I have a full cooker today with 5 bags of mixed meat. Porterhouse steak, beef shortribs, brisket, kidney, and Italian sausage. Various times, all at 130F/54C. The steak for dinner today, the shortribs for tomorrow. The others in the fridge.
I know that is too low for Italian sausage, but I mostly want to reduce the bacterial count and extend the length of time they can be eaten. They were only a day from expiring.
How did the batch cook go?
Very well. The beef kidneys (2 hours) came out especially well although I could have let the pan get a little hotter before adding the pieces to the pan.
The brisket (24 hours) gave me a chance to try fish sauce. I never really knew what to do with it until the discussion on the FB group. Nice flavor addition.
The shortribs were kind of skimpy but money off for the package. I used it as an opportunity to try my longest ever cook, 48 hours and also another test of fish sauce. The picture is of them before finishing. The meat was good and tender but the connective tissue not broken down very much at all.
Yeah - I’ve seen a lot of talk about fish sauce on the Facebook group, which I found super interesting. How does this affect flavor, by the way?
It does not seem to add any fishiness to the flavor profile. It is supposed to mimic dry aging, a process I don’t know much about. I like beef and have heard and read that aging is better because the bacteria breaks the meat down and makes it more tender. But that is what I got the APC for and why there are long cooking sessions.
I was very sparing in my application of fish sauce and I will try it again since I have a big bottle, but so far am kind of ‘meh’ about using it. It might be worth while to start a fish sauce topic and get some discussion about it.
Enzymes.
Bacterial action would be rotting (uncontrolled) or fermenting (controlled).
There are some interesting things you can do with fish sauce and using it to trigger/accelerate fermentation. I had a 1 gal jar of kimchi explode once because I used too much… It was a big stinky mess.
@RichardOL good call - I’ll create a new thread on it.
Did I mention I didn’t know much about it? ;-}
No worries. 
