Anyone else into Sous Vide cooking?

I got a gift card to amazon for christmas and bought myself a sous vide controller for my crock pot.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B011296704

I use a cheap aquarium bubbler to keep the water circulating.



For those of you who've not heard of it before, you vacuum seal your meat into a bag



Submerse it in water and let the cooker bring it to exactly the temperature you want.

I cooked my steaks to exactly medium rare (135*) and let them sit there for 2 hours. Then quickly seared each side in an iron skillet.

The controller has a temperature probe that you place in the water, and it switches the crock pot on and off to keep the water right at the temp you set it too. Mine can keep the temp to within a 3 degree range, it would be 1 degree, but the heavy crock causes some overshoot, so I set my temp about 2 degrees less than I really want to compensate for the overshoot.



It lets you get the meat perfect all the way through. You can cook ribs or roasts for up to 3 days but hold it at medium rare so all of the collagen breaks down and its super tender, without being overcooked.

I just did salmon fillets at 130* and they were out of this world. Because you are cooking it in a sealed bag, the meat doesn't loose any moisture or fat. The salmon had the consistency of salmon flavored butter.

And the best part is you can seal it in with stuff like cedar planks

https://www.vacmasterfresh.com/fresh-bites-blog/sous-vide-cedar-planked-walleye/

Or fresh herbs, and it gets infused with the flavor.

I sealed in a sprig of rosemary with my steak, and the entire steak had a delicious rosemary taste.

I have a leg of lamb I'm going to do next weekend.

wow - just catching the first few sentences while waiting
for the photos to load and I thought you were steaming your minnows :LMFAO:


several years ago, I got hooked on the "boil in a bag" vegetables in cheese sauce
and they were fantastic.

never heard of your recipe but it does sound great !

Johnny said:

wow - just catching the first few sentences while waiting
for the photos to load and I thought you were steaming your minnows :LMFAO:


several years ago, I got hooked on the "boil in a bag" vegetables in cheese sauce
and they were fantastic.

never heard of your recipe but it does sound great !

Click to expand...

This isn't really "boil", because you cook at an exact temp. The water bath I put my sealed steaks in was 135*, so they came up to exactly medium rare all the way through.

Because you heat the water to exactly the temp you want, you can't overheat the food and go past where you want. This means you can do ribs that cook at a low temp for 3 days so the collagen breaks down and the meat is super tender but not overcooked.

Never heard of it but it looks interesting. I will be looking into it.

I used sous vide probably 6 or 7 times. I just use an old Styrofoam cooler.

https://www.fieldandstream.com/articles/hunting/2014/10/recipe-redneck-venison-sous-vide

My son is a cook in nice restaurant and he says they do a massive amount of sous vide cooking. I've never had anything cooked that way or even seen it done in person yet but I plan on trying it the next time I go visit him. He says he loves any food they cook this way and can't say enough about how tender and good tasting anything cooked with this method. I'm looking forward to trying it.

I had heard about it and read up on it a bit a while back but don't remember seeing anything about being able to use with a regular crock pot. Maybe this is a new development since I first read about it.

I have never heard of this! :LOL2:

JMichael said:

I had heard about it and read up on it a bit a while back but don't remember seeing anything about being able to use with a regular crock pot. Maybe this is a new development since I first read about it.

Click to expand...

You have to have the controller I bought, its the "Brains" that keeps the crockpot at the prices temperature.

Alright dang it - just ordered one yesterday because of this thread. I watch allot of cooking shows and have always wanted to try this.

:LOL2:

fool4fish1226 said:

Alright dang it - just ordered one yesterday because of this thread. I watch allot of cooking shows and have always wanted to try this.

Click to expand...

Awesome!!! Let me know how you like that one. I went the cheap route, but if I get a little money together I might buy a nicer one.

lugoismad said:

JMichael said:

I had heard about it and read up on it a bit a while back but don't remember seeing anything about being able to use with a regular crock pot. Maybe this is a new development since I first read about it.

Click to expand...

You have to have the controller I bought, its the "Brains" that keeps the crockpot at the prices temperature.

Click to expand...

It's been a while since I first read about it, but to the best of my memories ability, they had the crock-pot looking cooker with the controls built in to it and all you needed with it was the vacuum sealer. But I also remember the stand alone unit was pretty expensive at that time as well. Since I didn't have a vacuum sealer back then (I do now), and the cookers were so expensive, I quit looking in to it. Maybe I should check again and see if they are any cheaper now.

I've done suis vide ribeyes with just a zip lock and cooler.

Suck all the air out of the zip locks. Get your water to 140. Put the steaks in for about an hour then hit it for about 10 seconds on each side on a hot iron. I used 20oz ribeyes.

I still cant believe this! :LOL2:

Jim said:

I still cant believe this! :LOL2:

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I've got 3lbs of beef ribs at 170* right now. Doing a 8 hour cook on them.

Doing a little more research on this today shows the self contained units are still expensive but these immersion circulator units are what's new and much cheaper than the older units. I've only found and checked on 3 brands of these immersion style units, but they all have about 10% of the reviewers rating them at 1-3 stars. Customer service from all 3 seems to be hit or miss, and varies by individual, with some pretty bad things reported by some. Keeping all that in mind, I think I'm going to try and find one of the Anova units on sale and give them a try.

Picks from my first sous vides. ***Does anyone else say "sous vide" in an accent with inflection????***

RiverBottomOutdoors said:

I used sous vide probably 6 or 7 times. I just use an old Styrofoam cooler.

https://www.fieldandstream.com/articles/hunting/2014/10/recipe-redneck-venison-sous-vide

Click to expand...

Jonah, what brand/style cooker are you using with that cooler?

JMichael said:

RiverBottomOutdoors said:

I used sous vide probably 6 or 7 times. I just use an old Styrofoam cooler.

https://www.fieldandstream.com/articles/hunting/2014/10/recipe-redneck-venison-sous-vide

Click to expand...

Jonah, what brand/style cooker are you using with that cooler?

Click to expand...

He's not. He's heating water to 140, and using the cooler to keep it there for a short cook. That actually works pretty well for short cook stuff like steak or fish, but if you want to do a long haul cook for like ribs, you need someone that can keep the water warm.

Dang that looks good.

Deer loin?

I actually didn't know it was pronounced "Soo Vee" for a long time until my wife started making fun of me for sounding like an idiot for saying "Soose Viday"