Recent Modernist Blog Posts Page 8

Lately there have been more and more sous vide machines entering the market every month. Each one has its own specifications, and pluses and minuses. Depending on what is important to you, different machines might meet your needs better than others.

To help showcase the differences between the sous vide machines, and let people know which machines perform better at certain tasks, we created our Sous Vide Benchmark Tests. We run sous vide machines through a specific set of tests so the results can be compared across machines.

This Saturday and Sunday I had the pleasure of attending the Taste Talks Brooklyn Food and Drink conference. It was a full day of talks and panel discussion by some of the best chefs in the country. This year Sean Brock from Husk was the Curator (if you haven't read his cookbook Heritage go get it now) and the event was amazing.

On Saturday there were 18 different 45-minute talks crammed into an 7 hour day with some amazing chefs. I managed to make it to the 6 panels that looked best to me and really enjoyed every one.

I really love good BBQ and I think this panel turned out to be my favorite. They had a great mix of viewpoints and while they all were coming from very different places they completely respected the opinions of the others. It made for a very dynamic panel as they addressed some heavy questions.

It included Jean-Paul from Blue Smoke, Susan Simmons from Birds & Bubbles, and Daniel Delany from Briskettown.

The What Heritage Means talk was fantastic and one of my favorites. All three panelists had different upbringing and got into cooking Heritage food in different ways. The moderator was Matt Rodbard, who wrote Koreatown (which I really need to get) and he did a good job moving the conversation around and getting everyone's viewpoint into the talk.

The panel included Suvir Saran from Tapestry, Joseph "JJ" Johnson from The Cecil and Esther Choi from mŏkbar. It was great listening to people with such passion for the food they are cooking. They also seem to view it as not just feeding people but educating them while celebrating a culture.

One huge benefit of living in Brooklyn is the easy access to events like this one, it was being held a few miles from my house. A negative is that you usually take the subway, and in late summer it's like a sauna down there. By the time my 30 minute trip was over I was dripping with sweat, not the best way to start off the conference. Luckily this first panel quickly made me glad I decided to attend.

This panel has some of the most innovative chef's in the city on it including Wylie Dufresne, Jeremiah Stone and Fabian von Hauske talking about the future of food and restaurants.

This is a great question and one that many people run into. I'll look at both sides of the question, whether to pre-sear and whether to post-sear. I'll start with the post-sear as it's the easiest to answer.

If you want good flavor and crust on your food, you will always want to sear it when it is done cooking. Even if you do a pre-sear, the crust itself will go away and can only be established by searing it after the sous vide process is over.

Very good question! And the answer is "It depends"!

Traditionally, the brine was used as a way to maintain the juiciness of food, as well as to firm up the texture and introduce flavors. This is all still true in sous vide cooking, though it isn't as apparent because the sous vide-only result is so good by itself. We will break down brining into "meat" and "fish", since they are handled differently.

This is a detailed review of the Gourmia GSV130 Digital Sous Vide Pod, an inexpensive immersion circulator manufactured by Gourmia. Near the end of 2015 they released this low-cost immersion circulator which, when attached to a suitable container, will provide an excellent water bath for sous vide cooking. If you are interested in getting involved with sous vide cooking, this review will give you all of the information you need to determine if the Gourmia is the right immersion circulator for your needs.

Sansaire has just announced their KickStarter campaign for their next iteration of their immersion circulator, the Sansaire Delta. Their campaign has also been fully backed already, with more than 900 backers so there is no risk of it not being funded.

With several of the other brands coming out with WiFi enabled devices I was expecting to hear something soon from Sansaire and I wasn't disappointed. The first thing that jumps out about the new unit is the unique design they decided on. Instead of the typical "stick" circulator, they went with a cool looking Δ shape. They say the end footprint of the circulator is smaller than the original Sansaire so hopefully it doesn't take up too much room in the pot.

I also liked that the control panel has been moved to the front. This takes it out of the way of steam from the pot (some other brands have been known to short circuit due to steam) and making it easier to reach and change the settings on.

With WiFi becoming available on the latest version of many sous vide machines, the important question is, "Do I need to have WiFi on my sous vide machine?" This article will help you answer that question. You may decide that having WiFi on your sous vide machine would be a "nice to have" but you don't envision that you would use it often. Or you may determine that WiFi is a "must-have" to simplify your life as a sous vide cook.

There are two ways to cook sous vide, one is based on the thickness of the food and the other is based on the desired tenderness. When cooking based on the thickness of the food it is helpful to have a reference guide to fall back on. I've combined several of the respectable sous vide time and temperature charts into one easy-to-use reference.

Cooking based on thickness is how PolyScience, Baldwin, and Nathan started out as they did research on food safety. Cooking sous vide based on thickness basically tells you the minimum time you can cook a piece of meat to ensure it is safe and comes up to temperature in the middle. It doesn't take into account tenderizing time or any other factors. It's often used by restaurants or home cooks who want to minimize cooking time and are using tender cuts of meat that don't need the tenderization.

On this website, as well as other places online such as the sous vide subreddit, there are often questions regarding the power consumption of sous vide cooking. Questions like the following:

• How much power is used for a typical sous vide cook?
• How much impact does the water bath insulation have on sous vide power usage?
• How do water ovens compare to sous vide immersion circulators on power usage?
• Is sous vide power usage something that we really need to be concerned about?

Motivated by this and our own curiosity, we decided to define and run a Sous Vide Power Consumption Benchmark to gather some empirical data on this interesting topic. Hopefully, this article will answer some of the questions you have regarding power usage during sous vide cooking.

Viewed from a high-level perspective, as meat is heated the components that make it up change. These changes result in structural transformations that affect the texture, juiciness, and mouthfeel of the meat. The higher the temperature of the heat applied to the meat, the faster these changes happen.

Here is a more detailed look at the process.

Raw meat is generally squishy, chewy, and full of moisture.

At 120°F (48.9°C) meat slowly begins to tenderize as the protein myosin begins to coagulate and the connective tissue in the meat begins to break down. This also causes the meat to firm up as the protein contracts. As the temperature increases so does the speed of tenderization.

I was recently interview by Cilantro as part of their Expert Interview Series. You can read about my thoughts on modernist cooking, pasta, and desserts.

This is the first of a number of vacuum sealer reviews we will be doing in the months ahead. This one is particularly exciting since it is on a chamber vacuum sealer - the PolyScience 300 Series Chamber Vacuum Sealer. This unit has nearly unlimited uses for both food storage and food preparation, especially for modernist cooking techniques such as sous vide and infusion.

We were quite fortunate to have PolyScience Culinary provide us with their 300 Series Chamber Vacuum Sealer for this review. They characterize this Vacuum Sealer as a "Maintenance-free design which provides professional-level features at a home cook's price." The short 2 minute video below will give you a quick introduction to the PolyScience unit.