Hi right back and welcome to your Anova Community Rick.
I know it’s heresy here, but i advise those new to the sous vide cooking technique to gain enough knowledge and experience so they can abandon thoughtless recipe app-driven cooking and competently cook with confidence. If you were expecting guidance on finding an app to control your cook you can stop reading now.
Bye.
Interested?
We here in North America can’t even reach agreement across regions on the names of various cuts of meat. Not only with US to UK, but adding the international aspect of Anova users plus many different languages is certainly an interesting Anova programmer’s challenge.
In NA your Topside of beef is typically called rump roast, pot roast, sirloin tip, top round and likely various other names according to how well it was cooked. It’s a challenging cut of meat that i would not recommend to a newcomer. Why, because it is often big, thick, and tough.
You ask to be provided with temps and times. Before you can determine them you need some details that only you can provide. That’s where that K-word above is necessary. So if you’re still reading, here we go.
Sous vide cooking is substantially different technique from the conventional cooking you probably have already mastered. Sorry to say it, but you can forget most of that. It’s time for your fresh start.
SV cooking transfers heat in a water bath to airless packaged food at relatively low temperatures over comparatively longish periods of time except for fish and seafood.
Sometimes mercilessly long.
I am only going to address your must-knows here, mostly because i am running out of patience in repeatedly doing this when the highly detailed information is readily available at the following site:
http://www.douglasbaldwin.com/sous-vide.html
Read to understand Part I and Part II and all you need to Know will be revealed far better than i can do.
Start with your desired outcome for the selected cut of meat in your mind. Not having mastered para-normal communication i can’t do that for you, neither can an app to my knowledge. You should think about your experience when you will be eating and enjoying it. It will be the degree of doneness as in Rare, Medium-Rare, or the varying degrees of Badly Done: plus how tender you want to enjoy your beef.
DONENESS DETERMINES TEMPERATURE AND DESIRED TENDERNESS DETERMINES LENGTH OF COOKING TIME. I regret the foregoing shout, but you would not believe how difficult is seems to be to have users accept those two tenets of SV cooking.
If there’s a sub-set to the above it’s, “FORGET ABOUT WEIGHT”. That’s very difficult to do for those that don’t have the Knowledge and can’t let go of conventional recipe driven cooking, a lot of which can be wrong.
If you have not yet purchased your Topside, please get a small one. Select its cooking temperature based on your choice of doneness, anything from 131F (Medium-Rare, and recommended) to 150F (Medium-Well or Grey). For your first effort i recommend you cook it for 24 hours for the purpose of evaluation. That about the centre point length of time for a Topside’s 12 to 48 hours range.
There’s one last item for your current Things I Must Do list, Rick. Get and maintain your SV Cooking Journal, a good one. Get a bound blank book, one to be taken seriously and certainly not a file folder with loose papers falling out. You may even want to develop a spreadsheet for your tablet or computer, but it should be available in your kitchen so you will record the details of each cook.
Record the following details in order:
- The date of the cook
- Item cooked, as in Topside roast.
- Item’s maximum thickness in inches (no weight, no length, - just thickness. Don’t clutter your Journal with useless details)
- Cooking temperature of water-bath, or your Anova’s set point.
- Duration of cook in hours
- Comments. Record your qualitative evaluation of the outcome in detail. “Edible” is not a useful detail. If the result was below expectation always record that and your suggestions for improvement the next time you cook that menu item.
If you do record the weight of the item in your Journal you should also record both the planned and the resulting actual number of portions produced. This information will guide your buying decisions for future cooks based on actual results you achieved.
Gain the Knowledge Rick, and do the work so you will amaze family members and friends with the superior quality of your cooking.
Do well.