Tag: sous-vide

2. Primi (pasta, risotto)18 Comments

Pasta with Smoked Duck, Beetroot, and Orange

StefanGourmet

I like the Italian way of having a primo piatto of pasta or rice first, followed by a secondo piatto of meat or fish. We often eat like this, and for this particular evening I had planned to serve first pasta with beetroot and then smoked duck leg with orange sauce. Because I thought the flavors would work together nicely, I decided to turn this into a piatto unico and serve everything together instead. I liked the result, but it was less ‘Italian’ than what I usually make because there were a lot of flavors on the plate. So pick for yourself whether you’d like to serve this all together or separately. Continue reading “Pasta with Smoked Duck, Beetroot, and Orange”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)15 Comments

Braciole alla Barese Sous-Vide

StefanGourmet

A simple but great dish from the city of Bari in Southern Italy (in the region of Puglia) is Braciole alla Barese, which can be prepared using either beef or horse meat. Thin slices of beef are stuffed with garlic, parsley, and cheese, rolled up, and braised in tomato sauce. I absolutely love this dish, but I thought it could be even better when prepared sous-vide. In the traditional preparation the meat is braised and thus cooked well done; with sous-vide it is possible to ‘braise’ the meat in the tomato sauce to medium rare. There’s only one way to find out, and that is to simply try it. It turned out delicious, and without putting down the regular version, which is great, the sous-vide version to me is absolutely superior. The meat is more juicy and the whole dish has a ‘fresher’ taste. Roll up the beef bundles as in the regular recipe and brown them in hot olive oil.
Continue reading “Braciole alla Barese Sous-Vide”

1. Antipasti (appetizers)26 Comments

Grilled Avocado with Tuna Sous-Vide

StefanGourmet

Yet another meal and another post inspired by fellow bloggers, two in this case. The idea to try tuna sous-vide came from A Single Serving, who left a comment on my sous-vide page. He mentioned tuna confit, which is not what I tried this time around (but I will). Instead, I cooked the tuna medium rare at 42C/108F. The idea to grill avocado came from Richard of REMCooks, as well as the idea to combine avocado and tuna. I made this for lunch, but it could also be a nice appetizer for two. If you don’t have sous-vide equipment, you could use a ziploc bag and stock pot as a good substitute (that will however require some attention to monitor the temperature) or simply serve the tuna raw.

You may now be thinking that I lost it. Grilling avocado? I had never thought of this, but I trust Richard and he’s right: it’s nice and a great way to eat an avocado that is not yet fully ripe. I was worried the avocado would ‘melt’, but that is not the case at all. The sous-vide tuna turned out very nice, with more flavor than rare tuna. I really liked the combination of flavors and textures, and the chile flakes made a big difference in this dish. Here’s what I did… Continue reading “Grilled Avocado with Tuna Sous-Vide”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)46 Comments

Hanger Steak Sous-Vide

StefanGourmet

Hanger Steak is a lesser known but very flavorful cut of beef. It has so much flavor because it comes from the diaphragm that is needed for breathing, and has therefore had a lot of use in the life of the steer or cow. Hanger steak is called onglet in French, and longhaas or karweivlees in Dutch. It is best when served medium rare, but it can be slightly tough when prepared like a regular steak. With sous-vide we can fix this, because we can cook it for a longer time without taking it over medium rare or we can apply the technique that I have called warm aging.

It is possible to tenderize beef by boosting the activity of calpain and cathepsin enzymes in the meat through bringing the meat to temperatures of 39.5C/103F for calpains and 49.5C/121F for cathepsins. These are the same enzymes that are at work when meat is aged at refrigerator temperatures (both for dry aging and for aging in vacuum), but much faster and (compared to dry aging) without drying the meat. If you can find dry aged hanger steak there is no need to apply warm aging, but I don’t expect this to be a cut that is available dry aged. I finished cooking the steak at 55C/131F for medium rare. You could also cook it longer at 55C/131F instead of applying warm aging, but the meat would turn out less juicy and a bit more like medium. Continue reading “Hanger Steak Sous-Vide”

Contorni (side dishes)12 Comments

Guest Post: Fennel Fondant Sous-Vide Without Special Equipment

StefanGourmet

I love it when someone prepares one of my recipes, and I love it even more when someone lets me know how it turned out!

Recently I did a post on Fennel Sous-Vide Fondant.  I bet some of you are curious about sous-vide after reading about it on this blog, but haven’t tried it yet because the equipment is pricey. Well, some recipes can be made without owning expensive equipment. One of my readers, Clayton from San Francisco, reacted as follows:

Fennel is a vegetable that I have always enjoyed eating. Its anise or liquorice flavor gives salads a subtle flavor-kick which I like. But I have never cooked with it. I don’t own an electric sous-vide water bath but I do own a large stock pot and Ziploc bags. So all that’s left to make this recipe are the ingredients. 

Since most of my readers do not own sous-vide equipment either, I inquired whether Clayton would be willing to do a guest post to share his results with you all.  And so here, with a big thank you to Clayton, is the first ever guest post on StefanGourmet.com! Continue reading “Guest Post: Fennel Fondant Sous-Vide Without Special Equipment”

Secondi di Pesce (fish dishes)20 Comments

Swordfish Salmoriglio

StefanGourmet

Swordfish is more meaty than most other fishes. So meaty in fact, that if the swordfish is really fresh and you cut away the ‘blood meat’, you could probably fool someone into thinking he’s eating meat rather than fish. There is one issue with swordfish and that is that it is often overcooked and dry. With swordfish this happens even more often that with other types of fish. By cooking the swordfish sous-vide, it will be very tender and juicy without risk of overcooking. The nice thing about cooking fish sous-vide is that it only takes a short time, so it is possible to cook the fish sous-vide without having a sous-vide water bath. You only need a digital thermometer for this to work. Continue reading “Swordfish Salmoriglio”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)14 Comments

Duck Leg a l’Orange Sous-Vide

StefanGourmet

Sous-vide confit of duck leg is great, but I thought it should also be possible to do a more juicy less flaky texture. Some experimenting with times and temperatures showed me right: 24 hours at 64.5C/148F yielded tender juicy duck legs. Duck with orange is a classic combination from French cuisine, known as Canard à l’Orange. And so a very simple but very stylish and tasty dish was born. Ingredients? Duck legs, an orange, salt and pepper, and a teaspoon of honey. That’s it! The duck is cooked in its own fat. Perfect simplicity or simple perfection? Continue reading “Duck Leg a l’Orange Sous-Vide”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)12 Comments

Leg of Lamb Steak Sous-vide

StefanGourmet

Good food can be surprisingly easy to prepare, especially if you have sous-vide equipment at your disposal. You could also make this with a regular oven though, but you’ll have to pay more attention to getting the meat cooked just right. Lamb is one of my favorite meats, with rack of lamb one of my favorite cuts. Leg of lamb can be cooked whole, but you can also cook a slice of leg of lamb as a steak. Here I am serving it with a red wine demi-glace sauce. Assuming that you already have the lamb demi-glace, there isn’t a whole lot to it. Just cook the meat sous-vide, sear it, and deglaze the pan to make the sauce. Here’s what I did. Continue reading “Leg of Lamb Steak Sous-vide”

Secondi di Pesce (fish dishes)1 Comment

Halibut Sous-vide with a Creamy Sauce

StefanGourmet

Halibut is not a fish that is easily available around here, and therefore I had not tried to prepare it sous-vide yet. So when I saw some at the market in Amsterdam I picked up a nice slice to try and cook sous-vide. Halibut is a flat fish like flounder, sole, and turbot, but it is a hell of a lot bigger so in most cases you don’t buy the whole fish but just a slice. I decided to serve it with a sauce made from white wine, fish stock, and cream. Served with potatoes and roasted vegetables it was a simple but nice meal, and it was no surprise that the halibut sous-vide was cooked to perfection: very succulent and tender.

Continue reading “Halibut Sous-vide with a Creamy Sauce”

Cooking26 Comments

Scallops: To Sous-Vide or Not To Sous-Vide, That’s the Question

StefanGourmet

Sea scallops are one of my favorite foods. When I first got my sous-vide appliance over two years ago, it was one of the first foods I tried. And I was underwhelmed. I didn’t do any side by side testing back then, but I was pretty sure that I couldn’t find anything special about the scallops that had been cooked sous-vide. After that I didn’t sous-vide scallops anymore. Since I was still relatively new to sous-vide back then, I decided to do a proper side by side experiment to find out once and for all whether those rave reviews I had seen elsewhere about the magnificent texture of sous-vide scallops were true after all. Continue reading “Scallops: To Sous-Vide or Not To Sous-Vide, That’s the Question”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)13 Comments

Chicken Breast with Tarragon Sous-Vide

StefanGourmet

Chicken and tarragon are a classic combination in French cuisine: Poulet à l’Estragon. In this recipe the chicken breast is seasoned with paprika and served with a sauce made from chicken stock, white wine, shallots, and tarragon. The tarragon sauce was nice, although I may have used a bit too much tarragon as it overpowered the chicken just a bit.

Continue reading “Chicken Breast with Tarragon Sous-Vide”

Contorni (side dishes)25 Comments

Parsnip Sous-Vide Fondant

StefanGourmet

One of the ideas I got from my new ‘modernist’ friends is to prepare vegetable fondant sous-vide. I tried it with parsnips as a side for the lamb with our Easter dinner, and it turned out great. I had never heard of vegetable fondant, but it seems to be very popular in restaurants in the UK. Root vegetables or potatoes are browned in fat and subsequently cooked in stock. It is relatively simple to do, but quite tasty as both the stock and the browning will add some nice flavor to the vegetable. This technique can also be used for potatoes, celeriac, sweet potatoes, carrots, etc. Continue reading “Parsnip Sous-Vide Fondant”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)11 Comments

Lamb with Lemon-Egg Sauce (Abbacchio Brodettato)

StefanGourmet

As I mentioned in my earlier posts this week, Easter is celebrated in Italy by eating egg and lamb. So it was a given that the main course for our Easter dinner would be lamb. To make it even more appropriate for Easter, the sauce of this lamb dish is made with an egg yolk. Abbacchio Brodettato is a lamb dish from Lazio, the region around Rome. Abbacchio is suckling lamb, but any young lamb will do to make this dish. This dish has a very original taste, as lamb is not often combined with prosciutto, lemon, and egg yolk. It works very well and the lamb is very tender. It is almost like eating white meat, and therefore it can be no surprise that a full-bodied oaked white wine is a better pairing for this than red wine. Continue reading “Lamb with Lemon-Egg Sauce (Abbacchio Brodettato)”

1. Antipasti (appetizers)6 Comments

Asparagus and Egg Sous-Vide

StefanGourmet

Easter is celebrated in Italy by eating eggs and lamb. As a starter for our Easter dinner, I decided to make a sous-vide version of an Italian antipasto called Asparagi alla Milanese. This is simply green asparagus with a fried egg, melted butter and grated parmigiano reggiano. For the sous-vide version I cooked the asparagus sous-vide at 85C/185F for 15 minutes and the eggs 45 minutes at 64.5C/148F. The resulting egg is like a poached egg, but with a very nice texture. The asparagus are tender but firm to the bite with a nice full flavor. If you don’t have sous-vide equipment, you could of course prepare this in the traditional way by poaching (or indeed frying) the eggs and steaming or boiling the asparagus. Continue reading “Asparagus and Egg Sous-Vide”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)23 Comments

Coq au Vin Sous-Vide

StefanGourmet

Coq au Vin was ‘invented’ to turn a tough old rooster into a feast. Nowadays it is hard to find such tough old roosters, and most Coq au Vin is made with chickens that have only lived to be about six weeks old. They do not really require to be simmered for a long time in red wine to become edible, and have a lot less flavor. Coq au Vin is still good anyway. If you are looking for a good Coq au Vin recipe for regular chicken, click here.

After I had discovered a type of free range chicken that is allowed to grow more slowly and thus develop more flavor, which reminded me of my grandmother’s chicken, I was curious how it would work when served as Coq au Vin. My parents were coming over for dinner and they had dropped some hints that they were curious about the “kip van tante Ali” I had found. And so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and prepare that type of chicken sous-vide, served as Coq au Vin. Continue reading “Coq au Vin Sous-Vide”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)16 Comments

Veal Rib Eye with Mushrooms

StefanGourmet

According to my butcher, you will live to be 100 if you eat veal on a regular basis. This is not a scientifically proven statement (he bases it on a few people he knows who used to eat veal on a regular basis and have lived to be 100) and since he’s selling the veal his objectivity is questionable. I do like to eat veal though, and it is great with mushrooms.

Fresh porcini mushrooms are very difficult to obtain around here, as they are in many other places around the world. A trick I’ve developed is to soak dried porcini mushrooms in hot water, sauté the reconstituted porcini mushrooms with fresh cultivated mushrooms, and then simmer all of the mushrooms in the porcini soaking liquid to boost the flavor of all the mushrooms. The mushrooms are sautéed with parsley and garlic, which is called funghi trifolati in Italy. Together with the deep fried fennel I posted about yesterday and a good glass of white wine, this makes a great meal for Easter. Continue reading “Veal Rib Eye with Mushrooms”

Contorni (side dishes)16 Comments

Deep Fried Fennel (Finocchi Dorati)

StefanGourmet

Fennel is a versatile vegetable that can be prepared in many ways: caramelized, in risotto, braised, as a salad, or deep fried as in this recipe. It has a nice flavor that reminds us of aniseed. The Italian way of deep frying fennel is to parboil it and then deep fry it breaded with breadcrumbs and parmigiano. Finocchi dorati are tender on the inside, crispy on the outside, and the lovely fennel flavor is accentuated. This is great as a side dish to meat such as this bone-in veal rib eye (about which I will post tomorrow). I parboiled the fennel sous-vide, but if you don’t have sous-vide equipment you can simply steam or parboil in water. The advantage of sous-vide is that no flavor is lost and that the fennel will be tender but firm to the bite. Continue reading “Deep Fried Fennel (Finocchi Dorati)”

1. Antipasti (appetizers)22 Comments

Smoked Salmon and Sous-Vide Egg Yolk Crostini

StefanGourmet

When I started my blog, it was an easy decision that it would be in English. Almost all of my fellow Dutchmen can read English well, and it would greatly enhance the number of possible readers worldwide. As a side effect I now have blogging buddies from Dublin, Chicago, Dallas–Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Northern California, Rome, London, Adelaide, Colorado, Northern Canada, Seattle, Saint Emilion, etc. but none from my own country. I do have Dutch readers (about 8%, in third place after the USA and the UK) and a lot of them are friends that I already know in real life.

No matter how much fun it is to exchange our recipes, photos, successes, failures and ideas with my blogging buddies, an important aspect is missing from such online friendships: cooking and eating together! This is impractical because of the distances involved, but luckily it has happened and if it’s up to me it will undoubtedly happen again.

Why am I telling you all this and what does it have to do with smoked salmon and sous-vide egg yolk crostini? I’m getting to that. Continue reading “Smoked Salmon and Sous-Vide Egg Yolk Crostini”

1. Antipasti (appetizers), Secondi di Pesce (fish dishes)22 Comments

Sous-vide Salmon-Pesto Roulade with Haricots Verts

StefanGourmet

The inspiration for this dish was provided by Richard McGary’s Salmon Roulade with Cilantro Citrus Pesto on Mango Corn Salsa, but it is quite different. A salmon fillet is butterflied, filled with a basil-lemon pesto, rolled up into a roulade, cooked sous-vide, and cut into slices that are served on haricots verts. Salmon cooked sous-vide to 43C/109F is amazingly velvety, which contrasts nicely with the crispy haricots verts. The round buttery flavor of the salmon is complemented by the fresh taste of the basil-lemon pesto. Continue reading “Sous-vide Salmon-Pesto Roulade with Haricots Verts”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)20 Comments

Horse Sirloin and Sous-Vide: a (not so) Rare Combination

StefanGourmet
DSC03896
Horse sirloin: notice the marbling

Due to the increased popularity of horse meat that I already wrote about in my post on Braciole di Cavallo alla Barese, my butcher now displays his horse meat more prominently. This is why I noticed this fine piece of horse sirloin at only half the price of beef sirloin and with better marbling. I decided that it would be a nice idea to try and cook it sous-vide.

I expected that I would be on my own with this, because most of the home cooks that can afford sous-vide equipment sneer at horse meat (or live in a country where it is not very sale for human consumption such as the USA) and so I was not expecting to find much guidance online. Google confirmed that horse sirloin and sous-vide are a rare combination: I only found one post and that was for horse tenderloin and most importantly wasn’t real sous-vide but more of a poorly executed poor-man’s version of it (not even a thermometer was used). Continue reading “Horse Sirloin and Sous-Vide: a (not so) Rare Combination”

2. Primi (pasta, risotto)27 Comments

Lobster Risotto Like No Other

StefanGourmet

All the recipes I could find for lobster risotto did not use the lobster shells to make lobster stock to use for the risotto. They were simply a plain risotto with a lobster served on top. And so I decided to create my own recipe for lobster risotto and it turned out spectacular! I decided to cook the lobster tail sous-vide because that will keep it amazingly tender, but if you don’t have sous-vide equipment you can simply boil the lobster tail as usual and still obtain a wonderful dish. Because live lobsters are not a cheap ingredient this is something for a special occasion or a dinner party where you are looking to impress your guests. This risotto is served with the lobster tail on top, delicious lobster meat mixed in with the rice that has a wonderful lobster flavor from the stock, as well as peas, tomato, and yellow bell pepper for lovely colors. This dish has a nice contrast between the creamy rice and crunchy vegetables. Continue reading “Lobster Risotto Like No Other”

Secondi di Pesce (fish dishes)17 Comments

Cod in White Wine Sous-Vide

StefanGourmet

This is an improved version of the Sous-vide cod with braised fennel and white wine sauce that I made more than a year ago. Apart from what I’ve learned about plating and photography since then, the improvements in the recipe are:

  • the cod is cured before cooking sous-vide to improve flavor and texture;
  • the cod is now cooked in the sauce of white wine and shallots, which will impart a nice hint of the wine to the fish;
  • a different temperature for cooking the cod: 41C/106F instead of 54C/129F in an attempt to make it less flaky.

Continue reading “Cod in White Wine Sous-Vide”

Secondi di Carne (meat dishes)14 Comments

My Grandmother’s Chicken Sous-Vide

StefanGourmet

Almost a year ago I wrote about my quest to recreate the braised chicken like my grandmother used to make. Most people have nostalgic memories of a favorite food made by their mother or grandmother. Just the smell of it will instantly propel you back to your childhood. In many cases the memory has been romanticized by our brains and it may therefore seem impossible to recreate it. For me, this was the braised chicken my grandmother made. Her husband, my grandfather, was the only one who had left the family farm, where his brothers and sister kept livestock including … Continue reading My Grandmother’s Chicken Sous-Vide