Bathtime.....

The adventures in sous vide go on......

A couple of days ago I tried a recipe from one of my favourite chefs Glynn Purnell which he cooked for the Great British Menu series. It involved using Pork Fillet (Tenderloin) and of course involved using the water bath.

I was surprised to see that he only cooked the meat for 18 minutes at 62C as I assumed that you need to do it for longer but of course he knows better than me so I followed it and was unbelievably good.

Yes it was a little bit pink but using this cooking method ensures that when the internal temperature of the Pork fillet reaches 62C for more than 1 minute any trace of Trichinosis is killed off so it's absolutely fine to eat.

I finished these off with the blowtorch which gave the meat a beautiful golden colour and a slight crust.

Accompanying the Pork was a Water Chestnut purée (couldn't get any Jerusalem artichokes), Glazed Pears and perhaps the most outstanding part of the dish some Vanilla dipped Potatoes.

The potatoes are a revelation and very easy to make. You just set the oven to 130C and layer the bottom of a glass oven dish with 6 slices of potato about 1cm thick. Remove the seeds from a Vanilla pod and sprinkle these over the potatoes then just cover the whole lot with rapeseed oil, give it a bit of a stir around to get it mixed up well, bung in the empty pods too for more flavour then heat in the oven for about 30 mins or until they are soft. I suppose they could be described as a Confit of vanilla infused potato too.

The whole recipe can be found here

The whole combination of flavours was just immense and it's no wonder this guy has Michelin stars coming out his ears.

So this shorter cooking period got me thinking because about a week ago I cooked some Ribeye steaks in the water bath but I did them at 55C for about 8 hours and I was a little disappointed after that time to find them quite a bit smaller than I was hoping them to be, the flavour was absolutely stunning don't get me wrong and they were cooked perfectly to medium rare but I wanted to achieve a certain look with the finished article and that wasn't possible with what I ended up with.

After cooking Glynn Purnell's Pork Fillet it dawned on me that as a much more tender cut of meat I need not have cooked it for so long and in fact around just 40 minutes would have been fine so I'm going to give it another go this evening serving it up with some gorgeous chips (not my own creation but these and they are damn good) some Portobellini Mushroom and my own Chilli Pea creation.

I was also thinking of what else to try in the water bath so rather unlike my usual self I have pre-planned a couple of meals for tomorrow and Saturday.

For tomorrow I have a couple of Lamb Neck fillets all vacuum packed up and cooking away, these are going to cook for around 30 hours before I'll blowtorch them ready to serve up with some Parsnip purée and a warm Broad bean and Asparagus Salad.

The next meal will be Beef brisket which again is already cooking and will be doing so for around 40 hours, this is going to be served up full roast dinner style with all the trimmings.....Just what we're going to need after a rather massive night out on Friday DJ'ing at Walkabout, Reading and seeing our buddies the lovely Candice and Wesley back off to Australia.

Personally I think they are just leaving the country before our boys give their cricket team a good bashing during the upcoming Ashes series :-)