Hi,
I’m new to anova. From my understanding if you cook something at a set temperature the result should be the same whatever length of time you cook it if you stay under 4 hours. which make sense to me. but my experiments show something different.
I’ve tried with egg, at 62 celsius, they are very different if i cook them 40 min or 1h30.
the same with carrots, i’ve cooked them 1h at 80 celsius, they were very crunchy, if i let them for 2 hours they are more soft.
is it normal? can somebody explain that.
@cedric things left in a heated water will continue to cook once you’ve hit your done mark. Many foods are very forgiving of you go over by a half hour or so: pork, chicken, beef, etc. Other foods are less forgiving: eggs, fish, and the like. You cannot leave the food in the water indefinitely. I’m not sure where you heard as long as it’s less than 4 hours, but that’s not always true. Really tough cuts like pork butt, brisket, ribs, etc, you can. Not so much tender cuts, fish, eggs, etc. Hope that helps.
The idea that you can’t overcook food with the sous vide method is erroneous. Not really sure how that idea came about, probably just someone misunderstanding what they were witnessing.
I’ve not really had much to do with cooking vegetables sous vide, but I love playing with my Anova for cooking eggs in-shell. In fact, if I was never to use it for anything other than eggs I’d still consider it a worthwhile investment. Yup, I love eggs and I love being able to tweak the texture of the yolk to be anything from pouring cream to Dali-esque ooze. But I digress.
The Serious Eats website has a lot of experimentation on the effect of time on various proteins, not just the eggs. Well worth the read. While the appearance of red meat may not change much with a long cook, the texture will due to the breakdown of interconnecting tissues, in the same way they do with regular slow cooking.
Just got my Anova today so I’m really new to this and naturally haven’t experimented much yet. Follow-up question on time: So how do I know how long I should set my timer for? Do I read a lot of recipes and apply whatever they say, do I experiment using trial and error, or is there some kind of rule one could start with (perhaps that’s the same thing as reading recipes …)?
Sure, my stove didn’t come with instructions on how long to cook my food for, but seeing most people are still new to the sous vide method, I would have guessed that Anova would have published some sort of table or the like, with times for different foods, but apparently not.
I would stick to the recipes at first while you gain experience. Eggs are very particular about time and temperature. I found the size of the egg matters as well. We get farm eggs that are rated Jumbo and there are quite a few double yolks. These take a little longer than the recipe.
At 62C, 143.5F) I would expect poached eggs. These should hold at that stage for a very long time. My rule of thumb is to always add cook time and never worry about how fast I can get food cooked.