Equipment, Recipes, Sous vide, Vacuum sealers 2 comments

Flash pickle with sous vide

By on March 3rd, 2010

One of the interesting application of sous vide is flash pickling, I am talking about instantaneously infuse food with a liquid. It\s something I never done before actually and I wanted to give it a go. I decided to go with two tests. The first one would be pickling cucumbers with a vinegar marinade and the second one infuse pears with… Well, vodka.

Pickled Cucumber
  • 1 cucumber.
  • 500 ml cider vinegar.
  • Tarragon.
  • Black peppercorn.
  • Kosher salt.
  • Sugar.
  • Thyme.

In a small saucepan, I heated the vinegar with all the ingredients except the cucumber of course, just enough to dissolve the salt and the sugar and for the herbs to infuse the liquid.

While the vinegar and herbs were heating up, I cut the cucumber into small pieces. The following pictures show a cucumber piece before being pickled. As you can see cucumber is already quite translucent to begin with.

My vacuum sealer is sold with a vacuum pump adapter allowing you to use acrylic containers. I placed the cucumber pieces inside one of them and reserved it in the fridge while the pickling liquid was chilling down.

After a while the liquid was cold enough to go in the container with the cucumber chunks. I placed the lid on and took the whole thing to my vacuum sealer.

I pumped as much air off the container as the machine would allow, the V.300 can vacuum up to 0.1 bar, I let the machine reach that point. The vacuum was so stong the the lid started to be sucked in and the cented started to dip in, that’s when I stopped the machine, I really was thinking that the container would explode. While the machine is sucking the air from the container you can see some bubbling occuring, this is the air leaving the cucumber. Once the vacuum was created I left the container alone for a couple of minutes, then I released the pressure. This when the pressure is going back to normal tha the liquid is sucked in the cucumber replacing the air.

That’s it! Done. your cucumber is now infused with the vinegar mixture.Not only the cucumber chunks are infused with a nice acidic flavour, their texture and colour changed dramatically. As you can see on the images above, they became extremely transclucent and meatier. Taste-wise? It’s not as intense as a several weeks pickling process but, hey! we’re talking about mere seconds here. It more than enough to add a tasty acidic element to a dish.

Vodka infused pear.
  • Pear.
  • Vodka.

This time again I took some “before” photos of the pear slices to compare with the end product. Check it out as with the cucumber a thin slice of pear is quite transclucent. Wait until you see how it becomes.

For the pear it’s pretty much the same process. I just replaced the vinegar with very good vodka. I cut the pear in slices and placed them at the bottom of the container and cover them with vodka. The slices kept floating at the surface of the liquid so I used the trivet that comes with the container to hold them submerged.

As with the cucumber I vacuumed the container to extract the air off the pear and then released the pressure to let the vodka replace it. When I removed the lid and checked on the fruit. It was just wow! It wasn’t transclucent, it was transparent! look again at the “before” picture.

I tried the same thing without liquid, to see if I could get the same change in colour change, unfortunatly it didn’t do much, it was a bit more transclucent than before vacuuming but nothing as dramatic as the vodka infused version. Obviously beside being beautiful it was also extremly tasty on account of the voska. It opened a new area of interesting desert ideas and I will continue testing this technique with other liquid.

Beef, Equipment, Immersion circulator, Recipes, Sous vide, Temperatures 5 comments

Shallow fried 72 hours sous vide short ribs

By on February 28th, 2010

Beef short ribs are often used as an example of what can be achieved with sous vide cooking and a couple of days ago, I actually understood why. Last Saturday I picked up a couple of short ribs at my butcher. Usually I braise them at low heat for a rather long time in my oven. This time I decided to go sous vide. I always hesitated to cook stuff for more than 24 hours, just because I have only one immersion circulator and I want to have access to it when I want and if I have something cooking, I just can’t.

My son who leaves in France came to spend a week with me in London. He has a couple of favorite dishes that he always wants me to cook for him so I knew that I wouldn’t sous vide much during the week, that was the perfect pretext to go with a 72 hours dish.

Shallow fried Sous vide short ribs with shiitake duxelle, balsamic vinegar glazed pepper and goose fat sauté potatoes.
Serves 2
  • 2 nice pieces of short ribs.
  • Shiitake mushrooms.
  • 3 bell peppers.
  • 4 potatoes cubed.
  • Goose fat.
  • Butter.
  • Modena balsamic vinegar.
  • Shallots.
  • Garlic.
  • Lemon juice.
  • Kosher salt.
  • Black pepper.

The first thing you have to do is to prep and cook the meat. Short ribs can be cooked for 36, 48 or 72 hours, for this recipe I went with 72 hours, just because… I could! I vacuum packed the meat and set my circulator to 59°C for 72 hours.

vacuumPacked immersionCirculator

Once you’ve done that, you can go ahead and live your life for the next three days. My kitchen is quite small, so I decided to put my circulator on my living room table, it’s another aspect of cooking sous vide I like, I can cook in any room I want, try to move your oven to the bedroom.

Three days later the meat was ready. It was time for me to get the rest of the dish ready as well. I prepped my bell peppers and the mushrooms that would later become a duxelle.

Duxelle is a mixture of finely chopped mushrooms with garlic and shallots, often used in the confection of Beef Wellington. If this case I went for a coarse chop.

bellPepper shiitake

I also started my potatoes, I peeled them, and blanched them in salted water until almost cooked.

For those of you who are helpless in a kitchen, first: What the hell are you doing here? then, here’s a simple trick for blanching vegetables. Every vegetables that grow underground need to be started in cold water and brought to a boil, every vegetables growing over ground need to be submerged in already boiling water. It’s a simple rule and it works.

When the potatoes were tender but not entirely cooked I shocked then in cold iced water to stop the cooking and left them on the side for later use.

blanchedPotatoes

I turned my attention to the bell peppers and the mushrooms. In a first pan I sauté-ed the peppers until tender with a little bit of sugar, then de-glazed them with Balsamic vinegar until the peppers were all coated with the resulting syrup.

In the second pan I melted a knob of butter and added the mushroom when he butter was foaming. left them alone until they got some colours and tossed in the shallots and the garlic.

Then it was the turn of the meat. At first I just wanted to sear it in a touch of oil, but because I was planning on using goose fat for the potatoes I thought that it wouldn’t do the meat any harm to be subjected to the same treatment, so I melted a good inch or so of goose fat in two cast iron skillets and heated them up to 180°C.

Goose fat as a high smoking point, around 190°C [375°F], so it can be used in the same manner you would rapeseed oil [Canola oil] or corn oil or any other high smoking point oil.

I took the pouches off the water, opened them and sliced the incredibly tender short ribs. I quickly shallow fried the meat in the goose fat enough to get a crispy outside and in the second pan I sauté-ed the potatoes.

It was time to assemble the dish.

finishedWide finishedClose

It was absolutely fantastic, the meat was so crispy on the outside. Imagine a Maillard reaction on acid, fork tender inside and to top it all up, it was cooked to a perfect medium rare.

So was the 72 hours of cooking were worth it? I have to say, taste wise it was definitely worth it. But it still a very high planning dish. I read online other recipes calling for 24 or 48 hours cooking time and I will try those out to see if there’s a difference in tenderness. When I’m saying that it was tender, I’m not ,kidding it was more tender than the most tender braised version I ever done. My son was in heaven and wanted me to cook it again the next day, which of course wasn’t possible. I think that next time I’ll cook a bigger batch and will freeze some for later.

As a side note, if you attempt very long cooking, be wary of evaporation, even at low temperatures the water will evaporate, the SWID that I’m using has a fail safe that stop the machine if the level of water reach a certain minimum point, so there’s no danger of overheating, but it is still a pain to wake up a morning or come back after work and finding your circulator off for an unknown amount of time. For those of you who don’t have a container with a lid I would recommend to use plastic film to seal the vapor in.

containerCovered

Community, Equipment, Immersion circulator, Sous vide 40 comments

Poll: What sous vide Hardware are you using?

By on February 24th, 2010

PLEASE THINK ABOUT CASTING YOUR VOTE ON THE VOTE PANEL SITUATED ON THE SIDEBAR.

This is a sticky post check bellow for more recent posts.

I’m starting a poll. I wanted to have an idea of what cooking equipment is the most used by you guys. Check it out on the right sidebar.

You can do the poll and leave comments here about why you chose the hardware you chose. It could help other people make their choice.