Timex: Thanks for taking on the Sous Vide avocados experiment! Pity that it doesn’t seem to have done much. I wonder what amounts of heat/time, if any, are useful, then.
I think the next step would be to try cooking them at 43C for two hours, instead of one.
However, from looking at the science, it really does seem like it would need to cook them to 90C in order for the enzymes to break down… although it’s possible they could break down at lower temperatures held for a longer period of time. I think 90C would deactivate them immediately, so presumably they will deactivate over time at some lower temperature.
I’ve been eating the guacamole and it’s good. The surface of both continues to brown at about the same rate, fairly slowly, with the browning not penetrating more than a few milimeters below the surface.
If I may have a moment of guac time. The pictures of the two types of guac shown also come with commentary stating that lime juice was used in the making. This being so, the experiment is faulty. Adding an acid to guac immediately invalidates the experiment. Acid stops the browning. Any guac maker knows this. The experiment should have been, avocado that is sous vide and avocado that is not. Then you would have both in a fridge for a time. Then you would see, after a time, which fruit turns brown first. Sorry.
Of course acid helps deactivate the browning enzymes. But it doesn’t totally deactivate them.
I always use lime juice in my guacamole, but it always turns brown anyway. The hope was that the sous vide process would completely deactivate that enzyme, thus reducing the browning effect.
It’s possible that without any lime juice the effect may have been more pronounced. It may be interesting to know if that’s the case, but it’s also somewhat less useful then, if it’s effect is no more than simply adding a bit of lime juice (unless you don’t actually like using line juice in your guacamole).
Yep. Best I could figure after seeing the 90C figure in the scientific article was that BrowningReductionFromAcid + BrowningReactionFromSousVide ~= BrowningReactionFromHighHeat. There may yet be some value for BRFSV that manages to preserve the guac well enough over the entire functional life of the dip (even if not permanently).
And now I’m wondering what irradiation would do to it. . . man, the FDA needs to hire me!
On the contrary, an experiment without lime juice would invalidate the experiment, because then instead of testing the browning of guacamole, you’d just be testing the browning of gross avocado mush.
I have one of those! It is pretty awesome. It chipped pretty badly around the lip/edge at some point but that hasn’t stopped it from working just fine.
Let it be known, the science guacamole experiment continues, and I have made another batch, this time cooking the avacados for two hours instead of one, to see if anything changes.
Hmm… I think I may have had something of a breakthrough here.
Now, I only made one batch this time so I don’t really have a direct comparison this time. However, with the 2 hour cooked guacamole, after 24 hours there is virtually no appreciable browning. Not zero, but very little.
They said October when I pre-ordered. Haven’t heard anything to the contrary, or more precise, since. Here’s the most pertinent response on their forum, from two weeks back:
Hi rexco - We’re working on getting inventory for the 220v devices across the board - as soon as we do you’ll see updates on our site page!
There is a place called Pappasito’s that I love. First one opened up in Houston probably 30 or so years back but they are all over Texas now and some in other states too. They have incredible fajitas. I have been going there forever since I grew up in Houston but it seems like each year they jack the price up a buck or so because why the fuck not? They are packed 24/7.
They marinate them in a simple recipe of 3 parts pineapple juice, 2 parts soy sauce and 1 part water. I had tried to duplicate this at home before, with so-so results. Pappasito’s use industrial size vacuum tumbler marinators. I didn’t have one. Until now! I bought one of these guys. Used tonight for the first time with some select skirt steak (ie. not great meat). And the results were fantastic. The taste was spot on. Meat was stringy, because select skirt steak. But that is fixable.
A rock tumbler for meat. What a crazy idea. I am intrigued, and have subscribed to the newsletter.
I’ve gotten better at planning and prep, but still, two or three times a week I’m trying to think of dinner ideas at 5:30, and drawing blanks after ten different “no time to marinate” strike-offs.
