Recent Modernist Blog Posts Page 2

This is always a big question people have. Once you're done sous viding, if you cook it through to pasteurization and you chill it efficiently and then put it in a refrigerator, the food will last for a long time, a lot longer than normal leftovers do.

If you follow that routine, cooked food in unopened sealed bags will last for at least a week, if not longer. I know some people, I think Douglas Baldwin is one who talks about food lasting for 2, 3 or even 4 weeks, depending on if your refrigerator's cold enough and you've chilled it properly. So sous vide leftovers do last for a long time.

My local stores and butchers don't carry much tri-tip meat, so I've only cooked it a few times. I turn to sirloin steak and strip steak a lot. Unfortunately, I don't have many personal good tips for tri-tip, but I know a lot of people who love it.

It's my understanding that you want to sous vide tri-tip to a steak-like temperature. You could select 131°F (55°C) if you like a medium rare steak. Some people enjoy tri-tip just heated through for 2 or 3 hours but others like to cook it a little bit longer to tenderize it. Mike says tri-tip is one of his favorite cooks. He does 134°F (56.6°C) for 12 hours and it comes out great.

If you have been following along with me on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, you've seen all the amazing food, presentations, and people I've experienced at StarChefs 2018. I want to add a little more context, and put some of my favorite experiences here on the blog. If you are a chef, or an adventurous home cook, StarChefs should definitely be on your "must attend" list. It's just a fascinating conference and I've been lucky to cover it for a few years.

Counter Korean

Jesse Vida and Junghyun Park from Atomix kicked off the conference for me with a great demo combining a cocktail and food pairing.

The cocktail was a complex blend with tart, sweet, and effervescent notes.

The short answer is, I don't think so. If it works for you, then great. Circulators are really nice to have though.

My Crock-Pot was an old model that didn't work very well anymore. After trying to do some ribs, I gave up on it; never used it again. I wanted to sous vide the ribs at 176 degrees and it took about 4 1/2 hours for the Crock-Pot to get the hot tap water up to that temperature. The people who say that it doesn't matter how powerful it is because you can use hot tap water, have never waited 4 1/2 hours to get up to temperature; it was ridiculous.

To make matters worse, it didn't even hold the temperature very well, and so I really struggled with those ribs. But if it's working for you and meets your needs, then stick with it. There's nothing wrong with a basic setup.

Timm Kuster says "We need more pickled vegetables on our plates!" That's a good comment because I also think pickled vegetables are great.

I didn't do much pickling until my last cookbook Amazing Food Made Easy: Healthy Sous Vide. In that one I did 2 different pickled vegetable recipes and it showed me just how easy it is to use sous vide for pickling.

This is a really great question! We get in this kind of echo chamber when discussing the use of sous vide cooking. I feel there's two opposite groups of people. There's the one side who thinks sous vide is completely overrated; it can't do anything that you can't do with traditional cooking. Then there's the camp who thinks you should sous vide everything. You've probably seen the extreme of that in the once or twice a year joke post about "my popcorn is going in the sous vide machine".

Despite the fact I make a living from writing and talking about sous vide, I believe that not everything is better with sous vide. I really feel sous vide is another tool and depending on what you're trying to accomplish, it might be the best tool.

A lot of people are disappointed cooking fish with sous vide and I think that's because there's several ways to prepare fish. Two of the main ones are more gently cooked methods like poached or steamed fish, and higher heat methods like grilled or pan-fried fish. I believe sous vide works great for some but not all fish preparations.

However, sous vide does excels at making many types of more gentle fish preparations, such as poached or steamed fish. In addition, sous vide is also great at low temperature preparations, such as lightly cured or slightly warmed fish.

There is a lot of talk about whether you should sear your meat before sous viding it. There are two main reasons to do it. First, pre-sear before sous vide to sterilize the meat. The first one is to kill anything on the outside of the meat before you sous vide it. Generally, lactobacillus can grow at the same temperatures you sous vide at. This is also why some people say before sous vide dunk the meat in boiling water for 5 or 10 seconds, just enough to kill everything that's on the outside.

The other reason to pre-sear is to add flavor and help out your post-sear. For most things I would never recommend only pre-searing. So if you are going to pre-sear you still want to sear at the end. Pre-searing reduces the amount of time it takes to post-sear.

How do you reheat sous vide food? I have some sous vide time and temperature charts that talk about heating your food or pasteurizing your food; it all applies to tender foods. If you've cooked something ahead of time, it's now considered a tender food. The temperature doesn't matter too much as long as you're reheating it at a temperature below what you originally sous vided it at.

Searing is one of those things that some people have no problem with it and other people really struggle with it all the time. There's a lot of things you can do to help increase your success and there's many different searing methods to choose from.

Some ideas to consider are the thicker the meat is the better sear you can get without overcooking the meat. Regardless of the type of pan, the heavier it is, the more heat it holds. The hotter you can get the pan before putting the meat in, the better the sous vide sear will be.

I recently tried out the Animato Whipped Cream Dispenser. The Animato whipping siphon is an inexpensive, but high quality charger that I really liked. I really liked the way the Animato whipping siphon handles. It is heavy and feels very sturdy, especially compared to several of the less expensive siphons I have tried out. I especially like that the siphon is all metal, which is critical because I often use mine in a water bath to keep mousses and foams hot.

For my testing, I made a agar-based mango-red curry foam, a nitrous oaked negroni, and a tarragon-caper infused mousse and the whipping siphon handled admirably during all three.

When I was a kid, I looked forward to eating crispy turkey skin more than anything else at the table! If you are like that, and really, really need your super crispy skin even after sous vide, then you have a few options.

These methods work for both sous vide turkey and sous vide chicken. They also work on duck skin with a little bit of tweaking.

There are several different goals people have when cooking a turkey. They can't all be accomplished equally using sous vide so it's important to know what you are most concerned about.

If your primary goal is to serve perfectly cooked turkey to your guests, then using sous vide to cook your turkey is hard to beat. Both the white and dark meat will turn out super tender and moist. You also have exact control over the doneness, so you can go as high or low with your temperature as you want.

I was recently hired by Snake River Farms to create a How-To video showing how to sous vide prime rib. They sent me an 11 pound and a 14 pound bone-in American Gold Wagyu prime rib roast (it also comes without the bone) to do the video with and I was really impressed with their beef.

Their steak is comparably priced to other prime beef and I've been very happy with the quality of it. The marbling is exceptional and the meat is especially rich and beefy. I think their beef is a very good "special occasion" beef when you are looking to enjoy an exceptional cut.

This is a detailed review of the Anova Nano, an inexpensive sous vide immersion circulator recently released by Anova Culinary LLC.

This circulator is the latest generation of the Anova line, with the design focused primarily on reducing the cost and size of the circulator, making it available to more sous viders than ever before. But don't let the low cost fool you, this unit has the design, quality, and precision that Anova has built its reputation on. The purpose of this review is to give you the information you need to determine if the Anova Nano is the right immersion circulator for your needs.