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Sous Vide Experiment #3
Lemon chicken, and chocolate pot de creme for dessert.
This time there are pictures, because![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sithjawa was interested in how things came out looking. Pardon my less than expert photography skills.
Chocolate Pot de Creme
I started the pot de creme first, because it needed to chill. I had the idea for it for two reasons: first, I saw them making pots de creme on Chef Academy (which, by the way, is not worth watching; the teacher enjoys being a dick more than he enjoys teaching, and the casual misogyny by the male students makes me want to scream), and second, the scrambled eggs I made yesterday came out as light and soft as custard. Since pots de creme are delicious but require a lot of careful temperature management (first to melt the chocolate with the cream without scorching either, and then to add and cook the egg without curdling it), I don't make it that often -- so if I could make it in the sous vide, I'd make it more often.
I didn't have a sous vide recipe for it, so I modified a regular pot de creme recipe I got off the Food Network website:
I set the sous vide to 105F, which is hot enough to gently melt chocolate, and in the sous vide bag I mixed the cream, milk, bittersweet chocolate, sugar, and salt. I sealed it up and stick it in the sous vide until the chocolate melted -- it didn't take more than 10-15 minutes -- and then mixed the chocolate into the cream and milk by, uh, mooshing the bag.
I set the sous vide (now empty except, of course, for the water) up to 160F, on the theory that that's a reliable temperature for setting egg yolks. Meanwhile, I beat the egg yolks and stirred in some of the warm cream-chocolate mixture until well blended, then poured the whole thing back into the bag and sealed it up. When the sous vide was up to temperature, I put the bag back in it and cooked it for half an hour, at which point it had thickened considerably. I poured it into small bowls and chilled it.
It came out looking like this:
It tasted fantastic, of course, because it was cream and chocolate and egg yolks and would have been hard not to be fantastic, and the texture was lovely and smooth without my having to babysit a double boiler or waterbath. It was a bit too soft to be a pot de creme -- it was more puddinglike. I think there are three possible ways to fix that:
a) Decrease the liquid. Many of the recipes have more like 3/4 of a cup of cream for a recipe of this size (two servings), so the next experiment will be to drop it to that.
b) Increase the egg yolks to three. That would set better, but with the risk of making it too eggy.
c) Once the custard has been formed and thickened, pour it into ramekins and bake it in a traditional waterbath in the oven. (Or just call it The Richest Pudding In The World and call it good.)
Lemon Chicken
Lemon chicken is one of my favorite quickie dinners, and I wanted to compare the sous vide version to my usual pan-cooked version.
For the chicken:
For the sauce:
For the chicken, I set the sous vide to 146F and let it heat. I salted and peppered the chicken breast on both sides, pressed the lemon slices onto it all over, and slipped it into the bag. (And of course sucked all the air out.) It cooked in the sous vide for an hour. (Chicken breast, being tender and thin, takes much less time than lamb chops.)
Because I usually have the lemon chicken with a pan sauce, I coarsely chopped the shallot and smashed the garlic, and cooked it very gently in butter with a little salt -- just to soften, not to brown -- for twenty minutes.
Once it was soft, I took the chicken breast out of the sous vide. A lot of juices had accumulated in the bag -- partly chicken juices, and partly juice from the lemon. I removed the chicken and brushed the lemon slices off it, then poured all of the accumulated juices, plus the lemon slices, into the pan. (I put the chicken back in the bag, sealed it up, and stuck it back in the sous vide to stay warm while I finished the sauce.)
From there it was just a matter of letting the juices reduce over high heat into a sauce. That took, oh, five minutes? Seven? Not very long. Once it was done, I pulled out the chicken again. It looked like this:
Not very attractive, huh? (The speckles are the pepper; the weird texture is because, under vacuum seal, the lemon slices impressed themselves into the meat and made circles.) It's also very pale, of course -- sous vide cooking doesn't brown food at all, so it looks kinda pasty. But when I sliced it, it looked much better:
I don't know if you can see it there, but the grain on the chicken breast is very fine -- it's almost smooth. There are no tough spots, no stringy bits.
I tried it like that, and to be perfectly honest, I could've eaten it just like that, no sauce needed. The meat was so juicy it didn't need the added moisture, and cooking it with the lemon in the bag infused a potent lemony flavor into the meat.
But the lemon butter sauce also tasted excellent, and it helped to cover the pasty chicken breast. ;) (Not that I mind pasty for myself, but if I were serving this to company, it'd be nice to have it not look weird.)
Anyway, the final plate looks like this. Pardon the puddle of sauce, which sort of sloshed:
And then I finished with the chilled pot de creme. Nom.
This time there are pictures, because
sithjawa was interested in how things came out looking. Pardon my less than expert photography skills.Chocolate Pot de Creme
I started the pot de creme first, because it needed to chill. I had the idea for it for two reasons: first, I saw them making pots de creme on Chef Academy (which, by the way, is not worth watching; the teacher enjoys being a dick more than he enjoys teaching, and the casual misogyny by the male students makes me want to scream), and second, the scrambled eggs I made yesterday came out as light and soft as custard. Since pots de creme are delicious but require a lot of careful temperature management (first to melt the chocolate with the cream without scorching either, and then to add and cook the egg without curdling it), I don't make it that often -- so if I could make it in the sous vide, I'd make it more often.
I didn't have a sous vide recipe for it, so I modified a regular pot de creme recipe I got off the Food Network website:
- 1/2 cup cream
- 1/2 cup milk
- 3 oz chopped bittersweet chocolate
- 1 tbsp sugar
- pinch salt
- 3 egg yolks
I set the sous vide to 105F, which is hot enough to gently melt chocolate, and in the sous vide bag I mixed the cream, milk, bittersweet chocolate, sugar, and salt. I sealed it up and stick it in the sous vide until the chocolate melted -- it didn't take more than 10-15 minutes -- and then mixed the chocolate into the cream and milk by, uh, mooshing the bag.
I set the sous vide (now empty except, of course, for the water) up to 160F, on the theory that that's a reliable temperature for setting egg yolks. Meanwhile, I beat the egg yolks and stirred in some of the warm cream-chocolate mixture until well blended, then poured the whole thing back into the bag and sealed it up. When the sous vide was up to temperature, I put the bag back in it and cooked it for half an hour, at which point it had thickened considerably. I poured it into small bowls and chilled it.
It came out looking like this:
 |
| From Food 2009 |
It tasted fantastic, of course, because it was cream and chocolate and egg yolks and would have been hard not to be fantastic, and the texture was lovely and smooth without my having to babysit a double boiler or waterbath. It was a bit too soft to be a pot de creme -- it was more puddinglike. I think there are three possible ways to fix that:
a) Decrease the liquid. Many of the recipes have more like 3/4 of a cup of cream for a recipe of this size (two servings), so the next experiment will be to drop it to that.
b) Increase the egg yolks to three. That would set better, but with the risk of making it too eggy.
c) Once the custard has been formed and thickened, pour it into ramekins and bake it in a traditional waterbath in the oven. (Or just call it The Richest Pudding In The World and call it good.)
Lemon Chicken
Lemon chicken is one of my favorite quickie dinners, and I wanted to compare the sous vide version to my usual pan-cooked version.
For the chicken:
- 1 chicken breast
- salt
- pepper
- 2 lemons, thinly sliced
For the sauce:
- 1 tbsp butter
- 1 medium shallot
- 2 cloves garlic
- salt
For the chicken, I set the sous vide to 146F and let it heat. I salted and peppered the chicken breast on both sides, pressed the lemon slices onto it all over, and slipped it into the bag. (And of course sucked all the air out.) It cooked in the sous vide for an hour. (Chicken breast, being tender and thin, takes much less time than lamb chops.)
Because I usually have the lemon chicken with a pan sauce, I coarsely chopped the shallot and smashed the garlic, and cooked it very gently in butter with a little salt -- just to soften, not to brown -- for twenty minutes.
Once it was soft, I took the chicken breast out of the sous vide. A lot of juices had accumulated in the bag -- partly chicken juices, and partly juice from the lemon. I removed the chicken and brushed the lemon slices off it, then poured all of the accumulated juices, plus the lemon slices, into the pan. (I put the chicken back in the bag, sealed it up, and stuck it back in the sous vide to stay warm while I finished the sauce.)
From there it was just a matter of letting the juices reduce over high heat into a sauce. That took, oh, five minutes? Seven? Not very long. Once it was done, I pulled out the chicken again. It looked like this:
 |
| From Food 2009 |
Not very attractive, huh? (The speckles are the pepper; the weird texture is because, under vacuum seal, the lemon slices impressed themselves into the meat and made circles.) It's also very pale, of course -- sous vide cooking doesn't brown food at all, so it looks kinda pasty. But when I sliced it, it looked much better:
 |
| From Food 2009 |
I don't know if you can see it there, but the grain on the chicken breast is very fine -- it's almost smooth. There are no tough spots, no stringy bits.
I tried it like that, and to be perfectly honest, I could've eaten it just like that, no sauce needed. The meat was so juicy it didn't need the added moisture, and cooking it with the lemon in the bag infused a potent lemony flavor into the meat.
But the lemon butter sauce also tasted excellent, and it helped to cover the pasty chicken breast. ;) (Not that I mind pasty for myself, but if I were serving this to company, it'd be nice to have it not look weird.)
Anyway, the final plate looks like this. Pardon the puddle of sauce, which sort of sloshed:
 |
| From Food 2009 |
And then I finished with the chilled pot de creme. Nom.
no subject
The chicken does look very smooth, to the point where my instant reaction is "That's unnatural!" I bet it tastes great, though; it looks like it cooked perfectly. I can definitely see the appeal of doing a finishing step on sous vide food.
My brain says "That looks like the closest you can ever safely get to chicken sushi!"
no subject
The texture is unbelievable, really quite different from any other chicken I've had (although I've never had really perfectly poached chicken, because I'm an inexpert poacher, so it may be similar to that; I don't know). The lamb chop was like a perfectly done grilled lamb chop -- excellent, but more like a really good version of what I'm used to. This is something else entirely. It's not rare -- it's cooked through, as you can see from the fact that it's pale and opaque -- but the difference is akin to the difference between rare steak and well-done steak. It's juicier and more tender, and without the strong graining that comes from cooking meat fibers to well-done.
Tomorrow's experiment is salmon! I'm told that fish sous vide is even more unique than chicken, so I'm looking forward to that. It won't need much seasoning, but I am contemplating a crumble of nori, and maybe a tiny smidge of pickled ginger...
no subject
I am conflicted, because on the one hand that'd be a great thing to get you for Christmas, but on the other hand I'd just steal it right back. Because, FIRE.
no subject
(Sorry, I don't have a more coherent reaction than that. :D )
no subject
no subject