Will do! Might be a while until I do it again, as I’m really busy at the moment & kinda too poor to buy things like steak.
First thing I would try though (following what Athena said) is just how low your oven will go (it sounds like it should go low enough, but it might not be accurate that low). Can you see through the glass in yours, well enough to be able to read a thermometer? Then put a separate thermometer in the oven, to find out what you need to set the oven to to get the correct temp.
Mine doesn’t show smaller increments between 50-0 C, so I adjust based on what the thermometer inside the oven says. In my experience, adjusting the oven temp a little if it drops or rises doesn’t matter too much, the water temp will stay the same for a while longer.
Then you need a thermometer on a long stick so you can see the temp of the water in the pot. I just put the lid on the pot and leave the thermometer sticking out.
I haven’t seen it as a hack on the internet either, which surprised me. Specially as it works with a beer cooler, it should work just helping the temp to stay the same by having it within an environment at the right temp, right? Because other than that, it’s basically the same as the beer cooler hack…
Let me know when you try it, I’m excited for someone else to try! PM me if the thread has zombified by then
Okay, found this link on using an oven after I did my first sous-vide steak.
If your oven temperature goes low, this is a piece of cake. Set it on convection. Pre-heat a big pot of water to the approximate temperature, and then put in the pre-heated oven at the approximate temperature + ~10 degrees. Eg, target temp is 130 degrees then the over should be about 140 owing to inefficiency of heat transfer. Toss in the vacuum sealed frozen steaks (we happened to have some in the freezer) and put the lid on.
I followed this steak cooking time chart according to thickness guide, and let it bathe for 90 minutes (much longer than the minimum). Pan seared it. Then it was like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Even my wife, who never lets me in the kitchen, thought it was a winner.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy. I’ll be doing steaks for the whole family tonight.
Yay, success! Glad it went well, and for some reason I am somewhat relieved that I am not the only one in the world doing this, I was starting to feel a little crazy…
I’m surprised sous vide still hasn’t caught on in a meaningful way, good to see people are trying it.
For anyone tempted, keep in mind that your tap water comes out around 140F, depending on how you set your water heater. I’ve got a medium sized cooler that fits in my kitchen sink. Throw a steak in a quality ziplock bag with some seasoning. Throw the bags into the cooler with hot water. Give it about an hour, then sear. Salmon done this way takes about 10min, scallops even less.
I ended up building a simple controller with a few parts off Amazon.com for about $40 that works as well as any of the thousand dollar versions I’ve used at work. Doesn’t take much.
This is basically what I’ve done. The tap water is about 130F, so it takes some boiling water to bring it up to temperature and maintain it. My first attempt was a rib roast. I just cut off the rib section, retied it into a cylindrical shape, and kept immersed at just over 140F for 12 hours. It was piece of quality meat so there was no doubt it would come out good no matter what. Tomorrow I’ll do a piece of bottom round for 12 hours to see how it does. I also have the ribs from the roast in the freezer so I’ll try them out after I get a heating element so I don’t have to stay up all night checking the water temp if it takes a long time. This is certainly going to be an easy way to make poached salmon.
Am I misreading that chart, or does it really say (top-left item in the chart) that you need to sous vide a 70mm (2 3/4") thick fridge-temperature steak for minimum of 6 hours and 25 minutes for it to come up to temperature? I’m sure they don’t mean that, but I don’t see another way to read it. Help me out here.
You don’t just need to get it up to temp. You have to hold it there long enough to kill any pathogens. The lower the temp, the longer you have to keep it there to be sure it’s safe. Most of the charts are based upon govt tables telling how long you have to hold at a specific temp to kill thins like e coli.
Ah, okay. I’ve sous vided >2" steaks for an hour or so, and it was certainly not raw, or even cool, in the middle. I can’t imagine you’d need 5 more hours to meet gov regs. Weird.
Fair point. Even with that, though, the chart still seems broken to me because:
a) The temp says “any”, not 130-135F. I think an hour at say 1000F will kill those bacteria. Yeah, its a nitpicky point, and I’ll stop being a smartass. But also:
b) By the chart, a 5mm steak needs just 2 minutes at that 130-135F to kill all those bacteria. Not a very long time, right? If it takes so long at that temperature for a 2 3/4" steak, there should be some built-in minimum time that all of the meat needs to be at that temperature. Apparently that time is in the 2 minute range, not the 6+ hour range.
I’m guessing it’s some sort of bacteria-killed-per-minute standard, so more meat = more possible bacteria = more minutes to kill some minimum number of them. But I’m totally guessing at this. And, yeah, I can find out, I have the internet. I just find that chart pretty weird, but it’s probably correct for what it’s trying to do, if not very useful for us home-sous viders.
There’s a difference between cooking to a temperature suitable for eating immediately and the time and temperature required to pasteurize. IIRC you need to maintain 141F for 120 minutes to pasteurize. This means if the meat is kept in it’s vacuum sealed bad it can be maintained for days in a refrigerator. With lower temperatures and times you need to eat the food withing 4 hours because bacterial growth continues at a level which eventually make the food dangerous to eat. At higher temperatures it takes less time. But you also need more time to tenderize tough foods.
Ah, an excellent point about pasteurizing. Again, I must be misreading the chart, because it looks like the chart says (top line) that to pasteurize a 2 3/4" steak at 55C/131F, it takes 5hrs, 15min, starting from 5C. Starting from the same temperature and not pasteurizing takes 6hrs, 25mins. Shouldn’t pasteurizing take longer?
Re: tenderizing, the article accompanying the chart explains that the times are only for bringing meat up to temperature, not for tenderizing.
I feel like I’ve really hijacked the thread looking at this chart, if so I apologize. I’m just frankly a bit puzzled. Tell me to knock it off and I will.
Well I can’t tell what that chart is trying to say, but I’d assume any refers to temperatures below 55C, so it takes longer to get the meat tender, not just up to temperature. Since there are so many variables to deal with, I’m not sure how helpful those cards are, at least for meat. I’d be expecting to keep meat in much longer than the minimum time anyway.
The Baldwin PDF linked to in an earlier post starts with a detailed explanation of cooking times, thickness, and pasteurization.
It is critical to follow proper procedures when cooking sous vide. There are some very nasty bacteria that thrive in the oxygen-free environment of a vacuum sealed bag. New York City actually banned sous vide cooking for a while and now requires restaurants to follow very detailed procedures.
My favorite recipes so far were 24 hour flank steak at 130, and a fabulous recipe for carnitas that involved cutting up a pork shoulder into chunks, brining it, then tossing the chunks with spices and putting them in at a high temp (160, maybe? If I weren’t on my phone I’d post a link) for something like three days. Fry them up in lard until the outsides crisp up, add a little fresh cilantro and lime juice, and holy God.
A big pot of water in a low temperature oven works well for up to 4 steaks. The other night I tried with about 7 steaks and it didn’t work so well. I had to crank up the oven temperature about 50 degrees above the target water temp. I stirred the steaks around a couple of times but should have done so a lot more. A couple of steaks came out beautifully, a couple were good but very very very rare.
There are probably some other tricks about using a big pot of water in a low temperature oven, but it certainly works.
anyone have a good French ox tail sous vide recipe?
Since I’m home today all day for the storm I’m going to try the water pot in the oven trick. I don’t have a fancy oven so lowest temp for me is 170F. I have a thermometer set to alarm if the temp of the water goes above 132. So far so good.
I recently rigged up a PID controller for my smoker that can do dual-duty as a sous-vide controller with a crock-pot, and it cost me about $80-100 all said and done.
(Auber 2352 1/16 DIN PID controller, 25A SSR, Radio shack project box, surface mount heat sink, cheap extension cord)
The sous vide controller plugs into the wall then your cooking device plugs into that.
At least if you are talking about that basic sous vide controller you would use say in a large crock pot.
Your device needs to be able to shut the current off to the cooking device.
If you have what I think you do that uses a fan and such to stoke the smoker, right?
