Their is now a long time that I wanted to cook sous vide salmon with Turbigomme and a probe. Viktor Stampfer book indicates salmon should be cooked 54°C for 10 minutes (core temperature) with a 56°C water bath. In my former experiment I raised the time to 14 minutes, as I didn’t have any equipment to take the core temperature.

This time I purchased Turbigomme on a French site called svdiffusion.com. Turbigomme is a gum made to be glued on a pouch. The gum is supposed to be airtight if you go through with a probe. I bought it 8.85 euros (3 meters) + 10.94 euros shipping costs! I was really mad when I reallized that SVdiffusion cheated on shipping costs. Who can believe that a 110 gr parcel could be sent for 11 euros!

Anyway I have now everything: 4 cm Turbigomme piece, a 3 mm Mastrad probe (I know this is very thick but this is a cheap thermometer – less than 40 euros) , 2 rubbers to fix the Turbigomme in the case the self-adhesive would not be enough and a nice piece of salmon.

I glued the Turbigomme on the pouch, strapped it with rubbers and pierced the all with my 3 mm probe. I didn’t face any issue during this process. The pouch did not look like “loosing vacuum”.

During the cooking process I was doubting if air was not coming inside the pouch as I could see some bubbles appearing. I was feeling more comfortable when I saw the other salmon vacuum pouch I made without Turbigomme was doing the same…

To sum up I would say my experiment was successful. 8 euros Turbigomme (plus shipping costs!) and a cheap thermometer (40 euros max.) where enough compared to those very expensive 1 mm hypodermic thermocouples probes (approx. 200 euros) and thermometer.

My only issue was the cooking time. The starting temperature of the salmon was 8°C and it took 30 minutes to reach 54°C core temperature. My water bath was set at 56°C. I decided to take the salmon of the water bath as soon as the core temperature reached 54°C (instead of waiting 10 more minutes as suggested by Viktor Stampfer).

I was afraid the salmon would be overcooked. It was the case…nothing to do with a raw appearance salmon!

Next time I’ll try 72 hours pork ribs. No need of an internal probe for this kind of cooking!!!

Jean-François

When surfing on the excellent CookingIssues.wordpress.com site I found a very interesting post about vacuum machines affecting textures of ingredients (click on the image bellow for a direct link to the post).
To sum up this post I would say that there is no need of a powerful vacuum machine for vegetable, fish and poultry (such as chicken). CookingIssues even says that for some ingredients such as chicken, the more you increase the amount of vacuum the more you affect the texture and the flavour! On the other hand CookingIssues did not mention any drawback regarding high amount of vacuum for meat.

Just to say that sous vide cooking at home is definitely possible with a cheap vacuum machine. Remember that the issue consisting in sealing sous vide a marinate can be solved by freezing the marinate.

Jean-françois

Viktor’s Stampfer’s book indicates:

• for the salmon:  54°C core temperature (129.2°F) for 10 minutes with a water bath at 56°C (138.2F). I don’t have a digital internal probe to take the core temperature of the salmon. Therefore I raised the global cooking time at 14 minutes.
• for asparagus: 82°C (179.6F) for 45 minutes.

I cooked sous vide these 2 ingredients with my new equipment: the SousVideMagic 1500B of Fresh Meal Solution. So far I am very happy with this equipment which works very very well.

The salmon was fantastic! It was looking a bit raw but in fact it was cooked. The salmon kept all its juicy texture. I loved it. I only regret that I didn’t take the time to put the salmon 2 minutes in the oven so that the appearance would not look white on the outside of the salmon (see the picture below).

I had more problem with the asparagus that I didn’t succeed to cook sous vide at the temperatures recommended by Viktor Stampfer.
45 minutes was not enough to cook the asparagus. I had to wait approx 1:20 to get them cooked at 82°C (179.6F). I really don’t know what happened. Could anybody give me a hint? Anyway, after 1:20 the asparagus was good but I can’t say that I ate something unusual.

Jean-François

The first table is a compilation of Viktor Stampfer’s recipes about cooking fish and ICC Roner Compact manual cooking information. The tables indicate both the core temperature of the fish and the cooking time at this temperature.

The second table illustrates the different core temperatures (not available for Heiko Antoniewicz) and cooking times chosen for the same fish by different cooks.

Table 1

(*) If core temp. available otherwise cooking time at water bath temp.

Table 2

(*) If core temp. available otherwise cooking time at water bath temp.

Jean-François

Jean-François