Ghetto Sous Vide: New Year, New Techniques

First and foremost, happy new year. Some people celebrated by getting crazy the night of the new year, but I did it during the day. I've been wanting to try to cook food a la sous vide for some time now but haven't had the money to buy a full setup. Well, the economic feasibility hasn't entirely changed, but my desire to do some sous vide hasn't. Thanks to information from my boss Scott, I'd found a way to try this method without having to drop $500 or so on a vacuum bagger and a box to heat water. The results were extraordinary.

So you wanna know how to do some sous vide, eh? Then read on. Dedication is required to cook food in this manner, especially without the best equipment. It requires cooking water, taking its temperature for more than an hour. However, the results are well worth it. You will never achieve such evenly, perfectly cooked food if you are using different methods.

Here's what you need for my anise-spiced sous vide pork tenderloin with orange coulis and duck fat fried mashed potato medallions:

Brine:

About 4 stars of anise

1 tbsp. corriander seeds

5 cloves

1-1/2 tsp. ginger powder

2 tbsp. salt (use either kosher, himalayan pink, hawaiian red, or sea salt)

1 tbsp red wine vinegar

2 cups water

Pork:

2 tenderloins

Orange coulis:

2 Cara Cara oranges

1 Blood orange

1/2 cup sugar

Mashed potato medallions:

2 cloves garlic

4 medium Idaho Russet potatoes

2 tbsp. chopped green onion

3 tbsp. heavy cream

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. fresh ground black pepper

Duck fat for pan frying

Special equipment required for cooking:

Cooler

Quart-sized freezer bags

In this recipe (and most others for sous vide) there is a brine component and a solid food component to go in a bag to cook. Start your brine by toasting the anise, cloves, and coriander in a pan in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 minutes. They should come out very fragrant. You'll smell the anise primarily. It smells like liquorice.

 While your spices toast, prep your meat to size so it will fit in your bags. I had to slice each tenderloin into thirds.

 When your spices are toasted, put them in a mortar and pestle or a grinder if you don't have a kickass mortar and pestle like I do. Add the salt and ginger powder.

Crush to a powder.

In a sauce pan, boil the water and vinegar and add the spices. Simmer for about 10 minutes to fully infuse the liquid and dissolve all the salt. Taste your brine. It's very salty and quite displeasing right? Don't worry. It's brine. It's not the part you'll be eating, it's only for seasoning. Your brine is done, your pork is cut to size. Move on.

Put 2-3 ounces of the brine as well as a piece of pork tenderloin into individual freezer bags. As you put the pork into the bags, be careful to not get pork-juice on the zippers of the bags. I'll explain...

Here comes another part where your dedication to the meal will be tested. Unless you have an actual vacuum bagger, you will have to use your mouth to suck as much air as  possible out of the bags. The best method I found was to close the bag mostly, leaving a one centimeter long slit open, holding it open wide, putting my mouth over it to form a seal, and inhaling as hard as possible until I got brine in my mouth. Then I sealed the bag with my mouth still on it and promptly spit the brine in the sink.

Warning: This puts you at risk of consuming raw pork-juices. You will get brine that has been in contact with raw pork in your mouth. If you can't deal with that, stop. I won't be held accountable for any cases of illness. I'm not responsible for your own decisions regarding cooking. I am solely explaining the process I went through to prepare my own food.

Refrigerate these bags for a minimum of 8 hours (overnight).

The next day has come. Heat up a bunch of water and start pouring it into your cooler. It's important to have a lot of water compared to food you're cooking because the cold food will offset your water temperature more significantly as the ratio of food to water increases. Bring your full cooler of water to 142 degrees Fahrenheit. It will take a lot of adjustment to get the temperature right, but it is important to be accurate. I didn't let my cooking temperature slip more than one degree off of 142 for any part of the cook time. The more accurate you are, the better your results will be. Once you've achieved a proper temperature, place a couple bags of brined pork into the water. Cook for 1-1/2 hours.
You should check your water temperature every 5 minutes. The best way I found to keep the temperature right was to fill a sauce pan with water, boil it, and every time you check the temperature to add boiling water, 4 ounces at a time, stirring and temp checking with each addition until you have reached a proper 142 degrees again. Then scoop water from the cooler and put it in your sauce pan, and put your sauce pan back on the stove. This way you don't keep adding water and overflowing your cooler. One final thing to note; always add the hot water as far away from the food as possible. You wouldn't want to thermally shock the pork that you've been so desperately trying to gently cook, would you?
(P.S. The answer is no.)

 Place a lid on the cooler, boil a pot of water with the potatoes in it, and place your garlic cloves for the potatoes in the oven at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 10-15 minutes. Boil the potatoes until they're slightly underdone. You should be able to stab them with a fork without too much effort, but they should still be slightly firm. I forget how long it took exactly. I think it was around 20 minutes.
While they boil, continue to monitor your pork temperature every 5 minutes and start building the coulis.
Juice your oranges into a sauce pan lined with a strainer (we don't want pulp). Add the sugar and put it on the stove to simmer, stirring often. Once it gets to 240 degrees Fahrenheit, it's done. It should reduce by quite a bit (more than half) and end up as a thick syrup with intense orange flavor.

Your potatoes are probably pretty close to done now. They should still be slightly undercooked because you'll be frying them later. Cut off the ends and cut the potatoes into centimeter by centimeter cubes. This is solely to break the skin into smaller pieces. Then put them in a mixing bowl. Chop the roasted garlic and add it to the bowl, as well as the green onions, heavy cream, salt, and pepper. Mash coarsely. It's fine to have large lumps of potato. They'll soften up when you pan fry them as medallions.

 Put the potatoes on wax paper and roll into a cylinder. Place in the freezer to chill for about a half hour, just so that the shape holds more firmly.

 Take out your potatoes and cut two centimeter thick rounds. Heat up some duck fat and add the potato slices.

 Fry until golden (4-5 minutes) and flip.

Yes, they're beautiful.
At this point your coulis should be heated to 240 degrees Fahrenheit. If it isn't there yet, get it there.
Your pork should also be finishing up. Take it out of the cooler and out of the bags. It should have a core temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Plate it. Pour some of the coulis on top of each piece and rest for 5 minutes. Cut in and see what perfectly cooked pork tenderloin looks like. Slightly pink. Don't worry. It's done. And it's done better than you dreamed it could have been. Now delight in the fruit of your labor. You'll taste salt and liquorice notes from the brine, pork flavors (obviously) from the tenderloin, and a wonderfully sweet acidic counter provided by the coulis. The potatoes are crisp on the outside, light, tender, creamy and smooth on the inside. Delight in the fruits of your labor. I would have gladly paid $20-30 for this meal in a restaurant. It was splendid.

So try out some ghetto sous vide. It's brilliant.

Special thanks to my boss Scott for recommending the ghetto sous vide technique, and to Modernist Cuisine for being a tremendous inspiration to try sous vide for myself.

Thanks for reading, and happy new year!