sous vide in a cooler!

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Updated, 9/9/15.

I'm working at getting caught up in my Science and Cooking class.  A week I managed to skip is on heat transfer -- how, and how fast, does heat get from outside of food to inside of food?

It turns out that for a wide variety of foods we want to cook them in two different ways.  We often want to cook them until the interior is a particular temperature.  Proteins, for example, unfold and rejoin with each other at certain temperatures.  The food is not "cooked" until these internal temperatures are reached.  These internal temperatures tend to be around 150 (F).

Then ... there is the whole issue of browning.  Raising foods to around 248 (F) allows proteins to combine with sugars, which creates hundreds of flavor compounds which are very attractive to Homo sapiens (though I believe I have read they are not attractive at all to chimpanzees....).  We really really like the flavors imparted by cooking things so their surfaces are around 248 (F).

This is why meat is browned before braising, and why onions may be browned before adding other ingredients to ratatouille.

So there's a problem -- getting the browning done requires temps much hotter than we want the interior to ever be.  Getting the interior to the temp we prefer, but no more, while still managing to get the flavors we'll get if we brown the outside can be non-trivial.

Sous vide cooking (also known as constant-temperature water-bath cooking) allows you to raise the interior temp of your food to whatever temp you want, and will hold the food at that temp for a long time, allowing you to whip your steaks out of the water bath, grill them, REALLY HOT, for just long enough to put grill marks on them, and they're perfect.  Time after time.........

Sous vide is a cooking technique that was new to me in 2009.  I'm not sure how often I've actually had foods cooked this way, as it is often used for meat (and I don't eat very much meat).

Sous vide means "under vaccuum" in French, which is a sort of stupid name for this method of cooking, in my humble, because while vacuum-sealing the food in plastic is usually part of the process, the MAIN take-away point is you use the process is to bring food precisely to a desired temperature and then hold it there as long as you like.

Sous vide cooking is putting food into a constant-temperature water bath.  The food is nearly always vacuum-sealed in plastic, to remove the air, so the food is evenly in contact with the heat from water, rather than soaking in the water, losing flavor into the water.

Anyway -- you can do sous vide cooking in a fancy-schmancy device that is expensive and will take up a lot of room on your counter, or you can use the cooler you already have...........

Going through my class materials, I found this link to a blog post about doing sous vide in a cooler.  The plain ordinary cheap cooler you might take camping.

Pretty darn clever!


It turns out Science and Cooking includes a video on sous vide by Nathan Myrhvold, who has done TED talks and has other videos also available on youtube.  I suspect that what I saw is part of one of the Harvard Science and Cooking lectures on youtube, but I couldn't find the sous vide bit pulled out anywhere. 

Nathan Myrhvold is an interesting and amusing speaker, and uses lots of really cool pics with his talks. He explains sous vide nicely, and makes clear why it is such an important and useful technique.  He addresses why we needn't worry about plastic, if we use the correct plastic....  "Polyethylene is extremely well characterized."  It is very widely used in scientific labs, where the impact of the container on the experiment needs to be known.  "We know what does and what does not leach out of it.  Saran wrap and Ziplock (brand) bags are made of polyethylene."  Chemicals DO leak out of PVC, on the other hand, and if you buy bargain-brand plastic wrap or bags, they may contain PVC.  Buyer beware.

I wish I could share Nathan's video on sous vide with you, but all I saw on youtube were whole lectures, rather than just the section on sous vide.  As a teaser, to encourage you to find him on youtube and listen even if it's a long lecture, he says that he likes to finish steaks with a blow torch.  :-)

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emotional state of amino acids

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The guy who is the main teacher for the Science & Cooking class I'm taking reminds me a bit of a young Robin Williams.  In looks, and in enthusiasm, if not in complete bonkeritude.

He, shall we say, tends to anthropomorphize his subjects of discussion.  Here's a quote from one of the videos I am listening to today:  "Hydrophilic basically means it likes water.  So if you put hydrophilic amino acids in water, they're perfectly happy.  If you put hydrophobic amino acids in water, they're perfectly sad."

We have heard a lot about what makes atoms and molecules happy and sad, and what they like (and do not like) to do as a result.

It all makes a lot of sense, and I'm not sure at all that this way of describing things isn't true, for all practical purposes.....

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properties of water

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This is an interesting short video that explains five reasons why water makes life as we know it possible.  (We are learning about specific heat in Science & Cooking. I looked for more info about the specific heat of water, which is how I happened across this video.)







Water is pretty amazing stuff!

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fun food facts

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Did you know that a cup of AP flour has approximately 138,750,140,160,000,000,000 molecules of glutenin in it?

I didn't.



Did you know that you should pack your baking soda into the measuring spoon?

I didn't.  Everyone knows to pack brown sugar, but baking soda?



Did you know that if you substitute white sugar for brown, in a recipe that has baking soda (like cookies!), your cookies won't rise properly, as there is acid in the molasses in brown sugar which is necessary for baking soda to do its thing!

I did NOT know this!  I have baked some flat and disappointing cookies in my day!  I bet this had something to do with it!

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"serving"....

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Ok.  I'm trying to do my homework for my Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science class.

I'm to look up some info about the nutritional value of eggplant.  (We were told to use wolframalpha.com.  Not sure why -- google knows about nutritional info, too.  But gives different answers.................  Maybe we were told to use wolframalpha so we'd all come up with the same answers.  I can see that.....)

Anyway.

So I am looking at wolframalpha.com's idea of "what is a serving of eggplant."  85 grams.  85 grams?  That seems like a pretty random amount..........  (And not very much, either.............)

Which got me thinking about "serving"s and got me wondering -- who decides what a "serving" is, and what is it based on?

I googled that, and found this article from Huffingtion Post.

Does it surprise you to learn that the whole concept is totally bogus, when applied to trying to figure out how many fruits and veggies we are being told we ought to eat?

Apparently the whole point is to make it easier (or even possible) to compare nutritional value across brands of prepared foods. 

This is not an unworthy goal.

However.

It doesn't exactly translate into understanding the quantity of fruits or vegetables anyone is recommending we eat.  And is pretty meaningless for discussing UNprepared foods............

Who knew.  And -- sheesh!  We need warning labels on the warning labels!




No wonder we're seeing all of these alternative methods of thinking about what to eat -- like divided plates with different sizes of divisions to hold different amounts of different kinds of foods.

 

This image or file is a work of a United States Department of Agriculture employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain.


But -- guess what -- you can find *diferent* divided plates..............

And -- of course it's all totally political.  The dairy lobby and the meat lobby are pushing hard for more of their products in the final version than is best for us......................




Here's something else to ponder....  Are people more or less likely to eat a recommended number of servings of fruits and vegetables if the serving size is smaller (so they're supposed to eat more servings), or larger (so they're supposed to eat fewer servings)?  Does it matter?  I wonder..........  If people are presented with more smaller pieces of apple, or fewer bigger pieces of apple, does it affect how much apple they eat?

Wouldn't this be a great idea for a kid's science project?  I am full of ideas of things for other people to figure out!  An idea rat.  :-)



Ok, back to  85 grams of eggplant..............

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Did you know fiber is a carbohydrate?

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If I ever knew fiber counts as a carbohydrate, I forgot.

I just started a class on the science of cooking, and they asked us to read a nutritional content label and answer some questions.  I got one wrong because I didn't realize that the "total carbohydrates" includes fiber.  I suppose I should have realized it from the format, but I didn't..........

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/carbohydrates/fiber/

"Fiber is a type of carbohydrate that the body can’t digest. Though most carbohydrates are broken down into sugar molecules, fiber cannot be broken down into sugar molecules, and instead it passes through the body undigested."

Good to know.............

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