Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Latest sous-vide (well almost):

• Make patty, zip-lock (or you could vac-seal, but don't do a full vac, you don't want to compress the meat).
• Cook in 56 C (? I think, could have been 60, will check for those interested) bath for 30 min or so. You could leave it long enough to pasteurize if you really want, and then not worry about rare burgers.
• Deep-fry for 1 min in ~420 F oil (or so). This makes a very nice outside of the burger.

Very juicy, perfectly done, very tasty. Adapted from Modernist Cuisine (they have a liquid nitrogen step, I was all out)(also, my meat grinder is down, so I used commercial ground beef, first time in years!)

Don't you hate when that happens?!

I've been doing my burgers SV since I got my circulator. Can't wait to get MC to see what they say.

I love them cooked SV and then seared...oh, so delicious.

Amy

There was some website I ran across that went into SV hamburgers pretty seriously. Cooked the burger SV, then compared deep fry versus pan sear. The author came up on the pan sear side of things, but as an old school drive-in fan, deep fry is one seductive siren to me. I will give this a try, though I can't reproduce the 132F very easily. I may just opt for a 150F (65C) cooking temperature since that is what my slow cooker does on low. Plus, given meat handling in the Philippines, overcooking may be a flavor no-no, but it reassures my my little health angel.

The article strongly suggested that vacuum sealing a burger was not good. He recommended dunking the bagged burger in a bowl of water, with the opening of the bag above water. That allows the air to escape without compressing or compacting the burger itself. If you have high quality ground beef available, that should produce one beautiful and juicy burger.

I'm not quite sure I agree with this, unless I'm missing the author's point. If you're using a food saver, you can pulse it so as to not compact the meat. (The same holds for delicate things like fish.) With my vac chamber, I simply set it to a lower time to achieve this.

Amy

Hi,

I have a really cheap source (The City of Springfield, IL) of liquid nitrogen and always have a supply in my fridge. It may not have the same provenance as yours, being only 78% pure, but it sure is cheap.

CC

Here is a link to the vacuuming burgers website guide/review/whatchamacallit for psuedo sous vide burgers with his discussion and views on vacuum sealing and an interesting point on adding any liquids to the burger when cooking sous vide. I'm not sure I completely agree with him on the latter aspect, where I look at some liquids as a flavor enhancement or exchange, not diminish-ment or stock-making, so to speak.

My vacuum pump (for inflating/deflating blow-up toys) is probably perfect for this, since it doesn't really pull down a serious vacuum. I may be wrong here. And not having experience (yet) with a vacuum seal machine, I don't know how easy it is to control the level of air removal. If it isn't hard, then not a significant concern perhaps.