one.
What they told me was to place the liquid in a bag and to place that bag in a second one, doing this, the liquid should stay in the first pouch and not be sucked into the machine causing mayhem. I tested the technique as soon as I got home. I used a 16×25 cm bag, filled it with beaten egg seasoned with salt and pepper and a bit of thyme and placed it in a second bag of 22×30 cm. Before that I had cut the smaller bag shorter, I took off about 2 cm, making it 16×22 cm.
I placed my vacuum sealer at the edge of the table, inserted the larger bag in, making sure that the smaller one wasn’t near the vacuum pump and closed the lid on the bag (which holds it) and let the bag to hang. I kicked off the machine. The machine sucked the air faster than it could suck the liquid up and I used the manual sealing command to seal the bag before the liquid could reach the top.
The technique worked very well, it will allow me to go further in my tests, trying more recipes that would have required a profesional chamber vacuum sealer. I could at last, for instance, try Heston Blumenthal’s sous vide scrambed eggs. I will write about it in the next post, I kinda have to redo them and take pictures before I eat them this time.
Just to recap, for this to work, it is better to have a machine that has a manual sealing control to allow you to stop the sucking of the air before the liquid reaches the top. Using two bags slows it down but doesn’t stop it completely. I’m using a la.va V.300 and it has both manual and automatic control. Another good feature of this machine is the ability to reduce the pressure of the vacuum. I don’t have the accessory yet but I should get it soon. with this feature, you’d be able to vacuum at half strength and slow down the sucking of the liquid that much more.
The image on the left shows the La.Va V300 as delivered. On the right at the center of the machine the pressure control valve which allow you to reduce the vacuum strength.
Anyway. If your machine has one or the other of these features you should be able to try this out. If it doesn’t I wouldn’t recommend it. Personaly I really like the idea of being able to cook sous vide with stock or olive oil. Tomorrow I’ll post the photos of the sous vide scambled eggs.
English
French
Casquette,
Congratulation for your blog, the design is very attractive and I have a lot of pleasure going on it.
Regarding vacuuming liquid with a clamp machine I red somewhere that LAVA was providing a sort of foam to include in the pouch at the edge of the opening. During the vacuum process liquids are stop/stuck by the foam…I didn’t have time so far to look at that but it could be a good trick.
Jean-François
Hey Jean-François thanks, for the nice comment. I tried liquid stopper, I have bought some recently.
It actually does what it says it does, but still, some liquid manages to go around it, on the left and right side of the strip (It’s really difficult to get the perfect lenght of strip). What would be ideal, would be to have pouches with integrated liquid stopper fitted perfectly from edge to edge. The 2Bags technique works a charm and actually
I might couple it with a strip of liquid stopper to make it completely safe.
N.
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