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Sous Vide water bath at home - is it actually usable every day?Hugh
2009-02-26 18:12:00 UTC

I’ve not done a sous vide post for a while, as you may have noticed. Now, you might have thought that was because I’d abandoned this silly cooking things in plastic fad.

You’d be wrong. In fact, these days I’m using sous vide at home almost daily.

Let’s back up a bit. What’s sous vide? Well, we explain it in our first ever episode, in fact – basically, it’s cooking using a water bath whose temperature is very precisely controlled to ensure that the reactions – and only the reactions – that you want to happen in your food actually take place. You don’t want all the water to be squeezed out of your steak, so you cook at a temperature where that won’t happen. But you do want the bacteria to die and the meat to be tenderised by the proteins breaking down, so you cook it hot enough for that to happen.

There’s lots of science and practical stuff, and it’s all very fascinating, and I recommend Douglas “I’ve been interviewed on Khymos now” Baldwin’s superb guide to the topic if you want to know more.

Most professional cooks using sous-vide will use laboratory water baths, but they cost a lot of money, so home cooks tend to either use a big pot of water and a thermometer or an improvised/cheaper sous vide water bath made with temperature controllers or an Arduino and rice cookers. And that’s the way I’d been doing sous-vide, on and off, for a year or so. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass, though – you can cook that way, but the slow cooker I was using took about 3 hours to reach the right temperature, so I didn’t exactly use it daily.

However, in December, I finally got fed up. I wanted to use sous-vide more, and I wanted to cook stuff without worrying I’d hit the wrong temperature. So,(Puts Clarkson voice on) I found this on the Internet:

That’s a full-on commercial dual waterbath. It’s not cheap, for £1000-ish (post-haggling) orders of not cheap. But it has finally allowed me to incorporate sous-vide, more or less, into my daily routine.

Is it worth it? Is sous-vide actually usable enough day-to-day that it’s worth spending that much money? Well…

Sous-vide: the downsides

Like, ooh, everything, sous-vide isn’t perfect::

  • Sous-vide isn’t quick. This has been the biggest barrier for me. The water bath heats up in under half an hour rather than 3-4 hours, so it’s a lot quicker than my previous attempts, and it will keep that temperature without any supervision effectively forever, but cooking a steak still requires about 90 minutes of warning. Having said that, this isn’t an “available time” problem, just an organisational one – my total time investment cooking anything from a steak to potatoes to lemon sole is about 3 minutes total, it’s just that I need to remember to set the water bath and seal the meat two hours or so before I eat.
  • Sous-vide isn’t very well-documented Sous-vide is precision stuff. There’s not really much room for guesstimation here. As a result, you really need a list of appropriate temperatures to cook whatever you’re thinking of cooking – sure, you could guess from something similar, but food chemistry is complicated, and there’s no guarantee you’ll get it right. For example, I’ve found that the temperature you cook chicken thighs at is more than 10 degrees different from where you cook chicken breasts. Unfortunately, there’s just not that much info out there on sous-vide temperatures. Thomas Keller’s “Under Pressure” is a godsend, or at least the 8 pages of cooking temperatures are, and Douglas’s guide is very useful too. But if something (like scallops, for example, which I cooked the other day) isn’t in the lists, you’re flying blind, and you’re less likely to get the trademark perfect sous-vide quality.
  • The Perfect Egg sucks The very first thing I did when I got my water bath was to set it to 64.5 degrees and stick an egg in there, to test out the Perfect Egg. And you know what? The Perfect Egg kinda blows. Sure, it’s very even consistency-wise, but said consistency is best described as “gloopy”. The white isn’t set at all, and whilst it tastes very creamy, it also tastes kinda, you know, slimy. And the yolk’s OK, but not on the perfect hard/soft knife edge. Ideas In Food have been questing after a better perfect egg for a while now, and I’ve got to agree, as currently defined, the “Perfect Egg” is really not that much cop.
  • Seasoning is a bit of a bitch Assuming that you don’t have a chamber vacuum sealer, yours for only £2,000 plus postage and packing, you can only seal solids in with your sous-vide food. That means that in order to season with wine, say, or lemon juice, or soy sauce, you have to remember to freeze it first. I’ve now got an icecube tray which one day will really run someone’s cocktail, but it’s a bit of a hassle to remember to freeze all these things.

Sous-vide: the upsides

  • Turns cheapness into ass-kicking goodness There are some foods which are just a total bitch to cook any way other than sous-vide, and they tend to be pretty cheap as a result. Duck legs, for example, are a total pain to cook conventionally. If you cook them in the oven, they taste nice, but shrink like a bastard and are fattier than a rib cut from Johnnie Vegas. You can confit them, but that requires more fat than – erm – I’ve done the Johnnie Vegas gag already – a lot of fat, anyway. However, they’re a total piece of cake if you’ve got access to sous-vide.

I tested this out for the first time on Monday: I took a duck leg from my overfull freezer, vacuum-sealed it with salt and pepper, and stuck it in one half of my double bath for 15 hours at 83 degrees. Then, at 6pm the next day, I extracted it, dried it a bit, poured the juices into my sauce, and seared it for a minute on either side. And the result? Well…

The sous vide duck leg was stunning. Probably one of the nicest things I’ve ever cooked. And all this for £1.50 ($2.25 ish) from Sainsburys. You can do similar things with sous vide pork belly (I get mine from the same farm that supplies Heston Blumenthal, for about £2 for a portion), oxtail, mutton (oh, my god, mutton. Incredible-tasting stuff. So good, in fact, that it deserves its own point), turkey leg (in theory – haven’t tried this yet), and dozens of other cheap-ass meats. I might well make my money back on the bath in a few years by buying duck legs rather than fillet steak. And added to that, these cuts tend to be incredibly flavourful, and quite unique.

  • Pain-in-the-ass factor: zero Well, aside from the timing issues I mentioned. But cooking in a sous-vide bath is about the easiest thing ever. Take a chicken breast, for example. It’s quite a delicate operation to get the breast perfectly cooked in a pan, takes about 10 minutes of flipping, and isn’t something you can just leave and wander off. And, of course, you’re always worried you’ve undercooked it, you’ll give yourself salmonella, vomit your guts up into the plumbing, and have to call an ambulance to help you retrieve your liver from the toilet.

Unless, that is, you have a sous-vide machine. My evening meal will tend to involve me wandering into the kitchen to cook some pasta or potatoes, wandering off again for about 20 minutes, wandering back three minutes before I serve to steam some veg, searing my steak/chicken/pork/rhino for a minute in a pan, and presto:

Nice, huh? And about five minutes’ work. You can even use sous-vide to cook meat for stir-fry or pasta, and ensure it’s perfectly done – the sous vide chicken linguine I did a while ago with 62-degree meat was amazing. If your potatoes take a bit longer to cook than you expected, that’s not a problem – anything cooked sous-vide can cheerfully be left cooking for another hour or so. You can even chill your food down to make your very own home-made ready meals, as Douglas Baldwin does, although I’ll admit I’ve not tried that yet because the idea of botulism even as a vanishing possibility gives me the Fear.

  • New flavours from old meat Have you ever tasted low-temperature cooked chicken? Then you haven’t lived. Well, you probably have. You may have a very exciting life, in fact. You may be reading this on your iPhone whilst bungee-jumping off the Grand Canyon. But this I’ll tell you – you haven’t tasted amazing chicken.

I understand that sous-vide has pretty much revolutionised chicken in restaurants – previously often considered the blandest meat, sous-vide allows it to be cooked much closer to rare, preserving its juice and its flavour whilst still making it safe to eat. At home, a 62-degree chicken breast is an utterly stunning meal – healthy, packed with taste, with the lovely hay-like barnyard taste that only really good chicken can normally manage.

And that’s not the only thing that sous-vide revolutionises. Salmon cooked so that it appears almost raw and tastes like smoked salmon, but with no smoke. Mutton – oh, my, mutton. Once again, almost uncookable outside a stew. But sous-vided at low temperature for ages, it becomes like Lamb+1 – it tastes like lamb, but richer, deeper, meatier, better in every way – oh, and cheaper, too. And the list goes on.

It’s even good for the veggies in the audience. Parsnip, for example, is a stunning, rich, unctuous revelation cooked sous-vide. Carrot, too. Sous-vide carrot is what you always imagined normal carrot would taste like if it was nice.

  • Quality without guessing Imagine having Gordon Ramsey trapped in your kitchen. Well, sous-vide cooking is like that, only much less annoying. And it doesn’t attempt to call the police. Normally, when you’re cooking, you’re estimating the effects that your work is having on your food, and turning the heat off at the point when you judge that the reactions you want have probably happened. With sous-vide, though, you’re just using Science to get your food to the point at which all the best reactions are happening, and then you’re leaving it there, until it’s done, done, done.

No undercooked chicken. No dry beef. No soggy potatoes. It’ll be as perfect as if it was being served at the French Laundry (barring seasoning and meat quality) – because you’re using the same science.

Yep, I’m liking the sous-vide. I don’t use it every day – sometimes I’ll just fry a steak or make a noodle soup with enough chillis in it to set fire to Paraguy. And I’m still learning the tricks – more on that next week, when I’m going to be doling out some sous-vide tips. But in terms of providing new cooking options, saving me money, and giving me top-quality food whenever I want it, I love my crazy-ass uber-expensive cooker.


Comments

Bob | 2009-02-26 18:26:37 UTC

Variety is the spice of life. Sous Vide is a great cooking method, but I’d get tired of it if I did it everyday. I think it is best as another tool on my belt.

Also, Some days when I cook I am really pressed for time and I am cooking more for the sake of nourishment than enjoyment. I’d like to cook out of enjoyment but that simply isn’t possible all the time.

Hugh | 2009-02-26 18:28:49 UTC

Agreed to both of those. There are some things you just can’t sous-vide, and there are times when you’re less “ah, 5pm, time to put the water bath on” and more “Oh, fuckity fuck, I’ve got to be out the door in 15 minutes…”

Chad | 2009-02-26 18:46:54 UTC

Nice post! Though… 3 hours to heat up your water in the slow cooker? Seriously? Did you start from cold?

My hot water comes out at 55 degrees, which puts me awfully close to target temperature for many things right out of the faucet. The controller takes care of the rest. I fill up the cooker first, and then do all my other prerp. Target temperature is usually reached fairly close to the time that I have the package prepped, seasoned, and sealed.

It takes a bit longer for hot sous vides, but then I’ll add a kettle of boiled water.

Robert J Lee | 2009-02-26 20:54:17 UTC

I’m still working on my sous-vide setup, which I’m building from scratch with resistors for heaters and Arduino’s and things, to keep costs reasonable.

It also heats up in about three hours. Per litre.

For testing, I’ve taken to boiling a kettle-full of water, putting it in a pan and letting it cool; I find it gets to the right temperature far faster than heating from cold.

Hugh | 2009-02-26 21:00:45 UTC

Chad – yep, three hours. I was starting from cold – but the big slowdown was actually that my PID controller tended to overshoot, then drop back off very, very slowly.

I must remember to add a kettle to my new setup, though – would speed things up considerably.

Robert – PID controllers are available for quite reasonable prices. I’m fairly sure you can get them to operate better than I managed – I never really got around to reading the manual…

Dougal Stanton | 2009-02-26 21:53:39 UTC

A grand! Christ on a bike, someone’s not been hit too heavily by the credit crunch! :-)

Hugh | 2009-02-27 16:15:47 UTC

To be fair, this was my “buy this rather than buying a new computer” purchase for the year. And a big chunk of it was Christmas present from several sources, too. I’m not actually Fred Godwin’s secret alter ego!

Janne | 2009-02-27 17:09:36 UTC

I should not have read this. Now I’m forced to by one (of course the inevitable negotiations with my wife must succeed first).

Martin | 2009-03-01 15:40:08 UTC

That is a good list of up and downsides of home sous vide cooking!

BTW, congratulations with the dual water bath. I believe it’s unstirred? An upside of that is that it’s silent (I would guess)! My stirred water bath makes so much noise, I could never have it in my kitchen. Also it’s easier to cover an unstirred water bath to reduce evaporation. I fixed my immersion circulator to a large pot of water, but have so far only used aluminum foil to cover the pot (maybe I’ll one day permanently dedicate the pot for sous vide and simply precision cut the lid to fit around the immersion circulator). You won’t believe how much water can evaporate from this setup during an overnight run at 65-75 C.

Hugh | 2009-03-03 17:57:06 UTC

Thanks, Martin!

Yep, the bath is unstirred. It is indeed almost totally silent – it’s running as I write, and I can’t hear it at all. The lids are also REALLY good – I’ve yet to do 48 hours, but I did the duck at 84 for 24 hours, and surprisingly little water escaped.

Interesting to hear the stirrer is that noisy – I’m kinda glad I didn’t go for one now!

Robin | 2009-03-06 10:18:14 UTC

I should blog about the sous-vide I’m doing. I’m using a big electric water bath kettle, normally used for “home canning”? I’m not sure how to call this in english. Weck-Style Canner/Pasteurizer?
The thing is, it costed me only 55 euros, bought at Lidl and it works fine. I checked the temperature and it won’t fluctuate more than 5 degrees Celsius.

Haven’t used it that much yet. I’ve made some confit of quaillegs and cooked some rabbitlegs and both turned out brilliantly.

I would never have invested £1000 on this, but my €55 was more than worth it. I can really recommend it.

Hugh | 2009-03-10 17:27:32 UTC

Robin – cool. My SV setup is probably overkill for most things – I bought it because I was fed up with only being able to SV one thing at a time for dinner parties, and because I wanted to be able to do 24 hour+ cooking with total confidence. But there are definitely cheaper, really good devices out there.

Ruth | 2009-03-27 02:03:05 UTC

I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Ruth

http://muffinsnow.com

Sous Vide Solutions | 2009-04-03 09:12:10 UTC

I thought I’d share this one with you for the egg problems…

A client wanted to use a dual chamber Clifton waterbath [ like your one Hugh – nice purchase, I too use this one at home – it’s next to my C70 Multivac machine! :) ] which he wanted to cook perfect soft boiled eggs in, by unskilled operators, and to have them ready is seconds, for a period lasting breakfast service [2hrs]…

This is what I worked out for him:

1. In a filled dual chamber water bath, set the left hand side to 90°C and the right hand side to 55°C [place a lid on the left side]
2. Once the bath is up to temperature, place [66g free range eggs] into the waterbath set at 90°C. These eggs need to be cooked from room temperature [20°C] and re-cover with the lid
3. Immediately start a timer for [7:30mins]
4. Once the timer has gone off, immediately lift the eggs from the left side chamber, and place into the right hand side, set at 55°C
5. Allow eggs to remain in the right side bath for a minimum of 5 minutes.
6. The eggs are now ready to serve ‘Soft Boiled’
7. The eggs will remain the same upto 4 hours after placing into the 55°C bath.

Have fun trying it out!

Olly Rouse

Robert Jueneman | 2009-04-06 22:30:42 UTC

Three hours to stabilize a rice cooker is ridiculous, as is spending 1000 euros on a water bath.

I’m using the SousVideMagic controller from www.freshmealssolutions.com, together with a 1500 watt, 10 liter Chinese-made commercial rice cooker (US$185 on sale).

Forget using the autotune function — the results are bizarre. Also forget using the Integral function, which tends to overshoot and then take too long to drop back down with an insullatd cooker. See the user manual, and assuming a 10-12 liter rice cooker, set it to P=180 (for Fahrenheit, or 100 for Celsius), I=0, and D=0. This setting should come up to temperature in less than 20 minutes from ambient, and a lot less if you use warm water to start with.

It might undershoot by a degree F for a while, but it is easier to add a little hot water to fix that than it is to fiddle with the controls, or run the risk of overshooting.

Be sure to calibrate your PID probe and your working thermometer, using a basal (ovulation) thermometer at 100F for 0.1F accuracy. I recommend the $50 All-Clad thermometer, which can be calbrated in an ice bath and is accurate to 0.1F in my tests, as calibrated against a NIST-traceable reference thermometer that reads to three decimal digits.

A deep fat fryer with a mechanical temperature control will also work — I saw an electric turkey fryer yesterday with 22 quart capabity for $79 at www.masterbuilt.com. It has no insulation, so it will not be as inclined to overshoot, but it will be much less efficient if you are cooking something for 48 hours.

Small home rice cookers are available for less than $20, and good for smaller portions fo vegetables, etc. Save your money (and counter space) and buy a second PID controller.

Nice thought about using mutton, although it is iumpossible to find in the States. But 48-hour brisket at 135F was fantastic, melt-in-your-mouth tender, whereas at 138F it was medium, rather than medium-rare, and not quite as tasty. So acurate temperature calibration is important!

Rice cookers are quite uniform in their temperature distribution — no hot spots, unlike a slow cooker or roaster. But if you are concerned, a $15 submersible pump of the type used for garden fountains will work nicely, at least at the lower temperatures used for meat. For higher temperatures, I would recommend an aquarium bubbler.

sandi baker | 2009-05-25 18:05:55 UTC

cooking chicken breast in Clifton water bath
What temp and how long please ?
I have used 82.7 for 1 hour…… think I have got it wrong …. please help !!!!
Many thanks
Sandi

Sous Vide Solutions | 2009-05-26 11:40:12 UTC

@ sandi baker…

My favorite method is this:
Corn fed chicken crown [legs / wings / parsons nose removed]
Place in 250 – 300ºC oven for 3 minutes [this shrinks the skin to the shape of the crown]
Chill, then place half a lemon in the cavity and a srig of thyme.
Full vacuum pack, place into preheated bath set at 68ºC and cook for 70 minutes.
Chill down for 90 mins in iced water.
Remove individual breasts from bone.
Re-vac pack and store below 2ºC.
To regen, heat at 55ºC for 20mins, and then remove from bag.
Dry well, season, and fry skin side down in hot oil for 1 min until golden. Add a knob of butter and baste for 30 secs.
Remove from pan, carve and serve.
Perfect roast chicken :)

Allen | 2009-07-21 14:52:53 UTC

Your egg issues may be due to a calibration problem with the temperature bath. I run a small lab and we must check all thermometers (electric and non) against a NIST traceable thermometer, which, in turn, must be re-calibrated every few years. Just because the fancy, expensive, readout SAYS the water is at 64.5C doesn’t mean it IS at 64.5C

ugg boots | 2010-08-27 13:18:31 UTC

I love it,Excellent article.I am decide to put this into use one of these days.Thank you for sharing this.To Your Success!

Dale Prentice | 2010-08-30 02:18:39 UTC

I love my sous vide the meat is so juicy, I also do kipfler potatoes with butter for 1 hour @ 65C, baby carrots for 20 minutes @ 82.5, alagrecque fennel and onions 1 hour @ 65C.

I have an Instanta SV25 and a Henkelman Jumbo 42. Being the importer for Australia has its privilages, I guess.

Dale www.sousvdieaustralia.com

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