Sous Vide Cooking

As you can see the control panel of my water bath is basic with a drainage valve, a switch on/off and a thermostat.

Contrary to an expensive water bath such as Roner Compact that costs at least EUR 2,000 my water bath doesn’t have a pump, the heating element is located under the container and is therefore not in direct contact with water. Above all my water bath do not benefit from a temperature controller.

I definitely don’t have the perfect cooker for cooking sous vide but let’s try anyway!

For my first try I took a 500g piece of beef I cooked at 58°C (136.4°F) for 1:30 . Please watch out to food safety and read this information.

It took really long before the water of the water bath reached 58°C (136.4°F), approx. 40 minutes, although I started with warm water. The temperature range was similarly to the one achieved with a halogen stove.

For food safety and flavor purposes (Maillard reaction) I seared the meat some minutes and ate the meat immediately.

The texture of the meat was amazing but a bit to raw for my liking. I think next time I’ll put it a little bit longer, 2 hours for example.

To sum up I would say my first try was a success and I really enjoyed this meat. I think I’ll try a couple of timeS cooking sous vide with this water bath before trying another kind of cooker.

Jean-François

I was happy to discover some days ago that someone already made the laborious work consisting in comparing immersion circulator prices on the net. Thanks to Molecularcuisine.org who dated this work March 20, 2009.

This comparison is available on a Wiki platform provided by Molecularcuisine.org so that you are free to amend it anytime.

The results of this work shows that the two cheapest immersion circulators available on the net are: 

• Fisher Scientific Polystat 36: USD 886 excl. sending costs and VAT (Fisher.com)
• Julabo ED: EUR 852 excl. sending cost and VAT (Laboland.com)

No need to indicate these 2 immersion circulators are the most basics available on the market sold without timer and grid protection.

Jean-François

I felt excited when receiving today the LAVA parcel as I knew this purchase represents the starting point of my experiments with sous vide cooking at low and constant temperature.

I took some nice picture showing details of this machine. This vacuum device looks easy to use and very robust. One thing is for sure…the design of the LAVA  machine is not attractive but this is not the reason why I chose it.

In my opinion, on particular thing differentiates the Lava 100 from its competitors (in the same range of price approx. EUR 250). It is the “security box” located in the middle of the panel of the vacuum machine. The main issue when vacuuming is that you can’t do it with liquids except if you benefit from a professional vacuum machine. Nevertheless accidents can also happen with professional vacuum machine. The funny video below illustrates what I am saying. This video is funny because a professional cook explains (in French) how to avoid leakage of liquids when vacuuming…the moral of this video could be “do what I say not what I am doing”.

The "security box" of the LAVA 100 vacuum machine

This “security box” allows minor mistake when vacuuming with a juicy ingredient. The manual of the LAVA also indicates a way to include, for example, a marinade in a sachet to be vacuumed. You freeze the marinade and then include it in the sachet. Why didn’t I think about it before! The manual says that you don’t need to get the marinade totally frozen, just hard enough not to leak.

Jean-François