Sous Vide Begins

or: "The Inevitability of the Middle Aged Modernist"

New Immersion Circulator: Friend or Foe? Undecided.

I got some new kit to play with. A relatively cheap vacuum packer to start. (The eventual upgrade will be a floorstanding chamber model.) It was only a matter of time before an immersion circulator found its way here.

Vacuum packing things is really quite fun. Here's some broccoli.

First thing: steaks! Got some ribeyes from the Ginger Pig, salted each and added a bit of rendered beef fat for no good reason, plus peppered 2 of them. Cooked @ 56C for 6 hours. Finished with a sear in the cast iron pan with butter after dredging in cracked black pepper. Then deglazed the pan with the liquid from the cooking bags and reduced for sauce.

Verdict: excellent! Great flavour as always but much more tender than normal for ribeyes. Big hit with all four of us. Definitely had the "edge to edge" consistency of doneness the method is praised for.

28l of 56C water and 4 ribeyes.

Thoughts: definitely worthwhile. Would use again for tougher cuts of thick steaks to get that lovely tenderness. Might nudge the temp down a little. Probably would not use on fillet mignon, unless using for timing purposes. Also not likely to use for skirt steak/onglet as the finishing sear is not much shorter than how I would normally cook one entirely, but possibly worth an experiment to fiddle with texture.

This is a repurposed aquarium. Looks like it's almost fulfilling intended use here.

Next up: eggs. Tried a few temperatures.  The well-documented problem with eggs cooked to a precise temperature is that the most people prefer the whites cooked more than the yolk. There are something like 4 main proteins involved in turning an egg into different stages of cookedness and they denature at different temps. Cooking the yolk to an optimal consistency in a water bath will leave the white too soft for most people. Here's what I've discovered so far.

Poached eggs: cook at 62C for 45-60 minutes, then crack into water on low simmer. At this temp, they still crack like raw eggs. Whites are cohesive enough to keep a nice full shape around the yolk. Does not take long to firm them up while leaving the yolk as-is.

Poachy.

Egg for eating as-is: I like 65C. The yolk firms up but still has a rich, satiny texture. The whites are custardy but solid enough to be nice rather than off-putting. Obviously high-quality fresh eggs are a must.

And let's vacuum pack a slice of bread.