Sous Vide Cooking

When I started cooking sous vide I had difficulties to decide which vacuum machine to purchase. Finally I bought a non professional vacuum machine (Lava 100) which is powerfull and high quality made. This vacuum machine was a big investment  (EUR 250) for my student budget.

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

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

Addélice twitted yesterday and mentioned some new information about their immersion circulator to be released mid-August.

• Microprocessor controlled
• PID temperature control
• Precision ≤ 0.2ºC
• heating power 2.000 Watt
• Timer function
• Overheating protection and low water level protection
• Acoustic and optical alert
• Circulation pump

Addélice mentions on its online shop that their sous vide appliance will be price competitive…

Here a picture taken from their site supposed to represent Addélice immersion circulator…maybe a protection grid?

Jean-François

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

Yesterday I bought in supermarket pork ribs and found interesting 24 hours pork ribs cooking recipes on internet. As soon as my girl friend came back home I share with her my excitment doing a 24 hours cooking experiment! Unfortunately I was brought down to earth since my girl friend said she was scarred the SousVideMagic could burn during our sleep! I tried to explain that thousands of people experimented 24 hours sous vide cooking recipes and that Fresh Meal Solution appliance was reliable…but she didn’t see reason.

On the other hand she is a bit right. The risk of fire is expressly underlined in Fresh Meal Solutions’ manual when the thermometer probe is taken off the rice cooker or is out of work.  This point is a major drawback of SousVideMagic equipment, no float switch (in case all water evaporated) or excess temperature protection is available. These kinds of protections are usually provided in thermal or immersion circulators.

Hooo come on….I want to try anyway! Do i have to do sous vide cooking on the sly? Will this blog lead me to a divorce ?

Jean-françois