How long does it take to get my Anova vessel to 130°F.
It seems to me I shouldn’t put my steak in until it’s the correct temperature. And should I let the sealed bag sit out or put in water bath immediately from refrigerator?
I’m very new at this.
My process is to fill the vessel with hot tap water. This significantly reduces the time required for the water to reach temperature. It depends how much water you are heating and your starting point to give a time estimate. Using hot tap water and a pot that is not overly large it won’t take long. I put my meat in the hot water and start timing when it reaches cooking temperature.
What John said! And you can take your meat directly from the fridge, put it in the cooking vessel and start the timer when the water reaches the set temp. You can take it directly from the freezer also, just add half an hour or so. Steak is not that sensitive to time.
Dr. Douglas Baldwin’s Practical Guide to Sous Vide, Table 2.3 seems to suggest otherwise, with for instance 135 minutes for a 30 mm slab of frozen meat to reach 1ºF less than the water bath’s temperature. I think I understand his math and appreciate it.
Table 2.3: Approximate heating times for frozen meat to 1°F (0.5°C) less than the water bath’s temperature. You can decrease the time by about 13% if you only want to heat the meat to within 2°F (1°C) of the water bath’s temperature.
I recently thawed a frozen Mahi tuna steak to refrigerator temperature 40ºF and then SV’d it quite satisfactorialy. I have another that I will add to the water bath frozen and add 135 minutes to the IIRC 60 minutes recipe cook time. We’ll see.
Coming from a tradition of meat overcooked to oven temperature, SV ‘overcooked’ is pretty meaningless, it is still edible not wasted and a learning experience.
The capacity of our APC heater is 1,000 Watts, which is equal to 0.95 BTU/second, 57 BTU/minute and 3,410 BTU/hour
A BTU is a British Thermal Unit, the amount of heat power required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit.
So 1,000 Watts will heat 57 pints (are a pound) of water 1ºF in a minute, or one pint (is a pound) of water will be heated 57ºF in a minute.
“A pint is a pound the world around.”. Fifty-seven is almost sixty, so 1000 Watts heats a pound of water about one degree per second.
The math is not overly complicated, to find out how much longer you need to warm your food when starting from frozen instead of thawed you need to take the time in table 2.3 and subtract the time in table 2.2. In your example the difference is 45 minutes. According to Baldwin 1 hour extra is enough for meat up to a thickness of 40 mm, meat up to 25 mm requires 30 minutes extra.
So if you prefer to start from frozen, just add some time.
LOL. You’re a better man than I, and I had 25 years experience modeling heating coolant by thermal conduction from uranium fission.
I remember a time when doing this math was exciting. Somewhere between college and now I have lost the enthusiasm.
L. S. Tong’s The Boiling Crisis and Critical Heat Flux
was my bible. We did a lot of in house training on highly specialized topics and I was the duty nerd, the “Doug of all Doug’s”, assigned to particularly abstruse topics.
OP.
Time to temperature all depends on the pre-existing temp of water coming out of the pipes…
(as that’s what it starts at) & seasons.
If there is no bag leakage (cloudy water) then multiple days & multiple uses before repurposing waste water from the vessel.
Insulating your vessel top (recommend a silicone lid) & bottom (foil wrapped insulation foam board offcut) will accelerate the heat up time exponentially, so start there & save energy & time simply put with minimal waffle.
Lids = no / minimal moisture loss & no pesky cut outs mid cook & “likely” heat up time decreases by around 1/3
Personally I don’t like, nor need hot water done this way, my kitchen is around 16-18c in March-April & my water ( chlorinated, from the cold tap) will obviously adjust to that, so my temp raise time from there to atypical cook temp is 20 mins, if my meat is frozen then my defrost time is my pot temp warm up time (or less)
All depends on whether you run a family kitchen & timetable or you have more time to faff (& learn to keep / dispense with the hypercritical side of things)
Put bluntly, let it fit around you, sous vide produced results are a cut above even with a couple of short cuts, no need for equation squiggle filled whiteboards in reality.