sous vide poached egg

Here's a quick sous vide poach, and it works quite well. 167 degrees for 12 minutes, then ice bath to arrest cooking. The eggs can be cracked directly onto toast, or perhaps into a bowl if you want to scrape off the unset whites. But I was pretty impressed. Very little egg left in the shell.

Sous Vide Turkeyburgers

 Gave this a try. Results were good, for a turkey burger.

1.1 pounds ground turkey breast

3 tbsp chopped parsley

about a teaspoon of kosher salt

cracked pepper

garlic powder (pinch)

mustard powder (pinch)

makes three patties. load em into the bag. (Although I didn't do this, I think I would douse it in some olive oil next time)

Cook the turkey at 145 for one hour. I went about ten minutes over that, to be safe.

sear over high heat, flipping twice and then adding mix of swiss and jack cheese.

Result is as juicy as a turkeyburger would be. Our buns were awful, and this was the major disappointment. The bun makes the burger.

Turkey Breast

So... here's one that could cover a week of sandwich meat and one family dinner. Do a turkey breast!

I cured a turkey breast with a 3:2 ratio of salt to sugar. Then I bagged it and sous vide cooked it for 24 hours at 131. Then I finished it on the grill, and hit it over and over again with a butter, olive oil, garlic, lemon baste.

Nice and tender. Easy to shave off turkey for sandwiches. Easy to block out and serve with whatever else you happen to be making (mac n cheese, ancient grains, whatever!)

Plus, it's in the fridge. It lasts a week. And no bones or mess to deal with.

I would love to try this cooking with the baste and see if it works. Might be the next experiment.

Sirloin pork roast

I did not have an approved sous vide recipe for a pork loin roast. Recipes on several different reputable sites suggested that you could cook a 3-5 pound roast anywhere from 135 to 150 degrees anywhere from 2.5 to 12 hours. Christ.

I settled on a compromise. I am cooking a 2.5 pound roast at 140 degrees for five hours.

Then I'm going to douse it in a butter, apple cider vinegar, herb mixture and roast it at 450 degrees for at least ten minutes, maybe more. We shall see.

Granted, internal temp has to be right, or we may have to roast it for longer at a lower temp... here's hoping. Results to be reported.

Update 1: the bag broke sometime after an hour and a half. I rebagged it, cleaned the sous vide, and got it going again. Don't know how long it was in a hot water bath, but, well, them's the breaks.

Update 2: Followed instructions. Pork came out tough. Okay, but the bone in sirloin was a pain in the ass to cut. Need a new recipe, frankly.

Swordfish Sous Vide

One swordfish half can typically be turned into three or four steaks. For a quick weeknight meal, here's my preparation:

For the marinade and sauce:

3 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp mirin
3/4 in. ginger piece
garlic clove

microplane the ginger and garlic into the mixture. I typically do this sauce up on the weekend while doing bulk food prep, but it only takes a few minutes.

Cut swordfish, bag it with the sauce, and let it marinate for at least fifteen minutes. Meanwhile,

• Fill pot of water and heat to 128 degrees.
• Toast sesame seeds. 
• Set aside and let the saucier pan cool. 
• Measure out 1 cup of medium or short grained sushi-style rice, prepare 1 1/4 cups water
• Snap the stalks from asparagus, put on a cookie sheet, prep with olive oil, salt and pepper
• heat oven to 425 degrees (you can broil them in the summer time when you don't want to heat up the interior)

Add swordfish, with marinade, to the water when it is properly heated and cook for thirty minutes.

After ten minutes, put asparagus into the oven.

After twenty minutes, start rice.

In saucier, prepare 1 tbsp sugar, 2 tbsp plain rice vinegar, 1/2 tsp salt. Stir and cook until combined. Set aside.

When swordfish is finished, remove, and pat dry. Put sauce into a small saucepan and prepare to reduce on the stove.

Heat an iron skillet, add one pat of butter and a touch of olive oil, and sear the swordfish for thirty seconds on each side.

Plate the suckers. Then add the asparagus. Then add the rice, after coating it with the vinegar mixture. Drizzle sauce on the fish. DONE.

swordfish sous vide

Here's a super easy weekday swordfish meal.

One steak, cut into thirds. Not too thick. Quick trick: if you are saving it, put it straight in the freezer bag and freeze it.

Marinade:

3 parts soy sauce
2 parts mirin
microplaned garlic and ginger to taste. One clove garlic, a good one inch piece of ginger.

Sous vide: 130 degrees for 30 minutes.

Pull it, dry it, sear it.

Reserve the sauce. Reduce it by half, pour back over the swordfish to serve.

chuck steak

Here's one that could become a standby, although it is a bit much for three. We ate it for two nights, and still have leftovers.

Chuck Steak.

I did not even know there was such a thing, truth be told. I was familiar with the chuck roast. With ground chuck But as a steak? The front shoulder is the hardest working part of any cow. It is flavorful, to be sure, but needs slow roasting to break down the fibrous tissue. Steak hits the grill and comes off within ten minutes (maybe fifteen, depending on whether it is two or three fingers thick). No dice.

So, enter sous vide.

I seasoned the steak heartily with four seasons rub, but then added additional salt and a ton of cracked black pepper.

Then I dropped this steak into a hot water bath the night before at 129 degrees and set the timer for twenty-four hours. Come morning I added about two cups of water to the pot. It had lost another two by the twenty-four hour mark.

The grill was prepared to high heat. I melted some butter in a pan, added olive oil, salt, pepper, and red wine vinegar. The steak got the hot treatment for about three flips, one and a half minutes a side.

The cutting board got an olive oil pour, salt, and chopped parsley. I dropped the steak on that, flipped it, and sprinkled the remaining parsley over it.

The result: a tender, tasty, meaty steak. Easy for a weeknight meal. One can pan sear it rather than start a fire, to save on time and trouble.

sous vide escapades, vol. 3: pork roast

While it may seem like heresy to put a roast in a plastic bag and cook it in water, well... it is. But I did it any way.

The Joule chefstep instructions were fine, with one caveat. The pork squeezes as it cooks, so I believe it takes longer than stated. Because you have such a big window with the sous vide machine, I recommend overestimating the time in the pot.

Once done, I recommend the broiler to brown it. This will cook it to 145 degrees internally (assuming you come out of the oven at about 135) while giving you a beautiful brown crust.

sous vide escapes, vol. 2: duck breast

I have never cooked duck before. Finally tried it--duck breast. This seemed like a natural fit for sous vide.

The recipe came direct from Chefsteps and I did not vary it in any way.

There was a slightly elaborate preparation ritual that took place.

Score the skin.
Heat iron skillet, no oil.
Sear, skin side down, for three minutes.
Add garlic and thyme to iron skillet.
Sear, breast side, one minute.

Put duck and thyme and garlic into sous vide bag.
Cook at 136 degrees for about an hour (whatever the recipe says)

Reserve duck fat from pan.
Heat iron skillet. Very hot.
Sear, skin side down, for two minutes to three minutes, until brown and crispy.

It worked like a charm. I could have cooked at a lower temperature. The re-sear will cook the duck a hair more. But quite tasty.

sous vide escapades, vol. 1: poached eggs

My wife is skeptical of my sous vide stick. Perhaps not for the normal reasons (cooking in plastic? heating water?) but because it strikes her as grossly redundant. You want vegetables? Broil or saute them. You want beets? Boil them? Perfect steak? Warm the meet and then use your big green egg to work its magic.

It did not help that my first forays into sous vide land were utter disasters. I tried Broccoli, which would not sink. The result was mushy and tasteless. I cooked it too long. The beets I did not cook long enough. The asparagus turned out quite well. It was well cooked but retained some crunch. I finished it in oil flavored with lemon zest, salt, pepper, and garlic.

She was not impressed. It was missing the charred flavor that comes with broiling with olive oil and salt and pepper. "Well," I said, "you can always finish it in the pan to char it." But by then I had lost the argument--if you are going to finish with heat, why not start with it?

So today I tried eggs. This was roundly ridiculed. You need a $200 sous vide stick to boil an egg? Not boil--poach. I have tried and never succeeded at poaching eggs on the stove top. Now I had a chance to try something new.

I used the Chefsteps Sous Vide recipe, which was

147.1 degrees for 1 hour.
Dunk the eggs in cold water for a minute or two
crack them over a spoon on a plate, in order to separate the unset whites from the set whites.

The eggs slipped right out of the spoon. They picked up easily and could be served without a problem. They were also delicious and beautiful. Just like actual poached eggs.

It would be nice if the whites were a little more set--I felt like I lost a lot of the egg. There is a shorter cook time at higher heat that is supposed to achieve this:

167 degrees for 15 minutes.

I cooked a mess of eggs and left several in their shells in the fridge. I want to try them cold, and reheated, just to see if they work out either way.

Reheating should occur at:

140 degrees for 15 minutes to one hour.

So, eggs are my first big success. Next comes duck, so let's hope that one goes in the win column.

UPDATE:

Reheated the eggs and it worked just fine.