I am just coming back from summer holidays and unfortunatly I’ll have to give back my Jubalo EC immersion circulator next week! Sniff!
In the meantime here is the result of my first try of cooking sous vide chicken legs.

I saw on Twitter a post from 3beanespresso who was asking himself why his try of sous vide chicken legs at 66°C for 38 minutes was leading to a gory result http://twitpic.com/fo3tl.
There was a long time that I have not looked at Douglas Baldwin “A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking”. I realized 3beanespresso used Douglas table. I therfore decided to try myself 64°C during 60 minutes (on chicken leg was 30 mm thick and the other one 35 mm).

I found on the net a recipe for the marinade :

• 1 tablespoon minced ginger
• 1 minced garlic clove
• 3 tablespoons Hoisinsauce
• 1 tablespoon hot chili sauce
• 1 tablespoon dark soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon honey  
• 1 tablespoon water

I took the chicken skin off and immersed the chicken legs 3 hours in the marinade. Then I took off most of the marinade surrounding the chicken before vacuum sealing the chicken legs. This way I have avoided leakage of marinade inside my non profesional vacuum sealer machine. I think next time I’ll freeze the marinade.

After cooking I seared the poultry some secondes with my blowtorch and a little bit of oil, just to make the chicken looking more appetizing.

The result was fantastic! I could realy feel the marinade and the chicken was moist and perfectly tender.
The 30 mm chicken leg was not bloody except some little red parts located close to the bones.
The 35 mm chicken leg was globaly a little bit more bloody than the 30 mm one (see the picture bellow) but the texture and the flavor were still fantastic!

I will definitly try again this recipe and next time add 10 minutes more to the time indicated in Douglas Baldwin’s table.

Jean-François

Down to my home is a fantastic fish shop. I could not resist when seeing this huge and beautiful 2 Kg Atlantic salmon. This was a great opportunity for me to try my new toy…the Julabo EC immersion circulator.

Recipe: I just put some lemon slices inside the salmon, put the salmon in pouch and vacuumed it. Temperature 56°C (138.2°F)  for 12 minutes.

This Julabo is a war machine. The  56°C (138.2°F) target temperature was reached so fast (even with my 20 litres water bath) and was very steady thanks to the water pump. Haaaaaaa! The time when I was using a gas or an halogen stove to cook sous vide is now so far to my memory. What a pleasure to switch on a machine, fix the temperature and that’s all!

The result was fantastic…juicy, looking like row but in reality cooked. I invited my neighbour who heard about my experiments and where very curious to see what is cooking sous vide with an immersion circulator.

Jean-Francois

Summer holidays started some days ago and, as promised, a University professor provided me with a old immersion circulator. He confirmed this thermal circulator has not been used with dangerous chemical or bio stuff.

Nevertheless the appliance was looking dirty with a sort of sediment all over the immersed parts. I took time to clean it gently. Here are the pics of my new toy!

So far I only checked if the Julabo was working well and plugged it to my water bath and set the temperature at 58°C.
The water pump is noisy and very powerful. I think it could cause a problem if using a small pan instead of my high water capacity water bath. The Julabo EC heated my 20 litres water bath in some minutes (the manual indicates 2,000 watts) which is noticeable compared to the 20 minutes waiting time for the gas stove, halogen stove and water bath former ous vide cooking experiments.

The only drawback of Julabo EC immersion circulator is the way to set temperature. You have to turn a wheel to set the temperature but their is a gap between the actual temperature indicated on the screen and the one set on the wheel. Therefore you need to adjust manually the weel to fix the target temperature appearing on the screen. It seems this problem doesn’t exist anymore with Julabo’s last EC version.
This version of the Julabo doesn’t benefit from a float switch which is a security problem if you want to cook for long time periods.

Jean-François

I feel very lucky and thankful to this person that I unfortunately can’t name as he told me to be very discreet (he is not really allowed to borrow me this immersion circulator). 

See you in some weeks with my new toy!