Sous vide recipes?

MinnBobber

Well-Known Member
Hi,
I received my new Anova precision cooker.
Is there a good source for recipes?
I'm waiting for the other part of my order, the vacuum bags and hand vacuum sealer.

Any suggestions for first meal, chicken breast or pork chop? I want to sample some super juicy meat!!
 
MinnBobber,

Skeena

Standing stone faced like a statue.
Marinate your favourite item, and then sous vide it inside a sealed heat proof bag(preferably vacuum sealed)
 
Skeena,

fft

Well-Known Member
Just seeing this...welcome to the team! I've got a bunch of recipes, but also you'll find that with practice you can use many non-SV recipes with your SV...which is what I do all the time.

The original and still very very strong resource for SV are the threads on eGullet. eGullet is like the FC of sous vide cooking...you can read the original sous vide thread where user "nathanm" pretty much codified sous vide cooking on a single thread (one of the greatest forum threads of all time imo), and later revealed himself to be Nathan Myhrvold, the former Microsoft CTO who eventually published Modernist Cuisine out of this very thread. So you will find a ton of recipes and discussion on eGullet and its very well indexed now by the mods there.

This is where I should probably point out some of the safety issues with sous vide. The basic rule is that you dont want to kill yourself by accidentally breeding bacteria in your sv bag. This means you should understand what safe pasteurization temperatures are (typically 135-137 for 15-20 mins or so, but thats off the top of my head). When you are cooking things below say, 135F, you dont want to leave stuff in the SV for much longer than it takes to cook...the max is usually a few hours. A good intro resource on SV with a good safety discussion is this white paper from Doug Baldwin. This also discusses the basic food science of SV cooking, with broad time/temp guidelines for meats, eggs, etc. Once you get a feel for time/temp for different foods it opens up a wide range of things you can do. Doug Baldwin also has a SV book that I have and would recommend. If you look at this last link you'll see the site contains a lot of the detail thats in the book so maybe you dont need the book.

Here are a few ideas and also links with SV recipes that are in my recipe book:
  • Olive oil poached salmon. From a 2008 wsj article on SV and Myhrvold, also has great recipe for glazed carrots and short rib. If you dig into the salmon recipe on eGullet, you will see that people prefer different temperatures of Salmon.
  • Soft boiled eggs. Different temps yield different textures. My favorite for breakfast is 142F for an hour. You can drop the eggs right in the bath. Separately, scrambled eggs also come out great...here's a recipe that I've saved but you can find a broader discussion of this online.
  • Chicken breast. The revelation here is chicken tastes so much better when cooked to 140F-150F instead of 160+. We use SV chicken for salads, fillings, nachos..whatever. My standard is salt pepper and olive oil (optional) in a bag at 145F for an hour. Serious eats has had a few articles on this which explain it well... link 1 and more recent link 2. We made Kenji's chicken salad last week with this recipe and it was the best chicken salad I've ever had.
  • Pork tenderloin. No link here but pork tenderloin is one of those things I used to hate because it was so easy to overcook which made it tough. But with SV I do it at 137 and give it a sear, and its really great.
There are also the braises where you go low and slow for multiple days. Brisket, short rib, pork shoulder. You'll see a lot on these online. Short rib for 2-3 days at 140F for instance... still pink on the inside but fully broken down and tender...no other way to do this but with a SV.

Also, dont forget that your vaccum sealer used alone has a few tricks up its sleeve. I make guacamole for parties in a vacuum bag and it stays fresh for days, for example.

Anyway, that should get you going. Enjoy...
 
Last edited:

MinnBobber

Well-Known Member
Anyway, that should get you going. Enjoy...

@fft Thanks for all the great info and links!!!!

My first attempt was chicken breasts, 146 F for 75 minutes.
It seems it takes more spice than one might think, almost like a spice rub??

I put on a few spices, where if you got a bare cooked chicken breast on a plate and you spiced it up like this, you'd think it was over-spiced/ a lot of spice. Sat if frig for 12 hours in the butter, sea salt, pepper, garlic powder, basil.
The final version was juicy BUT didn't have a lot of flavor/ spice taste.

I'm going to try heavier dose of spices. And we didn't add spice when serving, although I did sear it in some butter/garlic mix.

Awaiting the rest of my order--vacuum bags and hand vacuum pump.
 
MinnBobber,
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