Kitchen Gadgetry

To be honest, I’d be really leery of doing a biryani in a pressure cooker at all. The balancing act you have to maintain to get the rice right in those things is already incredibly tight in a pot I can remove from heat, open, and otherwise fuck with at will. In a thing that I basically seal and pray over? Jeebus, that makes the cook in my nervous.

Lentils for sambhar that is gonna be just as good with mush as it is with pulverized mush? Good times! Rice that’s seemingly always about 30 seconds from ruination? Nooooooo sir.

I’ve actually been wondering - can you start and stop it “remotely”? As in through the Internet?

I would love to be able to activate the Anova from work and have it start a 3-hour cook while I’m still slaving away at the office. If the wifi setting simply extends the range at home I’m not really all that enthused.

Agreed, I have a Waring pistol vac that I like, but I only use it for Sous Vide when I am prepping meals ahead of time and plan to stick them in the freezer. Otherwise it’s the ziploc, it’s just easier. I don’t even close the ziploc, I just clip it to the side of the container.

So for food safety reasons, even if you could, that’s probably a bad idea.

You want to wait for the wifi version that includes a robot to move the food from the fridge to the pot.

Glad you liked! I love McCartney’s crazy eyes, and that the show’s logo has a colon in it.

Sous vide cooks food so slowly that being out of the fridge for four hours being it being turned on probably doesn’t make that much difference?

But if a pressure cooker can somehow make biryani with the normal reduction in effort?

I must investigate further.

Depends on the cook temperature.

Sous vide temperatures are generally over 140F, so bacteria cannot grow. You can hold food at 140F forever. Of course the texture can be affected with very long extended cooking times, so you probably don’t want to leave it in forever-- but you could.

Even a medium-rare steak at 125F, bacteria can grow at that temperature, but extraordinarily slowly. And of course steak is a solid piece of meat, with all the contamination on the exterior. Once you finish cooking your steak to a perfect medium-rare you still need to sear it to get the maillard reaction, which definitively kills any bacteria that may have lived through a couple hours at 125F.

Generally, but not all. Steak is usually done below that, for instance.

The problem is that so many bacteria would grow in and on your food in 4 hours at room temperature. You can kill (most of) the bacteria, but their waste products will still be there and can make you very unhappy.

I don’t think that much bacteria grows in the 4 hours a steak is left out at room temperature in a sealed bag in water. I think most humans are tougher than that. (Also, your expensive steak was originally part of an animal hung up for months at a time before being chopped up.)

Anyway, my point was more that because sous vide uses lower temperatures, the time it takes for a steak at 19C to raise to e.g. 62C is longer than if you put it in a 300C pan. It takes hours to get from 19C to 62C when you water is only 62C, so it’s not like those hours spent in cold water is that much of an extension to being sat in the danger zone. (Plus, if you use cold tap water, then your tap water probably takes an hour or so to go from 6C or whatever to 19C).

It’s really not a concern with steak, as only the exterior of the meat could be contaminated in the first place and you sear that off anyway. Also, 125F is enough to seriously inhibit bacterial growth, in the same way that a 40F refrigerator has the same effect. 130F is actually enough to kill most bacteria, although you need 140F to kill everything.

I’m not sure I can recall doing a sous vide cook at more than 150F. Looking at the temperature guides, it seems like dark-meat chicken needs that high, so I guess I probably did that once (didn’t care for it - I don’t think chicken benefits too much from sous vide).

I personally don’t have much of a problem with leaving a vacuum-packed bag of meat in water for a few hours before starting a cook, especially not red meat or pork. Chicken would probably give me some pause, but I’d be cooking that at so high a temperature any bacteria would die off anyway.

I’m not sure I can recall doing a sous vide cook at more than 150F. Looking at the temperature guides, it seems like dark-meat chicken needs that high, so I guess I probably did that once (didn’t care for it - I don’t think chicken benefits too much from sous vide).

This is so wrong! Sous vide chicken breasts at 60 C are way better - so juicy. And I made chicken fajitas that way just the other day and they were the best I’d ever made.

seems like dark-meat chicken needs that high, so I guess I probably did that once (didn’t care for it - I don’t think chicken benefits too much from sous vide)

Those temperatures are messed up though. Duck, which is going to be similar to chicken in terms of what it needs, only needs to be cooked to around 135. I’ve found that a lot of the “official” cooking times tend to err way on the side of caution. Although, bear in mind, part of it is probably also because rare chicken will freak folks out, but rare duck is acceptable, even though it’s kind of the same?

Regardless, I agree with your assertion though that for dark meat chicken, sous vide seems like a waste, since you can just cook chicken thighs forever anyway and never ruin them.

Sous vide for white meat chicken is the bee knees. Best way to cook it, time permitting.

I’ve found this, and think I may try it out to see how it works.

Update on the pressure cooker birani:
It worked surprisingly well. It was a bit too soft, because I used more coconut milk than it called (since it called for 1 cup, and a can of it is like 1 and 2/3 cups, and what am I gonna do with a third of a can of coconut milk?).

I think though that if the liquid levels are adjusted (Maybe just add more rice) it’d actually turn out quite excellent.

Interesting! I do like VegRecipesOfIndia, their stuff is usually very good. Maybe I’ll have to experiment with that now that I’ve got my little stash of saffron back from mom (accidentally left it at home over Xmas).

As for 2/3 cup of coconut milk? Toss it, some yogurt/chilies/cilantro/ginger/peanuts/shredded coconut into a blender and whiz up some coconut chutney, brah!