Sous vide duck

I recently upgraded from my DIY sous vide controller to a Anova One sous immersion circulator. While my old rig was good, it was too much hassle to set it up every time so I wasn't cooking sous vide as often as I would have liked. Since getting the Anova I've been cooking sous vide way more often. Most recently, I cooked duck sous vide (for why, see Stacy's blog post here).

Unfortunately, I'm low on pictures, but in short, I broke down the duck into parts and cooked each part differently. Stacy made a soup with the bones. I sous vided the breast, skin on, to medium rare (54C/129F), then seared it skin-side-down in a pan to crisp the skin. No pictures of this, since we ate it Friday night. I served it with an orange sauce made with reduced orange juice, orange rind, sugar and triple sec.

I deskinned and cured the legs and thighs overnight using a dry cure of salt, coriander, black pepper, and dried thyme. Then, I cut up the skin and rendered out the fat, and made gribenes from the skin. After the overnight cure (~10hrs), I rinsed off the cure and vacuum bagged the legs and thighs with some rendered duck fat, fresh thyme and orange zest, and cooked them sous vide for approximately 25 hours at 65C/149F.

I pulled it off the bone, and served it warm, on a salad of arugula, red onion, and mandarin oranges, with a dressing made with the orange sauce from the previous night, rice wine vinegar and olive oil, and topped with gribenes "croutons":

Sous vide burgers

Quick on the heels of upgrading my sous vide controller last week, this past Sunday we had some friends over for a "barbecue" where I made sous vide burgers. The recipe was "simple," it only had two ingredients:

1. grind up a bunch of meat (sorry, didn't take any pictures of this)
2. add an amount of salt equal to 0.8% times the weight of the meat
3. shape into 160g patties, seal in bags (with about a teaspoon of oil [fine, three ingredients]) using the water-displacement method, and let sit in the fridge for an hour
4. cook sous vide at 131F (55C) until burgers reach a core temperature of 129F (54C)
5. sear on grill or with blowtorch
6. eat!

Here are all the burgers cooking:

Although it looks like the temperature is actually 2.2 degrees too hot, I haven't fixed the offset on the PID yet. It's actually at 55C.

The final result, perfectly medium-rare through and through, on a bun with mustard, tomato paste and vidalia onion:

DIY Immersion Circulator -- Version 2

I decided to upgrade my previous method of cooking sous vide. As I noted in that post, the original version left much to be desired in terms of safety and reliability. Although I originally intended to pack all the electronics into a PC power supply case, as a test of concept I used a plastic storage container:

With this arrangement I had a lot of space to fit everything. You'll also note the outlet on the front. This outlet is controlled by the PID-SSR combo, and leaves me a lot of flexibility for heating elements. Basically, instead of hard-wiring the heaters to the SSR, I wired them with a plug on the end, and it just plugs into the outlet. This leaves me the option of using the controller to regulate the temperature of other devices, like my smoker.
Now, the formerly-packed case just has the heaters and thermocouple attached:

This version also has a cooling fan for the SSR (I cut slots in the side of the container for airflow).

Thus far, I'm much happier with this version. After I've tested it for a bit and am sure that I really like this arrangement, I'm going to try and jam all the stuff into a PC power supply case so it takes up less space. Stay tuned for future updates.

DIY Immersion Circulator -- Version 1

I decided to upgrade my previous method of cooking sous vide. When I saw these plans for a DIY immersion circulator I was sold. After an Amazon shopping spree, I started assembling the stuff. I borrowed a Dremel (thanks Josh!) to cut the acrylic for the casing and did a dry fit before I started gluing anything:

I then glued in the heating elements and wired the thing up. It works!

Note the eggs in the bath below, at the ideal "soft-cooked" temperature. Thus far I've successfully made soft-cooked eggs and really good white meat chicken in this thing.

But, you'll notice a few things (serves me right for not applying enough critical thinking when reading the plans). First of all, there are wires hanging out the back. There's also a heat sink (metal fanlike structure) hanging out on top, attached to the SSR. The reason is because there's not enough space in the box to fit everything. Oops.

Furthermore, the way the heating elements are set up, I need to fill the bin way up with water or the elements will not be submerged and burn out. And, that's 120V stuff, exposed, directly above water. This isn't a good idea.

So, my plans for Version 2 of this is to put the control portion of the device in a separate container and run the heating coils and temperature probe separately. I'm going with the case from an old PC power supply (cooling fan included, for the SSR). Stay tuned for future updates.

Kitchen sink sous vide tilapia

Ever since I saw this video, I've been wanting to cook fish sous vide in my kitchen sink, but until recently I've been too busy for cooking experiments. This past Sunday, though, we decided to finally make tilapia in the sink. I'll also note this is a really kid-friendly method of cooking, since (until the last step) the temperatures involved are pretty low, and kids can help by holding the thermometer, or by dropping the bagged fish into the sink.

First, we filled the sink with hot tap water, at a temperature which is good for this sort of fish:

Then, we bagged the filets with a little bit of olive oil, and immersed in cold to squeeze out the air (in retrospect, I probably could have done this step right in the sink). Then, they went for a swim in the water for around 15 minutes (look up tables of cooking times in a book, or just calculate it yourself). Since we were eating these right away, we didn't need to worry about pasteurization issues.

To finish, I seared them in a pan with butter and capers (which became all crispy), topped with fresh ground green pepper and a squeeze of lemon, and served them with quinoa. They didn't need added salt; the capers were sufficient:

This actually turned out to be a really quick and easy way of cooking the fish to a perfect doneness in a nearly-foolproof way. It has the added benefit of not heating up my kitchen on a hot summer day. I am definitely going to be doing this more!