Sous vide over cooking toughens meat?
I'm new to sous vide cooking. The equipment I'm using is a Ronson slow cooker connected to Sous Vide Magic PID controller, no bubbler. No vacuum sealer.
I calibrated the SVM temperature reading to boiling water, and it was very close (99.9 oC). I then "auto-tuned" the PID. The end result is that it takes a long time to get up to temperature (/slow/ cooker), but holds it within 0.1 oC once achieved consistently.
For my first experiment I wanted to try Douglas Baldwin's Flat Iron Steak recipe. (12hr @ 55 oC)
I chose three well marbled blade steaks (cheap cut) with a little bit of bone in the centre. Each steak was individually sealed in a zip-lock bag using the water submerge method Doublas Baldwin recommends.
The first day I cooked them for 10 hours (not 12, it was dinner time, and I was impatient :( ). I quickly seared the steak 30 seconds per side in a very hot pan and rested it for 3 minutes before serving. It was very tender and had a beefier flavour than any other steak I can remember. But there were some tougher bits around the sinew, but still edible.
I left the other two pieces in the fridge over night and continued cooking one of them for 10 hours the next day. To my surprise after 20hr total of cooking at 55 oC, this piece felt tougher and more rubbery than the first, and the sinewy bits were distinctly even tougher. Does anyone have an explanation for this?
I know thickness in a slab shaped piece of meat is most crucial in determining cooking time, and each of these steaks was about 15mm thick (so not very thick), so potentially even 10hr was too long?
Best Answer
Anything you salt will firm up in texture over a period of time. I suspect that since you cooked these with seasonings and then chilled and left them in the fridge before reheating an eating they firmed up a great deal in the fridge.
If you check out this blind tasting conducted by Dave Arnold at Cooking Issues you'll find some more detailed info about this topic. The gist of it is that for cook-chill-reheat purposes you shouldn't salt the meat before searing. For cook-direct serve meals your just fine doing it that way.
http://www.cookingissues.com/2011/10/12/to-salt-or-not-to-salt-thats-the-searing-question/
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Can you over cook meat in a sous vide?
While you can't overcook your food with sous vide, leaving it in the water bath for too long can result in changes in the texture. After a while, it can turn out soft and mushy. Also, with fish and eggs, it can make the fish too dry and the eggs too firm.Can sous vide make tough meat tender?
Turning Tough Cuts Tender: Collagen proteins unwind into moisture-holding gelatin at temperatures as low as 122\xb0F/50\xb0C. Sous vide cooking allows us to hold tough, collagen-heavy cuts of meat at lower temperatures for longer periods of time and get the same tenderizing effect as braising.Why is my sous vide steak overcooked?
Overcooking foods Even though people say sous vide is easy, you can overcook your food. The food continues to cook after it leaves the pot, unless you place it in an ice bath. Also, when you go to sear your meat, you can easily overcook it during searing, especially if you're using a thinner cut.Why is my sous vide meat mushy?
For example, many chefs recommend that sous vide steak should not be cooked for longer than four hours because the connective tissue begins to break down and the steak can become mushy. If the recipe says to cook something for between one and four hours, it's probably not recommended to cook it for 12.I COOKED a Brisket for a MONTH and this happened!
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Answer 2
Another possibility is that the extended cooking time dissolved and extracted all the collagen in the meat, making it seem "tougher". The best way to judge doneness of food (especially when cooked sous vide) is to take its temperature, rather than use size/time tables.
Answer 3
From the same book, Dougles Baldwin's sous vide guide, "The water-holding capacity of whole muscle meat is governed by the shrinking and swelling of myofibrils."
If you cook meat too long, you will end up with more moisture in the bag outside of the meat, rather than inside the juicy steak. You can see this if you cooking two similar steaks for drastically different amounts of time - there's a lot more water left in the longer-cooked bag.
Cuts that are meant to be cooked for a long time are done to break down collagen into gelatin, making a hard cut softer, but cooking even longer dries out any meat. Soft cuts don't have much collagen and don't benefit from a long cook.
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