Kenji also mentions the task is better used for hamburgers over 6 oz. Otherwise the size is a factor on the sear.
If you are going to Sous Vide the toast, you might as well do your bacon as well:
I did this via Chef Steps last week and it was definitely better bacon. I don’t like extra crispy bacon, which means I have to slowly pan cook it, which takes forever and is easy to mess up. This made the whole process super easy. Just buy thick cut bacon in a package that isn’t easy open, dump in water bath the night before, and quickly fry it up in the morning.
World’s best bacon.
I also tried Chef Steps’ sous vide egg bites that are a take on Starbucks and uh… no. They want you to add flavor on top instead of combined, but that just doesn’t work the same, at all.
Speaking of egg tricks, check dis yall:
Okay, so really the guy has more or less exactly one egg trick: separate the yolk and whites and do some weird shit to one or both of them.
BUT! The idea of, say, herb-infused-but-otherwise-normal-looking fried eggs could be a fun twist for weekend breakfast sometime :)
I actually bought a Searzall, and a high powered propane torch… So I’ll probably do some torch seared sous vide when they get here.
If I’m not mistaken, that picture came from Serious eats. If you look at the article linked above, that is NOT, in fact, safe if starting with ground meat. Just want to make sure people don’t think cooking ground beef to 120 makes it safe. 130 is the minimum and it has to be held at that temp for 2 hours (so, 2.5 total). Grinding your own meat is a different story (and you can drop full cuts into boiling water briefly to sterilize the outside).
120 is kind of gross for a burger anyway… it’s gonna be basically raw ground meat in the middle, which is not what I’m looking for.
I’m with you. I don’t like for meat to be gummy. That article was great, though, because I had been thinking about exactly this issue: how sous vide would work for burgers. I’ve thought about trying to grind my own meat, but it seems like such a pain, honestly. Lately, we’ve been using store bought ground beef, a mix of 70-30 and 85-15. 8oz patties, so nice and thick. Think that would be perfect to try with this method.
Agreed. I’ve never quite understood the desire for rarer burgers. I like a nice medium-rare steak but that’s a tasty piece of tender quality meat that I want to savor. Burgers are made from ground up cheapo tougher meats. I want that stuff medium-well at a minimum.
I do get that it’s possible to make a burger by grinding really good cuts of meat, the kind of stuff that I might enjoy as a steak. I don’t get that either though. If I had that steak available, I’d make steaks and not grind it.
I mean, it’s theoretically possibly I’m sure sure to repair a Volkwagen by tearing apart a brand new Lamborghini to cannibalize the parts. It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s possible.
Didnt realize I grabbed the 120 picture. Anyway the point was to show that you’re not getting a gray piece of meat when you are finished. I did read about the pasteurization process for store bought ground beef but thanks for pointing it out. Fortunately the article also says that as far as texture, appearance and flavor, a burger sous vide’d for 2-3 hours is indistinguishable from one run for 40 minutes.
For me, the perfect burger is medium, pink in the middle. I’m ok with edging a bit toward medium rare as long as the texture isn’t gummy.
The joule I ordered just showed up a while ago, coincidentally (a day earlier than expected, even, which is remarkable considering it shipped from China). Now I have a tough decision to make. I hadn’t expected to buy one quite so soon, but jumped on the sale. I’d been thinking about giving it to my wife as an anniversary present, but that’s not for awhile.
Otoh, tomorrow is the anniversary of the day we met, 28 years ago, so that seems like a good excuse.
Yeah, the 120F burger is way too close to beef tartare for me. Maybe if I ground it myself, but probably not because ew, and when the hell do I grind my own hamburger? 130F is an improvement, but I’d prefer the fat to break down some more.
I recently came around to the smashburger technique, which stills runs deeply counter to the “don’t squeeze out the juices” rule I internalized early on. But my favorite local hamburger joint has been doing it that way since forever, so it appears that I like it. Also, easy, fast, and practically no guesswork.
Ya, the 130 burger looks good.
Well the point is to smash it as soon as you pit it on the grill/in the pan. It hasn’t cooked yet so you aren’t squeezing the juice out.
Haha. I am pretty sure any kid I know would be so weirded out by an egg with 6 yolks they would never eat it.
The trick is (and this is gonna work far and away better on little boys) to convince 'em that it’s suuuuuuper gross (giggle).
Cuz we adored edible gross-out crap when I was a kid if it was sold that way. Remember this shit?
Oh yeah, it works like a charm. Really good result. Just feels wrong!
My nephew will eat ravioli but won’t’ eat spaghettos or spaghetti…It took a lot of convincing to get him to eat mar far chicken and tempura chicken even though he loves… chicken nuggets. Every time I see this kid, he’s complaining about normal food put in front of him.
I’m pretty sure if i was at picky as my nephews are… my parents would have watched me starve.
Yeah I know what you mean. I went from, at a young age, thinking that cooks slapped and moved food. Then to watching cooking shows starting from Julia Child and others to knowing, in my bone marrow, that you did not poke a steak or squeeze a burger. To this new thing about either poking a thumb into a burger to stop it from essentially turning into a meatball or the wonderful smash the sucker when it hits the heat thing.
Paradigm shifts can affect your world view. Sometimes in a good way.
I still don’t like cilantro. Cilantro… cilantro never changes.
ISTR reading somewhere about the first known description of cilantro, written by some herbalist monk in the middle ages, which amounted to “Wholesome-looking, like parsley, but tastes like feet.”
I actually did get to like it. First taste, on pork chops, was completely revolting, then a few years later a different context it totally clicked.