I feel a new chapter is necessary to elaborate on my experiments in the new sous vide & slow cooker that I bought as I’m still not sure where those are going….
First a few words on how dare I buy a sous vide when I’m fiscally challenged: It was a bargain that came complete with bags and vacuum / sealing machine and cost no more than the money I saved when I bought a “display unit” dehumidifier rather than paying full price. Anyway, that’s female logic for you – I SAVED, didn’t I?!!
So the sous vide… here it is – just the right size for a one-man (err one-woman) operation:
First experiment: Chicken breast with bell peppers in lemon sauce. I was too excited to try out the new machine so I did it the lazy way and rougly chopped one onion, three mixed bell peppers, one unwaxed lemon and seasoned the chicken breast with salt and pepper, then poured in a lemon sauce that is available in pouches (Chinese style lemon chicken sauce). I know, I know… super lazy… but the sauce does actually taste rather good.
Anyway, I prepared four portions with one breast each and vacuum sealed them, then cooked them sous vide at 65C for 1:15 minutes. One hour would’ve been enough but I was super scared to cook at such low temperature and naively thought that giving in an extra 15 minutes might make it safer (well, I am still learning…).
I ate the first portion right away and put the other three in the freezer…. This was an “experiment” to find out how the frozen and reheated meals would compare to the first batch that I ate right away. While looking a little “anaemic” by my carnivorous standards, the colour of the veg wasn’t half bad! Didn’t expect that after over an hour – and it was crunchy, too, just perfect!
Slicing the chicken breast revealed the true power of the sous vide style cooking: This was undoubtedly the juiciest chicken breast I have ever prepared. The taste was incredible. Yes, I “could’ve” finished it off in the pan or under the grill, but I was just too eager to try it and it tasted to good that I didn’t think it “needed” any additional browning off (at least not on this first trial run).
Next, I tried the chicken from the freezer – two days after I had cooked it. And to my pleasant surprise I must say that it looked and tasted almost as good as the freshly made meal two days ago. The veg hadn’t lost any of its texture and the meat was still juicy as hell. Great stuff…
Check out the photo – the food may have given off some of the juice, but it wasn’t lost, it went into the sauce. So the flavour was there, full on.
And… of course… two weeks later, I had another one of the portions and was not disappointed. Check this out! The green bell pepper looked a little darker, but that’s about it. Full flavour, juicy and delicious. This means that cooking meals in advance has now become a viable option for me. (I usually insist on fresh preparation every day, because I hate reheated food and most certainly refuse to buy a microwave oven… But reheating food gently and slowly in the sous vide, I can put the frozen pouch into the preheated water and go to work; and when I come home at lunch time I have a perfect meal. In fact, if I don’t manage to get home at lunch time, I can still have it for my dinner and it will be there in the machine, waiting for me, ready to be eaten immediately – without having to worry about it being cold or overcooked.
There’s another portion in the freezer and I shall share with you all the result of reheating it next week, a month after preparation…
In the meantime, I’ve moved on to the next experiment, which was lamb. I love lamb but I’m a little fickle when it comes to lamb and cannot remember ever having eaten “all” of it. While I usually don’t shy away from fat or those collagen rich bits of gristle and cartilage on chicken, beef and pork, with lamb I tend to leave those bits behind because…. well because I usually would’ve preferred them to be more “done”, but presuming conventional cooking methods that would mean overcooking the rest of the cut. Not so in the sous vide!
I managed to procure two pieces of fresh lamb shank from Australia (the good stuff that’s usually very expensive here), and I decided to seal it with a pampering medley of fresh garlic, sage, rosemary, thyme, herb butter, ground black pepper and my fancy Persian Blue gourmet salt.
I cooked it sous vide at 60C for 8 hours – and the result was absolutely a-bloody-mazing! I served the lamb shank with a mash of parsnip, carrot and sweet potato (American yam), put through the ricer and blended with butter, salt, pepper and freshly chopped Italian basil. I brought the herb, butter and meat juice mix from the sous vide pouch to the boil in a saucepan, then filtered it through a kitchen tissue (for want of a cheesecloth…) and then reduced it with a little red wine (a nice Margaret River Cab Sav that I also drank with the meal). I finished off the shank with the blow torch to get that nice caramelized brown hue and crispy fat belt. It was glorious and I think the photo says it all… Yumster!
Getting braver by the day, I went and bought a couple of pieces of park shoulder (my favourite cut). I must admit that they were a lot bigger than I anticipated and possibly a bit too big for my sous vide, so I sealed and froze one of them and used a mix of Bavarian sweet mustard, port, herb butter, garlic, bay leaf, cloves, star anise and another few secret ingredient before sealing it for the sous vide. After cooking it at 65C for about 16 hours (more out of necessity because I had to go to work than because any recipe required it…) and then finished it off with the blow torch (I should have rather cut off the skin beforehand and roast it separately in the oven, but I’d never have the oven going when I’m not at home… Safety first! And by the time I got home, my oven would’ve taken way too long to heat up and produce the desired result. It was 10pm by the time I could eat anyway, because work kept me a little longer than expected…). Anyway, the roast itself was pretty awesome, chewy skin or not. The meat was all but falling off the bone, while still being very juicy and full of flavour. I do apologize for the poor quality of the photos, but I was very tired and eager to tuck in….LOL…
I had the rest of the pork for lunch and dinner, pulled and put on bread with mustard and the leftover gravy… Very pleased with the taste, though I know my presentation leaves a lot to be desired. After all, these were just “trial runs” for my Christmas meal and since I’m the only one eating, nobody complained.
In the meantime, I’ve been mulling some wine for my colleagues in the office and must say that it would’ve been far easier doing that in a pot on the stove, so I wouldn’t go into that much trouble for a little “Gluehwein” again…
Right now, I have cranberries in the sous vide to make a nice sweet, tangy sauce to go with the other piece of pork shoulder that I’ll be having some time over the holidays…
Excitement all the way! I’ll keep you posted; stay tuned…
Result! Cranberry sauce turned out well:
Christmas! Can’t begin to describe just how pleased I was with the outcome of my lamb shank and my roast pork shoulder.
First I had the lamb shank that I had frozen with the above mentioned aromatics and that I let cook from frozen in the sous vide for about 8 hrs. It was tender and moist and just how I like it. Served with my yam (sweet potato) / carrot / parsnip / potato, butter and fresh basil mash and nutmeg infused Brussels sprouts, it made a gread dish accompanied by my home-made cranberry sauce (see above sous vide experiment), mint sauce (from the jar) and gravy.
The pork shoulder was quite a large piece, given that I only have a small sous vide and only a miniature portable oven. The beauty of it all was that while the pork “from its frozen pouch” was slowly cooking in the sous vide for sime ten hours while I spent the glorious Christmas bank holiday shopping and having fun instead of slaving away in the kitchen. When I got hime at night, all I did was transfer the roast from the pouch to an oven tray, separsting the thick fatty skin from the meat and letting the skin roast on a rack above the baking tray with the roast. This way, the crackling got super crisp from both sides and the roast itself also crisped up while being basted by the fat dripping off the skin from above – a win win! While the roast was in the oven, I prepared the dumplings and red cabbage (lazy stuff, but remember I eat alone and it’s not worth the hassle making everything from scratch), and I used the juices from the pouch, plus tangerines, onions, herb butter, red wine and a few more spices and herbs to make a scrumotious gravy, plus I added my home-made cranberry sauce.
I guess only those readers who grew up in Germany will truly be able to understand my excitement about this meal that tasted a lot better than it looked.
I recently tried the perfect 63 degrees (Centigrade) egg… By experimenting with the temperature by only 1 degree to 64 degrees, I changed the texture from runny to creamy. Having fun with this and will continue to post updates.
And now for something completely different….
Today I made “Dulce de Leche” for the first time, and it couldn’t be easier when using the slow cooker. Filled the machine with water and set the temperature for 85C. When the temperature was reached, I put two tins of sweetened evaporated milk (cracked open a little to avoid risk of explosion) in the water, with the water level being about one centimetre below the rim of the tins. I closed the lid, careful not to let condensation water from the lid drip into the opening of the tins, and then let the milk cook for 10 hours while I went out having a good time doing other things (totally no monitoring or stirring required!).
The result is a smooth creamy Dulce de Leche with the perfect texture and a rich toffee colour. I transferred the sweet gold into a clean jam jar to put in the fridge for later. This stuff is begging for vanilla icecream and I guess tomorrow will be a terrific calorific day… Yum!
Yes, this is huge. Will leave the rest for tomoz… No matter how tough that hike was today, I know I don’t really “deserve” all that (way too much). But that wonderful piece of Australian organic Wagyu had to be used. I used very basic spices and aromatics (just fleur de sel, black pepper, garlic and herb butter actually), because I am exhausted and wanted to get dinner sorted quickly (not willing to shop for herbs at 10pm). After 2hrs at 56C in the sous vide, the beef absolutely melts in the mouth (a winner!). I did give it a quick blast with my new blow torch, but only cautiously, because I’m super scared to use it. (Got to get my confidence back after the near disaster with that other torch.) Made boiled potatoes and Haricot beans to go with it and served it with more herb butter. (Couldn’t be bothered to make a gravy either, I’m so tired…)
All in all, I’m very happy with the result even if the presentation looks more Ork Food than Haute Cuisine
In love with Hong Kong 