Thoughts on sous vide cooking machines?

Undeniably effective but gay as fuck and exclusively for beta faggots who have no pride.

And restaurants.

>cooking in plastic
SOOOOYYYBOOOYYYY

why would a restaurant use these? don't they take much longer to cook your food?

It's amazing for prep. With a commercial one you can do huge batches to exact temps and then when you're serving it's basically just heating it up and adding color. It's the steakhouses ultimate cheat.

If your oven has a slot for attaching a temperature probe, you can even just use a dish of water inside the oven as a rudimentary sous vide bath. The temperature control probably won't be very precise though (you can't do much better than +/-5 degrees with an oven thermostat) which kind of defeats the purpose for things like meat.

Can you explain how that works a bit? Do they just have a bunch of steaks slow boiling and then just grab one when it is ordered? I thought it took an hour or so to sous vide these fucking steaks. Do they need to have steaks boiling at diff temps for rare, well done, etc? or do they just take make them all rare and finish them off as ordered?

Well the whole point of sous vide is that you can control the exact serving temperature and hold it there indefinitely, so I guess you could have just a rack of baths for each desired temperature, and keep pulling steaks out of them all night. Even if it takes hours to get up to the desired temperature, once it's there that's where it stays. I don't know how they do it though, I hope that guy who does comes back with an answer.

Surely they have to unwrap them and sear the outside to make it look appetizing, so maybe they do just finish off the cooking that way.

Kinda, but nothing is ever boiling, it uses warm water to raise the temperature gradually without over cooking. It may actually take 3 hours to properly sous vide a thick steak.

With a commercial water bath you could simultaneously cook many steaks, then cool them immediately to stabilize their temps. You could do batches for different steak doness. The benefit is that this is a very passive process so you could be pre-cooking the steaks while you do normal prep processes.

Plus you can put butter, herbs, and marinades into the vacuum packs to infuse flavors with the meat while it's cooking.

It's also amazing for roasts, kinda like the ultimate slow cooking machine.

More info on this? I have a crockpot, also an Amazon account.

Once it comes time to serve you finish them in a pan or on a grill.

Also apparently some places do have sous vide drawers for desired doneness, I've just never seen it.

>£75
>Expensive
You sear it numb nuts
>Look appetising
>Mallard reaction

i was a long time hater on this. but i finally broke down and got one since the amazon truck was selling one from my work just a block away. i used this over the weekend to cook some steaks. wow. if it's too cold to bbq outside and you don't mind waiting 90-120 minutes, this is the way to go. i'm making a rib roast using SV this thanksgiving. should be good judging by how the rib eyes turned out. just in case you were wondering, i seared using a 4000° torch.

>and hold it there indefinitely
oh okay, i didn't know they could just hold it at the desired doneness for a long time, that makes it pretty useful.

>£
How much is that in real money?

i used ziploc (brand name, not nigger tier) bags. water displacement seal method. no need for a vacuum sealer taking up more counter space. i already have commercial slicer taking up valuable space.

how did you season the steaks before it went into the sous vide bag?

you can buy an offbrand anova imitation sous vide for $40

>Plus you can put butter, herbs, and marinades into the vacuum packs to infuse flavors with the meat while it's cooking.
I just realized, Trader Joe's sells a variety of meats sealed in bags with various marinades. Could I just buy one of those, throw it in a homemade sous vide bath, and enjoy a perfect delicious steak a few hours later?

Many burgers.

0.0133366 Bitcoin

i used pepper and very little garlic salt. probably 3:1 ratio. then i topped the finished steaks with compound butter.

Try one of these. They're $35, I own one, they work perfectly.
amazon.com/Inkbird-Itc-308-Temperature-Controller-Thermostat/dp/B01MDSWXY4
The downside to the $15 temperature controller is it's just a bare electrical component. You have to get a box and the plugs and wire it all up yourself. If you know nothing about electronics, the prebuilt temperature controller is the way to go.

they tend to end up being really salty, FYI. too much marinade (salt) cures the meat when cooking for 2 (or more) hours.

Bout 100 freedom bucks

oh. and on sunday i tried it with pepper, garlic salt, and fresh thyme & rosemary sprigs. turned out great. even better than saturday's.

Do you know how a crockpot (or a rice cooker or a hot water kettle or w/e) works? It's very simple, there is a heating element and a thermal switch that cuts off when the temperature rises above a certain point. A rice cooker is a simple example to understand because it only has one temperature setting. The rice is fully cooked when all the water has evaporated or been absorbed into the rice. How does the rice cooker know when there is no more liquid water left in the pot? Physics makes it simple: the temperature of liquid water can't (normally) increase above the boiling point of 100 C, so once the thermal switch is calibrated to turn the heating element off once the temperature exceeds 100 C. When all the water is gone, the temperature can rise above that threshold and the cooker turns itself off.

If you replace the normal temperature sensor in your crockpot (or w/e) with one you can control, you can make it so that the heating element turns on whenever it is below the desired temp, and turns off whenever it is above. It works just like a thermostat in your house. To make that modification yourself you would need to be able to figure out how to rewire the crockpot with your temperature controller.

tepid water hospital food

naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Maybe there is a caveat about that, since the other guy mentioned lowering the temperature to "stabilize." The idea is that the meat doesn't just keep cooking though. If the steak is just held at 140 degrees it's not going to cook to more doneness than whatever 140 degrees corresponds to. Heat flows from hot to cold, so if the steak and the bath are the same temperature, there is not going to be any more net flow of heat energy into the steak.

>(salt) cures the meat when cooking for 2 (or more) hours.
Oh, good point. But the bag itself would hold up? If I see a mild looking flavor I might give it a try some time.

How do you figure out how to adjust the temperature and cooking time for different cuts of meat or even seafood? They all vary in thickness etc. Is there much rial and error to good results?

Do you have access to the internet?

yeah, the sealed bags will hold up. they are designed to withstand boiling temps (which sous vide never reaches). plus it's food grade (BPA free), so you don't have to worry about the packaging. if you can find something milder or even a pre-bagged plain piece of meat, then you've found gold.

No

the anova i have actually connects to your smartphone and will control all the temps and times for you. i have the wifi version which is more reliable than using the bluetooth (that is unless you plan on staying in the kitchen). i think the rule of thumb is 45-60 mins per inch. just make sure you cook above 129 (bacteria likes to fuck with your food below that). that's why you see a lot of SV recipes utilize temp around 130-133. of course all the bacteria technically is found on the surface, so if you torch (or sear via cast iron) you should be good to go.

That's a pity.
douglasbaldwin.com/sous-vide.html
chefsteps.com/activities/sous-vide-time-and-temperature-guide

They can make your steaks very tender although it takes a few hours to do it properly. I use it a few times a month.

>How are you cooking your steaks?
>We boil zem in a ziploc bag?
>FUCK ME

>They all vary in thickness etc.
That's the beauty of sous vide. The thickness will effect the cooking time, but the temperature of the meat can never rise above the temperature of the bath. You just set it to the temperature you want it to be when it's done, and wait for it to warm up. Just use the normal temperature/doneness guidelines.

vac-seal and proprietary bags aren't necessary unless you are A) doing really funky shit or B) autistic about MUH PLASTICS

What prevents it from becoming a pitri dish for nasty bacteria if you don't use something properly sealed and sanitized? I don't think the cooking temperature is high enough to be considered a safe holding temperature for as many hours as you need.

different things can be held at desired temps for different amounts of time, see chefsteps.com/activities/sous-vide-time-and-temperature-guide
Post bag Sear time on steaks in negligible, like sub 30 seconds each side.
generally it is proper temperature, and searing afterwords can help if you're worried. also, assuming you have good meat and practice decent kitchen hygiene outside of the bag, there won't be many things that would be a problem anyways.
Further reading: chefsteps.com/activities/a-complete-guide-to-sous-vide-packaging-safety-sustainability-and-sourcing

There is literally no reason for it to "connect to your smartphone", the amount of bullshit needed for that, vs a simple PID controller, is insane.

The smartphone shit is just so they can force you to connect it to facebook and the mandatory bluetooth optical combination dildo vibrator speculum electro-stim unit which needs to be butt plugged in your rectum, paired with the digitally signed RFID authentication unit that contains your SSN and blood type, and livestreamed to Anova servers 24/7 or any attempt to eat the food becomes an instant DMCA violation and they'll send their legal attack dogs after you.

now you fucking tell me

>cooking shit in a carcinogenic material that leaches synthetic estrogen

I got one a few years back for Christmas. Its pretty nice but I don't use it often. Definitely the best way to cook chicken breast.

It's gotten a lot of press for steak, but chicken is where it really shines in my opinion. Chicken is rarely the centerpiece of any meal, at least in terms of flavour. It's the white rice of the meat world. However, it needs to be cooked properly or it comes out like complete shit, and it's fairly labour intensive, even compared to steak. If you can (words are hard) section? a chicken, then sous vide what you want to eat, all that dicking around with the fucking bird is done and you can focus on making sauces and sides, which is really where you turn chicken into an actually decent meal.

On a tangent, but this is kind of the same reason a rice cooker is useful, you just fucking turn it on and shit works. Yeah, cooking rice isn't hard, but my stove doesn't have 8 jets and I don't need another thing to deal with. I wouldn't really trust a rice cooker with anything other than rice, and I wouldn't sous vide any decent meat, if only for the fact that I still want to pretend that I'm a good cook.

The other absolute A game sous vide dish is pork tenderloin, that's a really really easy winner.

Use food grade BPA-free, also some things can be immersion cooked in glass canning jars.

i did a SV of bacon this morning. seared it on one side only. it was terrific.

memes until they are 30 bucks