Huh. For me, deep frying is obviously the tastiest way to cook food. But it’s a pain in the butt, and it makes the whole house smell like oil, so I only do it every year or so. Otherwise, I leave it to the professionals.
As for chicken breasts, I pretty much only cook them as part of a whole roast chicken. I don’t know why, but they come out super juicy and sweet (I use the famed Thomas Keller method). If I’m not cooking a whole chicken, I’ll just buy thighs anyway.
I’ve been wanting to try brisket that way. That’s something that takes a long time to cook no matter what method you use, and I’ve never done it in my smoker because I don’t want to spend 8 hours tending to the smoker (actually more like 9 hours if you include the time to start the coals and let the smoker come up to temerature). But I hear you can sous vide a brisket overnight, and then smoke it for a relatively short time just to develop the flavor. I’m sure barbecue traditionalists will call that cheating, but if I can get a good brisket at home without all the work of smoking it for 8 hours I am all it.
I wouldn’t call it cheating. Properly barbecued brisket is a low and slow process of rendering the internal collagen, and the smoke flavoring only penetrates a short distance into the meat. I’d say the sous vide - short smoke method is really just another way to get to the same place.
I’d think it would be difficult to sous vide a brisket though, maybe more so than smoking it. Especially a whole one-- not just a flat or a point. That would have to be an awful large plastic vacuum bag and container of water, and might be difficult to keep that amount of water to proper temperature. So I think if you’re talking about sous vide-ing a brisket it’s probably just a flat.
Smoking on the other hand, granted I’ve done it a lot so I’m used to it, but once you get a good smoking setup going, say with the minion or snake coal burning method, and get things stabilized, the process needs minimal babysitting. I’ve woken up at 4am, gotten things started, and once I was confident the temp was stabilized, went back to sleep for a couple hours.
I think this is well said. I would add that much of what one considers “overrated” depends on the era in which one learns to cook, and what tools were/became available at the time.
The rice cooker is a good example. For those of us who learned to cook rice without its benefit, we see no advantage to having yet another single-use tool cluttering up the kitchen. I may well have been an enthusiastic user if they were around, but they weren’t. I have a specific pot I use on the stove to cook perfect rice every time, and I do not find it challenging in the least. I don’t eat much rice anyway.
Similarly, since sous vide was not an available method when I learned to cook, I’m not likely to incorporate it into my methods now. I’ve had meals prepared with them and you know, ok, but I haven’t had anything I couldn’t prepare as well or better without its aid. Again, I have enough kitchen toys taking up space!
I love my grill, use it often for all sorts of things and don’t find it cumbersome even though it’s charcoal all the way, baby. I do like the propane assist to light the coals, but it’s not necessary. Using a chimney is fine, too.
I’m an old style cook who makes most things from scratch and I try to keep the tools needed to a minimum (which you would never believe if you saw all the kitchen crap I have). But I don’t grudge others any tool or method if it creates an end result that pleases them and makes cooking a more enjoyable pursuit in their world!
I tried a method on chicken one time with an old steel drum barbecue. I was burning up a bunch or plum wood from a tree I had cut down, I decided to use the coals to roast a chicken, I scraped all the coals to the left side and put the chicken on the right side. It was extremely hot guessing well over 700 degrees. The whole chicken was done in what seemed like about 5 minutes and it was by far the best chicken I had ever tasted.
I think sous vide is for the convenience. I don’t know when Mrs Cad will be home so throw in some NY strips to 125F and when she gets home sear them off. Or when you need that perfect temp on king salmon so it is rare and not raw or cooked.
Yeah, the convenience aspect of it I could certainly appreciate. If I need to be away from cooking for any period of time or have to time finishing perfectly, it would be nice to have something that I can keep in a holding pattern until I can get to it.
And this is right back to time and technique. I do a lovely French onion soup in the slow cooker, but the first step is throwing in a TON of onions (mix of sweets, yellows and reds) into an empty crock with a hefty chunk of butter and just walking away for a few hours. It can absolutely do the job, especially on high, but throwing a bunch in with everything else considering the thermal mass, and it isn’t going to do a great job.
Another common slow cooker instruction that pisses a lot of people off is “why slow cook it when you ask us to sear the meat / sautee or sweat the veggies / par cook some of the ingredients first?” It’s a legit gripe, because sometimes it seems you’re double or triple cooking the same dish. Of course, it adds flavor, ensures evenness in doneness, but it’s -also- more work.
As mentioned above, each person is going to draw the line differently about how much “extra” work they’re willing to do in search of a flavorful dish. Plenty of people out there (and not just young ones!) look at the tools, skills, and work involved and say “meh, time for pre-made / takeout / delivery / boxed mac 'n cheese”. Everything we’ve mentioned is overrated to them.
This is a very good point. My wife is the baker, not I, but when she first learned from her mother, it was all kneading by hand, and she felt that was totally not worth the final product when she could get good enough bread from a store bakery. Later, when we got into baking (a terrible mistake, we felt we could cut down carbs by not buying any store bread, that if we wanted it badly enough to bake it, we would eat less, riiiiiiiiiggggghhhhhht?) being able to use our stand mixer made all the difference in work involved!
But a single friend of ours said why bother? They swear by their bread machine, because it does the mixing, the baking, keeping warm, and was a lot less overall to clean up! And, I will grant, it isn’t amazing bread, but it’s better than most of the store-brand French or Italian loafs in the bakery isle for 2.99 a loaf still. Of course, when Covid happened, and he couldn’t get bread mixes for love or money…
Warm take, surely?
I primarily use sous vide to tenderize cheap cuts of meat. I make lots of stew type dishes using lean cheap roasts. I always cook at least 24 hours before adding it to the stew, it retains it’s texture without falling apart and become very tender to chew.
Well then, you owe @iiandyiiii a post over in the current Stew Thread!
But you don’t need the bread mixes. I used a few when I first got my bread machine, but you can make just about any traditional bread with the machines. Portioning out the individual ingredients is a bit more work that a pre-packed mix, of course, but not so much more work over all. Maybe ten minutes of effort, and then let the machine do the rest.
I know that, and even HE knows that. But if you’ll recall, during Covid it got hard to get flour, yeast, or anything else due to all the various issues and a spike in popularity in home baking. It wasn’t impossible by any means, but he was used to paying around $2.99 a box (so the same as a store loaf) and the costs and effort suddenly doubled or tripled on him.
But the bigger point was about why I and other bakers put so much effort into a product (from scratch bread) when there are faster and easier ways to accomplish it - to @Aspenglow’s point above, and to the thread in general. Or why some purist bakers might look down on us for our “from scratch bread” when we didn’t do the kneading ourselves and left it to the stand mixer even!
You could do that in your oven just as easily, actually.
What you do is smoke it for four or so hours pretty heavily, and then when it hits the “stall” (the point where evaporative cooling offsets heat gain, and the internal temp remains stable), wrap it up in foil and put it in your oven on 300, and let it rip until the internal temp gets to 203.
We eat black beans almost every week, and my wife handles them. The night before, she sautes an onion in the Instant Pot along with garlic and spices, then dumps in the beans and water and sets the whole thing to start cooking the next afternoon. Dinner the next night just requires some cheese-grating and other quick measures: the beans are ready for us when we get home.
It’s still much more convenient than stovetop beans.
I’d strongly recommend against it. I tried making whole brisket via the sous vide & smoking method 4 or 5 times, following the seriouseats.com method and then trying some variations, and it never came out good. It was tender, and smokey, but dry, dry, dry - no matter what temp I did the sous vide bath at, all the liquid came out the meat and just settled in the bag. I tried basting the finished meat with the juices in the bag, but it still had the mouth feel of dry meat with juices added.
Then I tried smoking a brisket on a basic Weber kettle grill with the America’s Test Kitchen method, and it came out infinitely better. Tender, smokey, but deliciously juicy. Sous vide has it’s advantages, but I’d never use it for brisket again.
I have far too many gadgets. Two Instant Pots, a Ninja Foodi Grill and a Ninja Flip, a basic Zojirushi rice cooker, a Wancle sous vide controller, a Japanese made waterless cooking pot, all sorts of things. I wouldn’t call any of them overrated–they’re all very good at what they are designed to do, but I do agree that the hype can be too much. Pressure cookers are great for soups and chilis and stews. The indoor grill is nice because it really is a good electric grill, the Flip is just a small countertop convection oven, the sous vide has made some good meals. (I sous vided an entire turkey last Thanksgiving and it came out great.) If anything, I’ve had the least success with the waterless pot, probably because all the instructions are in Japanese and translation software is only so good.
I agree it does dry the meat out. Ok for some applications but certainly not all.
I remember your great contributions to my Barbecued Beef Brisket thread. Yes, that ATK kettle grill brisket method is a winner.