Thread: Sous vide
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Old Mon, Feb-09-09, 10:13
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awriter awriter is offline
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Plan: Kwasniewski Ratios
Stats: 225/158/145 Female 65
BF:53%/24%/20%
Progress: 84%
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nancy LC
Interesting! Do you think the temperature is pretty accurate and steady?

Do you mean in the convection/microwave? It appears to be accurate. Steady is another issue. Convection helps with accuracy and steadiness because the hot air is constantly circulated throughout the oven. However, as with all ovens, it works by bringing temps up to a certain point, and then turning off the 'burner' until it drops to a certain point, which turns it on again. "Keeping Constant" is probably one of the main reasons the commercial sous vide equipment is so expensive.

The bigger problem, I think, is knowing when a food has reached the magic number! If you're doing eggs in the shell, for instance, without a chart created by someone who's gone before, how would you know? Do I let the egg go for an hour? Fifteen minutes? Etc.

Quote:
I was thinking my poached eggs are almost sous vide (without the vacuum), as I hold them at just before a simmer. They are really good too, quite creamy without any of the chalkiness fried egg yolks get.

Good point. And of course you can see the eggs themselves when you poach, and you know when they are 'done'. Still, I've got plenty of eggs so I'm going to try it in the shell, in a simple water bath. I've got a special 'simmer' burner on my range.

First I'll simply try to keep water at 148 degrees (using my probe and moving the pot on and off the burner as required) and put in room temperature eggs. Every five or ten minutes I'll take an egg out and put it in the palm of my hand. Within a few seconds either the egg will still feel cold, or it will have reached the temp of the water (which I'll also put on my palm as a baseline). I'll try and get the egg temp as close to the water temp by feel as I can before cracking the shell to check on the contents.

Worse case: I'll put an undercooked egg in a the micro with some butter for a few seconds and eat it. And I'll have a few more eggs still in the water, and will continue to time and test. May take me an hour or two to eat breakfast; the reverse of IF, I guess.

If I can get this to work, I'll then try it in a water bath in the convection/microwave for the same time and see what differences, if any, occur. More delicious eggs I'll be forced to eat. And then I think I'll try again on the range, this time 'poaching' the eggs in a 148 degree butter bath. Ah, the sacrifices we make for science!
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