Sous-Vide in a Cooler! (A cool recipe)

It's winter time and my cooler was feeling neglected. I've been wanting to try out some sous-vide cooking and have been reading about a good hack that uses a beer cooler to hold the proper temperature. Last week, a customer with poor quality identification skills, returned a perfectly nice eye of round because it "looked bad". An eye of round is excellent for sous-vide since it really benefits from low and slow cooking.

In case you don't know, sous-vide is a method of cooking that involves putting whatever you wish to cook in a waterproof bag, and then submersing that in a water bath that is the desired internal temperature you wish to cook to. There are loads of benefits, the main one is that your meat (sous-vide can be used for fish or veggies as well, but we'll stick to meat) will be evenly cooked to the same degree of done-ness throughout. Because this is low and slow cooking, the collagens in the meat have adequate time to break down into gelatin, making the meat soft and palatable. Also, since the meat is not exposed to high temperatures that cause the proteins to contract and squeeze out moisture, sous-vide cooking creates a juicier result.

Sous-vide can be slightly riskier from a food safety point of view than conventional methods, so if you have a compromised immune system, you probably shouldn't try it. Of course, if you have a compromised immune system, you probably shouldn't try anything. For medium rare, the target temperature is about 55°C, this is well below the official "safe" temperature of 63°C° (held or "rested" for two minutes) for whole muscle cuts and 70°C for ground meats. This is normally not a problem with conventional cooking methods because the outside of the meat, which is where the bacteria are, is brought to a much higher temperature. Fortunately while a short stay at a high temperature kills nearly all bacteria, a long dip at a lower temperature, like our 55°C Medium Rare roast, does just as good a job. The danger is if the chef isn't paying attention and allows the water bath to drop into the 40°C range. Bacteria love that temperature and they start having single celled orgies and can also release toxins that, even if you later kill all the bacteria, can still send you to the outhouse - and not in the fun way. The other danger is the Clostridium botulinum bacteria, which is a hardier bug that, rather than dying at low temperatures, just goes dormant and can come alive later like some kind of microbiological zombie. Fortunately botulism is very rare and so long as you keep hot foods hot, and cool them down quickly for storage, the risk is very small. I'm pretty sure that my greatest risk of accidental death due to sous-vide cooking comes from the possibility that I might get drunk and drown in the cooler. I encourage you take steps to mitigate that risk, perhaps wear a snorkel while you work.

Now, on to the cooking! What you will need:

• Something to cook, I recommend beef, I heartily recommend an eye of round. As with all recipes, if you try this with product not sourced from The Meat Guy, you will be afflicted with boils.
• Coarse ground Sea Salt (Grosso).
• The Meat Guy's Almighty Spice.
• Beer, lots and lots of beer!
• Some rocks, cleaned and boiled in advance if possible.
• A food-safe plastic bag.

Step 1. Admire your meat.

Step 2. Rub some salt on your meat.

Step 3. Rub some spice on your meat. So good.

Step 4. Put the rocks in the bag. Put the meat in the bag. Pour some beer in the bag. The rocks weigh the bag down so that, in case you aren't able to squeeze out all the air, it will stay submerged in the bath later. The beer has two purposes; first it makes it easier to squeeze all the air out of the bag since it's kind of hard to do that with just rocks and meat; second, when the wife asks, "why are there so many empty beer bottles in the kitchen?", you can say it was "for the cooking!" 

Step 5. Squeeze all the air out of the bag. The easiest way to do this is to submerge the open bag in a big tub of water (with the opening above water), as you press it down, all the air will come up, then tie it off underwater.

Step 6. Chuck the whole thing in your cooler which is filled with water that is at a slightly higher temperature than your target. I was shooting for 55°C. I knew I was going to be gone for several hours so I filled up my cooler alternately with boiling water and "hot" water from the tap until I got it the temperature to around 62°C. I checked the temp about 10 minutes after I put in the roast and the temperature had dropped to about 58°C so I threw in one more pot of boiling water, just for good measure. I should have probably checked the temperature again a few minutes after that, but I just allowed the power of my personal awesomeness to carry me through. The more water you have in the cooler, the better it will be at holding a stable temperature, so fill the cooler up.

Step 7. Close the cooler and wait. It might not seem like it, but you now are cooking. For this example, the roast was in the cooler for about 8 hours. The cooler was never opened and the temperature of the water when I took it out was about 54°C. Sous-vide is very forgiving, a few hours more or less will barely affect the product at all. It's not uncommon for chef's to leave meat in the sous-vide bath for 2 or 3 days. If going beyond 8 hours in a cooler though, you will need to periodically add hot water to keep the temperature up. An eye of round is the tenderest of all the tough cuts of meat, if doing something that starts out more tough, 12 hours or so would probably be best.

Step 8. Take the bag from the cooler.

Step 9. The moment of truth. Notice how the shape of the roast has hardly changed at all. If this were roasted in an oven the areas with fat cover and connective tissue would have shrunk more than the red meat and it would look a little shriveled.

Perfectly done, nice even pink, and none of the juices are running out.

Step 10. Get your Maillard on. It's perfectly fine to eat the roast right now, but to make it even better, a nice crunchy crust is the way to go. The process where meat sort of caramelizes on the outside and gets all tasty is called the Maillard Reaction. It is hastened along in the presence of butter so...

Then turn off the fire alarm and add meat.

Golden!

Step Finished. Slice it up, serve it with a sprinkling of sea salt, if you have guests, tell them you've been slaving for hours.

Note: The other half of the roast I sliced thicker and cooked like steaks in the pan, fabulous!

You can Add an Eye of Round to your shopping cart right here!

Turkey up in your turkey

Yo Dawg, I heard you like turkey...
and stuffing...
and cranberry sauce...








So we put some turkey, 
and stuffing, 
and cranberry sauce,
all up in your turkey, 
stuffing, and 
cranberry sauce.

Totally Festive Stuffed Turkey Breast!

Cooking turkey is fun. Most folks only do it once or twice a year. I do it a lot more than that because, I sell turkey, but also, I like turkey. It's the least foul of all the fowls and because turkeys have great big breasticies, there are many things you can do with them. Like, for example, play LA plastic surgeon and stuff 'em up!

1. Gather around some company. Turkeys get lonely, you should always plan a feast when cooking up turkey meat. You'll need some starches, some sweets, some green stuff. Get it all together.

2. Tenderly lay out your breast and prepare it for the sacrifice.

3. Splay out the breast. Lay you knife flat, leaving about 5mm on the bottom, and cut it open into one big sheet.

4. Now prepare the sweet, sweet edible silicon replacement that we will use to pump this breast up. In a blender, throw in some of our stuffing mix, some olive oil, and about a half can of cranberry sauce. 

5. You may need to force it all down into the blender to get it all chopped up, but it should then look like this...not tasty looking at this point.

6. Now, lovingly spread it all over that breast. As always, whenever touching meat, this is a good time to whistle. It calms the meat and makes for less awkwardness should someone walk in on you.

7. Roll it all back up, not too tight, you don't want your stuffing to be forced out. Then gently slide some kebab skewers through the roll to hold it all together. Finally, rub a bit more olive oil and spice (Almighty Spice) on the top.

8. At this point, the breast is ready for some hot, hot lovin'! It needs heat, about 180ºC worth, for an hour or two. After the first few months at least, man cannot live by breast alone. Thus pick out a few side dishes and make them all supplicate themselves to the heat source of your choice. In this case, a Roaster Oven.

9. There are many ways to tell if your feast is ready. But pop-up timers are an easy one, and it just so happens that we offer them for sale.

The timer will look like this:

10. Next, let the breast rest. It's worked hard and needs some time to recover. no less than 10 minutes, 20 - 30 is better. This will allow the juices to re-align themselves, much like impotent dictatorships following the Cold War. However in you kitchen, you'll be able to reign in the blood-loss and the waiting makes for a more succulent breast.

11. Carve it on up! If you've done well, or even if you've only done it half-ass, you will be rewarded with a spirally, meaty, masterpiece.

12. This really was not that much work, it didn't cost much either, so to overcome your guilt, you should serve this on some sort of big wooden plank raised up off the floor. There should be fire, captured on a stick, plates and utensils that peasants can wash later, and plenty of God's inebrious nectar straight from the bottle.

Of course, if you've done everything to perfection, dirty little street urchins will invade you house and try and steal your turkey. Really bad "Yo Mama" jokes will usually drive them away...

Happy Turkey Hunting!

The next time I make this I might do a couple things differently:

• Rub a bit of salt on the breast once it is all spayed out. This will extract some protein and make it all stick together a bit better. A bit of pounding with a meat mallet would do the same thing.
• It would probably be better to turn the bread portion of the stuffing into crumbs and then mix in the liquid. This would make it a little dryer so it sucks up more of the turkey juices.
• I'd drink more wine. I've never seen a recipe that couldn't be improved by the cook drinking more wine.

www.TheMeatGuy.jp 

Turkey Confit in a Rice Cooker

This is an oldy but a goody.

I’m always looking for new ways to cook stuff, partly from curiosity, partly because my oven sucks. I was speaking with the chef at one of our restaurant accounts and got interested in confit. Confit, which is French so the “t” is silent for some reason (to get the pronunciation just right you should slur like you’ve just polished off a sixer of chu-hi), is an old-fashioned way to cook and preserve meat.Traditionally you salt the meat and then cook it in it’s own rendered fat, duck leg confit is a staple on the menu at most French restaurants.

Even though confit is cooking in oil, it’s different than frying, it is slow cooking at low temperatures for several hours. I’m not really good at doing anything that takes several hours, both my attention span and memory are so short that the last time I tried to make regular coffee as opposed to instant, the pot sat for two day before I remembered to turn it on. However, I am really good at chucking meat at a heat source and turning up later to see if it’s ready. It turns out that I have an appliance in my kitchen that is perfect for this sort of thing—the rice cooker!

The way a rice cooker works is that it does three basic things. First it brings the pot to a boil under pressure to capture the steam, next it holds that temperature for about 15 minutes to allow the rice to absorb the moisture, then it goes into a “warm” phase to keep it hot. So it quickly heats to 100°C, then drops down to around 50 or 60°C, hot enough to cook and kill any bacteria, but too cool to fry, perfect for confit.

I started with a nice little 7 pound turkey that I had laying around and a pulled out the timer and the plastic thing that holds the legs together, you don't want to cook these in oil.

My rice cooker is not so big so I cut it up into pieces, if you have a large enough cooker, you could do this with the whole bird, that would require a lot of oil. I broke the bird into the leg and thigh portions, wings, back, and breast. There is not much meat on the back so I threw that part into the soup pot along with one wing that wouldn’t fit.

Next I scored it so that the spice rub would penetrate into the meat, then I rubbed it all over with some of our Almighty Spice (oh so very mighty!). This bird was pre-brined so I didn't really need to do much more. If you are working with a bird that has not been brined, then you should generously rub some salt on it as well and let it sit for 10 or 20 minutes.

Pack it into the pot of the rice cooker and fill it full of olive oil. Theoretically you could use a differrent type of oil, but olive oil adds some flavor without greasiness and doesn't produce any bitter aftertastes.

Normally when cooking rice the cooker needs about 10 or 15 minutes to heat up, then it switches into warmer mode. Because I had the bowl totally filled with turkey and oil it took about an hour for it to heat up. I then got drunk, went to a nudie-bar, got kicked out, passed out on the sidewalk, got a lift home from a scooter-gang, and stumbled in to see that my rice cooker had been warming for 6 hours. You can do whatever you want while it cooks, you don't have to do what I did.

I had the munchies somethin' fierce so I pulled the turkey out of the cooker and let them rest on some racks for about 10 minutes. You need to let it rest because the turkey gets tired after all that cooking, and you should probably give yourself a little break as well. You deserve it!

After a little rest, just start carving. This bird came out perfectly done. The meat could be pulled off the bone but it wasn't flaky. It was not greasy or oily AT ALL! The herbs and spices really penetrated and the only way I could tell that it was cooked in olive oil is that the fruity flavor of the oil was infused throughout the meat. This was, by far, the best tasting turkey I've ever had! I recommend you give it a try.

Edit:  I've been asked if it's possible to reduce the oil consumption and it is! Take the turkey, cut it into small pieces, pack it into ziplock bags filled with olive oil. Squeeze out all the air. Then fill your rice cooker with water rather than oil and you will get the same result. Since oil is lighter than water, your bags will float, so it will work better if you weight them down with a rock or something.

Get your turkey here!

-TMG