TIP: Other uses for your Sous Vide water bath - Defrosting frozen meat

Anova Precision® Cooker
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If you retain water in your Sous Vide container after cooking, planning to cook something else in it the next day, it would be nice to use that sitting water at room temperature for other things until you Sous Vide again rather than have it just take up space on a counter.

I raise this point because I live in California where drought is a way of life now, and dumping 10-11 qt of water down the drain casually after cooking seems wasteful. (You can only use so much to water your plants)

Being a chicken fan, and having a Costco load of Chicken Thighs in the freezer constantly, I’m sometimes faced with wanting to cook some chicken but having neglected to transfer a package of chicken from the freezer to the refrigerator area a couple of days prior to defrost slowly.

It’s well known you can rapidly defrost food quickly by filling a container with cold tap water and placing the sealed package of food (e.g. chicken, steak) into the water. The tap water defrosts the meat packet without any heat. (You change out the tap water every so often during the defrost)

It occurred to me that dropping that plastic bagged frozen chicken into the room temperature Sous Vide bath could accomplish the same thing. Give it a try!

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I use it to mix drinks, it’s almost as good as a dirty hot dog water martini or a spam juice whiskey.

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Ha, Ha, I LOVE it! :wink: That’s thinking out of the box.

I love a good Martini or Cocktail, but haven’t heard of either. They sound nasty, but nice. I’ll have to experiment some. :yum:

Thanks!

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Hot dog martini sounds pretty on point.

But yeah - I cook pretty much every day, so I don’t change my water nearly as often as I should, cause, yknow drought and all that business too. I just use the sous-vide water afterwards to water one giant plant. Its huge now.

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This is a great recommendation!

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Forgive me for re-posting an old topic but I recently joined the community boards and thought I’d share a sous vide hack of mine… We also buy large packages of chicken from costco and freeze most of it. When it is time to defrost I have recently been using my sous vide unit to assist. Like you I would place it in the water bath, but take it one step further and turn on the unit at a room temp setting. It will defrost way faster if you get that circulation going.

I’m also in California and my wife gets PO’d when I use the bowl under a slow drip of the tap technique.

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@monkeyrra You’re more than welcome to add to an old topic! It brings it back to life. :wink:

Haha, I can totally understand your wife! Lol. The slow drip works, but you definitelty lose a lot of water.

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I will have to time it… but using SV at room temp has probably been the fastest method of defrosting I have found.

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Would make sense that it would be faster with the circulator (as oppose to the slow drip method for defrosting)! @monkeyrra

Thanks for sharing!