Science of Slow Cooking | Hacker News Reader

Science of Slow Cooking

scienceofcooking.com

137 pointscolinprince119 comments

This is pretty specific to slow cooking meat.

There's lots of good ways to slow cook meat. I think slow cookers(aka Crockpots) have a lot of downsides. If I've got 8 hours to cook a piece of meat, I've probably got the time to sous vide, which I think gives better texture. If I had a smoker, I'd go that way for the flavor and texture. I'd rather braise in the oven as well.

Crockpots are easy, and leave the oven free, but I think too often give a universal mushiness to many cuts. They can be used well for long meat cooks, but it's more difficult than it seems.

For a bigger upfront purchase I think a pressure cooker is the better option for most. It's great to be able to pull off beans from dry in an hour, or high quality stock on an hour. A lot of the pressure cookers have slow cooker functionality built in, as well. Pressure cooked meats can have a different texture than traditionally cooked ones, but it's not as objectionable in my mind.

If you liked the post thoughtfully linked here, Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is a must.

> but I think too often give a universal mushiness to many cuts

Lots of people like that, especially with sub-par cuts (blade roast anyone?).

I sometimes wonder how many cooking techniques exist specifically to "upgrade" lower quality ingredients. Slow cooking, spices ... it's likely not a huge list, but I suspect it forms a notable part of the world's cooking cultures.

Absolutely. I grew up spending lots of time on a farm, I've lived in a 3rd world country, plus have cooked for a living. The fact is, the majority of an animal is shitty cuts of meat.

Even something like short rib is 'premium' compared to much of the carcass. So slow-cooking is great to turn a blade or round roast into something that doesn't suck. And definitely, a huge part of every food culture is cooking these subpar cuts.

I'm just here trying to understand what a "shitty cut" even means. For me, it's all meat. Some tastes better than other. But the baseline is "good".

The old animal meat (from milk cows and goats, and egg hens) that I ate as a kid would probably horrify someone like you lol

> old animal meat?

In one of his books, Escoffier explained that in making beef stock get better flavor starting with the meat of old animals.

Soooo, I considered that, and in NY thought of retired dairy cows so called around. I got to a packing house in PA where I got an explanation "think fast food". So, maybe McDonald's, Burger King, etc. are serving the beef the Escoffier liked for making beef stock!

Well, think of it this way: all cuts of meat have varying degrees of meat, fat, and gristle. The meat, properly cooked, adds texture and some flavour; the fat carries immense flavour but can overwhelm with grease; the gristle is mostly crap: no flavour, gets in your teeth, chewy, unpleasant, best discarded or ground into sausage.

Broadly speaking. Some meat is so lean (bison, e.g.) that is must be cooked rare lest it become as dusty as the rest of Utah (the best bison I ever had was this fantastic place in southern Utah, hence the reference) and some meat is so fatty or gristly it must be slow cooked or braised or otherwise managed.

And consider that how tough is a cut depends on its use: various fowl favour standing on one leg so the other is ceteris paribus more tender; cf also the reference above to the front legs of red deer.

So “shitty meat” basically says “this animal did not lay about on fluffy cushions but scrambled for a living, except for this little bit here”.

Some people rave over tenderloin aka filet mignon. I love it, if properly larded and cooked. Otherwise, I much prefer rib eye: juicier, more flavourful, even if a little gristlier.

When I’m hungry, I don’t much care. When I have time and/or spare cash, a good starting piece well prepared is a joy.

Indeed - I hunt red deer, and the most useful meat is the back legs and back straps (muscles running along the spine) - the front legs and neck etc. are typically only used for mincing.

Even then the cuts in the back legs vary in usefulness.

And venison is notoriously lean, hence a lot of methods of cooking it involve larding to prevent it ending up a dry lump of chewiness.

Slow cooked 'shitty' meat like chuck is tastier than the best cuts. Or so I've found.

But you do have to cook it for a long time - or pressure cook.

> it's likely not a huge list

It's definitely a large list! every culture imaginable has a whole range of dishes specifically for elevating "basic" and "cheap" cuts of meat.

It isn't limited to meat, either. Work has to go into making rhubarb something vaguely edible. Artichokes aren't all that appealing prior to good preparation.

Calories used to be a lot more scarce than they are now.

Rhubarb is delicious raw.

I'm curious what you're thinking of regarding rhubarb. As another reply pointed out, it's fine raw. Otherwise it's usually just cooked gently with some sugar.

"good preparation" for artichokes in my life has always just meant "a good and thorough steaming". Nothing more. Helps to eat with a good garlic mayonnaise, but not critical.

I will not stand for this rhubarb heresy!

>Work has to go into making rhubarb something vaguely edible.

Eh? You cut it into pieces, throw on some really basic sponge cake, bake for 30 minutes = delicious rhubarb cake. Or put it in a pan with some water and like a glass of sugar, boil for 10 minutes = rhubarb compote. Am I missing something?

I think the current cuisine of a culture is related to its economic status. Westerners often turn their noses up at things consumed in, say, East Asia, yet many of those same things were consumed in the west before industrial farming allowed us to be more choosy about our food.

Go read about California during the gold rush, where an influx of people without appropriate food infrastructure pushed people to eat bears, cougars, songbirds, etc.

Pemmican.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pemmican

I mean thats the majority of smoking meats (and providing longevity).

What you describe is the primary motivation to the genesis of French cuisine: how do we take this crappy cut of meat or unpalatable vegetable we can get on the cheap and make it edible?

I suspect a lot of Indian cuisine also. No point debating which of the two has the best outcomes, is there? :)

Agreed, I enjoy the results regardless of the origin!

I live in Thailand now, but lived most of my life in The Netherlands. I live on the Thai countryside. Most of the pork and beef/buffalo meat my girlfriend buys in the village market, I don’t really enjoy. It’s often “chewy”. Apparently Thai people do like these kinds of meat, but I think The Netherlands would export most of this meat the 2nd or 3rd world countries.

Those “chewy” kinds of meat would be ok when slow cooked I’d wager, perhaps in a Hungarian goulash [0].

I suspect the local pig farmers send the best cuts of meat to the big city, to sell for higher prices.

At least the chicken meat is good.

—-

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goulash

That's exactly where brisket comes from*. It was not considered a good cut of meat, so it was provided to the ranch hands. They figured it out.

*at least to the bbq legends/mythos of bbq in texas

Kansas City also considers brisket a local specialty.

(KC used to be a major stockyard and slaughterhouse as it sits both on the Missouri river and on a rail line.)

I'll take a Texas tall tale against your KC doused in sauce version any day of the week, and twice on sunday. ;-)

My favourite is ox tail. Takes hours to cook through, but once you can grab a piece with tongs and get all the meat fall off with a slight shake, gives an absolutely gorgeous flavour to a slow simmer meat dish.

Bonus: you can drain the liquid and put in in the freezer. Keeps good for a week or so. Wonderful gelatine and works with almost anything else as a base.

It lasts only a week even after being frozen? Seems odd.

Whoops, not freezer. Fridge.

Thanks for spotting it.

I don't think "sub-par cuts" makes sense as a category. Different cuts are just suited to different kinds of cooking.

Calling a blade roast sub-par because it doesn't make good steaks makes about as much sense as calling tenderloin sub-par because it doesn't make a good braise.

Blade isn't the best braising cut either. For braises short rib, chuck, oxtail, etc... are better. That's why I called it sub-par.

Blade is chuck.

My bad, dunno what I was thinking.

I think it's just that the cuts suited to slow-cooking techniques tend to also be the cheaper cuts. Maybe that's because they are generally from larger muscles and therefore in comparatively greater supply.

It makes a bit of sense because a tenderloin is much less meat than say a brisket. It's also much more tender when cooked a short time. So traditionally it's meat for a more affluent audience while a brisket is sold to the poor. Or so the story goes.

Pork shoulder in the slow cooker is great - lots of sub-par cuts are great in there.

I've never had a slow cooker pork shoulder that was nearly as good as one smoked, sous vide, slow-roasted, braised, or pressure cooked.

Also pork shoulder is great! It's one of my favorite meats. It takes a long time to cook (because you have to render the collagen), but it's delightful.

To be fair - I'm not saying it is necessarily as good I should have caveated it as it is still quite good and way less involved. Return to effort ratio is high (and cost is low).

>I've never had a slow cooker pork shoulder that was nearly as good as one smoked,

Um, like duh! ;-) Slow cookers aren't for the foodie types looking for best recipes, it's for the "i got other things to do" types. I use the bejeebus out of my smoker. The problem that I have is that if I'm going through the work of using the smoker, I'm going to smoke everything in the fridge. I did a few racks of ribs and a tenderloin, but the fire was soo good that day I threw on a roast. Best roast I've had.

With regards to beans, I'm always blowing up my beans in the pressure cooker or having them hard. I've not found the right touch to get what I can from a can or on the stove top. I need your secrets!

With beans, cooking them fast is a double-edged sword. Now that I'm working from home, I prefer to cook mine in the oven, precisely because it takes hours, and I don't have to be precise and disciplined about checking on them. If I get caught up in work and check twenty minutes later than I planned, there's no risk of ruining them.

Try waiting for the pressure cooker to cool the point that it's no longer pressurized without releasing any steam. In general, if you have a container of wet things in a pressure cooker (e.g. a bean with its seed coat, but a jar with a lid works the same way), when the pressure outside the container drops below the pressure inside the container, the net force tries to expand the container. If the pressure inside the container drops below the vapor pressure of whatever is in the container (which is likely _above_ ambient pressure in a hot pressure cooker), the contents will boil, which can cause various unpleasant effects.

This can be minimized by trying to keep everything inside roughly in equilibrium while the pressure drops below ambient. Or a pressurized cooling system could be used in which the pressure cooker is pressurized above the vapor pressure using something other than water vapor (e.g. air, but an inert gas could be used, too), and then the contents can be cooled as fast as desired without risk of boiling or rupturing anything.

I've never heard of anything resembling the latter for home use. If I understand correctly, commercial canning operations will cool their jars under pressure while spraying the outside with disinfectant to minimize the risk of anything living getting in before the jars fully seal.

I recommend using an electric pressure cooker with a pre-soak mode. I use the "Multigrain" mode on an Instant Pot LUX60 with the "More" option active, which according to the manual gives 45 minutes of warm soaking followed by 60 minutes of pressure cooking in the same water. I use plenty of water and discard it after cooking to remove some of the indigestible oligosaccharides, and I do not find soaking in separate water to be necessary.

Typically you open the Heinz can

Microwave under clingfilm for 3-4 minutes

Serve over toast.

Its not that complicated right?

I like to choose myself how much salt and sugar I have along with my beans.

Rather than a "sure-fire-technique", "secrets" maybe just be a one-by-one elimination of errors.

Sorry if this is obvious, but "blown up beans" pretty much universally means "overcooked". They probably would have been good if you'd cooked them less.

However, "hard" beans are trickier. It might just mean "undercooked", and you can give them another few mins in the pressure cooker, or it might mean that the beans are old/were not stored in a dry air-tight container.

So how to pressure cook good beans:

Start here for rough times: https://fastcooking.ca/pressure_cookers/cooking_times_pressu...

Cover beans with about 2-3x water. The goal is that once the beans have expanded there is no excess water. The excess is just diluting your seasoning.

prepare seasoning (in this example for something good in a burrito, w/ corn bread, or served with a braised pork shoulder): brown a lot of onions in a lot of oil. For 2 cups of dry black/pinto beans, something like 1 large onion and 1/4c of neutral oil. Add 1/2 head of chopped garlic to the mess after the onions are browned. Add another drizzle of oil and into it add ground chili (preferably a smoky one like morita), cumin, and black pepper just as you are turning off the heat. The effect of cooking spices a moment in oil is positive (see indian "tadka").

Add salt and seasoning* in with the uncooked beans. My rule of thumb is that the cooking water should taste decidedly salty - a bit saltier than you ultimately want the beans to taste, since the salt will disperse somewhat into the volume of the beans.

*Some people say don't salt or season until the beans are cooked, else your beans will stay tough.

This is definitively not true in the case of salt - in fact the opposite, salt is shown to help denature the protein in beans and decrease cooking time: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,48&q=salt+...

It seems to be somewhat true in the case of the calcium leached from seasoning like onions and garlic, but, IMO with the pressure cooker it's not an issue in practice.

Also cooking in an alkaline solution can help denature tough, improperly stored, beans. So if you're having a rough go of it, you could try adding a tsp of baking soda to the pot.

Happy beaning!

It's not perfect, but I've had good results soaking the beans first. Soaking overnight works best, but in a pinch, two minutes at high pressure is sufficient. You can release the pressure quickly (by the steam valve) after the soak, because the beans are still hard. Discard the soaking water.

Adding some salt to the cooking water (not the soaking water) will help keep the beans from turning to mush.

You will probably have to experiment to find out what works for your cooking equipment, beans, and water chemistry.

I assume a slow-cooker or stove-top method would remove some of the variables and make it easier to achieve a consistent result. I haven't manage to plan beans that far ahead in recent memory, so I can't confirm.

I just received my preordered America's Test Kitchen recipe book for Instant Pots in the mail yesterday. I loved their approach, generally, and was very excited to see that they had a pressure cooker book. I'm actually making my first pot of beans following it, as we speak!

Anyway, they say that to "minimize busted beans" it's essential to brine them first, 1 lb of beans to 2 qts water with 1.5 tablespoons of salt. You can either soak overnight or bring to a boil and then let sit for 1 hour. They also say you always need to add a bit of oil while cooking, and to use the "natural" pressure release rather than quick release. And 8 cups water to 1 lb of beans. Beyond that, you'll have to determine the particular cook time for your kind of bean, but they seem to range from "turn off as soon as pressure is obtained" for black beans to "3 minutes at pressure" for pinto beans.

Hope that helps! I'm looking forward to seeing how my beans turn out following this. I haven't had great luck with pressure cookers in the past.

I love America's Test Kitchen. They are so worth the expense.

Have you tried adding cream of tartar to your brine for the beans? It's supposed to help with reducing how gassy you can get from beans.

In India, people in a hurry, and some restaurants, add baking soda to chickpea dishes, like chana masala, to reduce that gassy effect, I've heard. Don't like to do it myself. Soaking the chickpeas in warm water for a few hours before cooking, and adding enough Indian spices and masalas, for both taste and digestion, probably cuts the gassiness.

There's variability even using the same bean and the same settings on your cooker because venting can vary, I think based on humidity. I've had my cooker vent in 15 minutes, or 60 - it's still cooking while it vents. So you have to be aware of that when you start the cook. If you've got a broth going on the stove at the same time, the beans will vent more slowly

For garbanzos, I do 45 mins cooking followed by 15 mins (or more) of natural release. Works great every time!

At what pressure? I think I do like 15 minutes at 12 psi

Whatever the default is on my Instant Pot. I think it defaults to "high". I don't use the bean-specific setting, which didn't work well for me.

Haha, I had cooked beans and rice no problem at all at sea level for twenty years. Then I moved to 5500'. Even a year after moving in, I once ruined three consecutive (same afternoon) pots of brown rice. I ruined a couple of 15 (or whatever) bean soups, too.

Got to soak ahead of time. Now I never fail. I use a pressure cooker on the bigger beans. You just have to pay attention to the time/result and calibrate your cooker.

But how much of the universal mushiness of slow cooking vs braising is that they usually have different definitions of done?

In a lot of cases, braised dish ingredients are the same as slow cooker recipe ingredients. A braise has a lot of intentional steps to develop flavor, whereas a crock pot recipe normally just says "dump it all in a crock pot".

But for the mushiness, I would say it's where a crock pot recipe often says "cook on medium setting for 8/10/12 hours", and a braised recipe says(should say) "cook until done". If you braised for the same amount of time crock pot convenience recipes use, you'd get the same amount of mushiness.

I think crockpot recipes tend to be wetter and covered, to allow for longer unattended cooks. That's the other typical difference

100% agree on the braising in the oven vs. crockpot. A crockpot gives you 2 or 3 temp settings, where an oven can give you dozens or hundreds.

>It's great to be able to pull off beans from dry in an hour

Also dry beans in a slow cooker is a bad plan anyway - there have been incidents of people getting sick cause slow cookers don't hit the required temp to get rid of the Phytohaemagglutinin.

Pressure cookers are a much better plan for this as you say

Depends on the bean you cook. Most beans are fine, kidney beans, for example, are not.

Depends on the meat. I prefer braised (cooked in liquid) brisket/shank/tendon way more than cooked sous vide.

I've tried the 8-48 hour sous vide with beef/pork and didn't find it worthwhile.

I was a big champion of sous-vide but I've realized that, while it can produce very precise texture results, it just doesn't develop as much flavor as something braised in the oven.

The evaporation\reduction that occurs during a long braise in the oven significantly concentrates flavors in the meat and there are a lot of delicious Maillard reactions on the sides of the braising pot as well as on exposed bits of meat that just don't occur in a sous-vide bag.

In fact, the bag prevents evaporation from occurring at all, and a quick sear post-bath doesn't quite achieve the same result.

Water baths have their place, but I've gone back to traditional slow cooking if I want that deep flavor. Also, the house smells so much better!

> Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is a must

Yeah, my read from the article was that someone had found McGee's tome and grabbed the section on meat cooking.

For a simpler and less heavy reading, Cooking for Geeks is a surprisingly good starting point. (I love On Food and Cooking but it's as much a scientific reference as it's a food preparation guide.)

Most slow cooker recipes are adapted from (and/or can be adapted to) Dutch oven recipes. Cooking the same recipe using the latter, in the oven on low heat with the Dutch oven lid slightly ajar, will produce a much more flavourful dish thanks to the Maillard reaction and all of the delicious browning that takes place on the top. It’s something I recommend to anyone who enjoys braised dishes.

Dutch ovens are great for baking bread too. They trap moisture in so you get a really nice crust vs just baking it in the open oven

Of course, if you don't have that or a steam capable oven, just pop the kettle on and put a tray of boiled water in the bottom of the oven and you'll get the same effect.

Suggestions:

- Use an old tray, or a cheap one, that you don't mind getting beat to crap. Baking heat + water are very hard on trays.

- Also hard on the bottom of many ovens.

- Don't use glass. It will very likely shatter either when adding water or due to oven heat. Ceramic likewise.

- Iron will rust.

Stainless-steel or aluminium are your best bets.

When removing the tray (at the end of the oven-spring bake), realise that you have an extremely hot tray full of boiling water. If you guage things right, you'll have very nearly completely boiled off the water.

Where do you get your recipes!? I've had an instant pot for a while but never ended up using it much.

https://myheartbeets.com/ is a great resource for Instant Pot recipes.

If you're cooking bachelor chow, an electric pressure cooker is the superior method of cooking to anything else.

I used to eat out about 80% of the time, at huge expense, but since buying a pressure cooker its 5%...

There are plenty of recipes where you just throw in the ingredients, add a specific amount of water, set a specific time, and come back in 20minutes to a perfectly cooked meal. Its far less hassle than cooking with a pan etc, and uses less energy and water.

Smaller items like hard-boiled eggs take about 5 minutes in total.

You're also not venting cooking fumes and steam (and combusted natural gas) into your kitchen, so air quality, mold etc. is much improved.

I wonder if power usage is also significantly better (rather than open air cooking)

An induction cooktop and electric pressure cooker certainly makes a gas connection for the kitchen unnecessary.

There's an interesting video from Adam Rageusa on how bad gas cooktops are:

https://youtu.be/CcAJ3_-Hou8

I think that gas cooktops and open-air cooking vessels are just used frequently because they're easy to show off on cooking shows... Its hard to make a Youtube video on things cooking in a sealed pressure cooker.

I meant watts. How much a pressure cooker saved compared to an induction plate. probably a little.

I've seen the gas vs electric argument too when I wanted to make a food truck. Cooks mostly prefer gas because of habits.

I am contractually obligated to hype up electric pressure cookers whenever mentioned. Some other dishes that can be cooked with ease:

* Steel-cut oats

* Potatoes

* Dry beans

* Yogurt

* Tempeh

* Cheesecake

You can also sanitize containers for canning, saute, steam, and boil.

Can you share some recipes?

Irrelevant anecdote: I was cooking nachos and decided to try slow cooked carnitas for the first time (I like cooking but I'm not very good at it). It was truly mesmerizing seeing the way the pork meat stiffened at first and then slowly softened over time. I was roughly following J Kenji Lopez Alt's recipe (look him up if you want a great resource for all things cooking). I had incorrectly covered the pork at first so steam was escaping. Once rectified with some more time (3 hours total cook time) the meat took on a whole new quality of softness after having been quite tough at 2 hours.

As a science enthusiast, learning more about the interplay of heat, time interacting with things like collagen, protein matrices, fats, cell walls for veggies makes cooking so much cooler and fun for me.

> As a science enthusiast, learning more about the interplay of heat, time interacting with things like collagen, protein matrices, fats, cell walls for veggies makes cooking so much cooler and fun for me.

You would love Harold McGee's book On Food and Cooking

Some of the science was a little over my head but reading it has improved me a lot as a cook.

Very neat article. I consider myself a novice at slow cooking meat. I've done Sous-Vide, crock pot, and Kamado cooking. By far, Kamado is king.

Next time you think of buying a BBQ, find a used Kamado. Don't overthink it. Just do it. A little more prep, but not really more work.

It's as simple as: 1. Stir the charcoal to get rid of the ash 2. Add more charcoal 3. Light charcoal, leave grill open. 4. Come back 15 mins later, set Kamado up (deflector plate, grills, etc) and close Kamado. 5a. Set up digital temperature control 5b. Wait 20 minutes and make temperature adjustment. 6. Wait 60-90 minutes, add meat. 7. Drink beer, relax. 8. Eat.

It's really not complicated, especially if you are on Hacker News reading this. Add as much charcoal as you want. Leave the too vent half or 1/3 open. Control temperature with oxygen flow via the bottom door.

It really is that simple.

As for how this ties in to the article, a cubic centimeter of water will turn into 5500 cubic centimeters of steam. All the water in your meat will turn to vapor and exit the Kamado. But slowly. Which, as the article states is optimal because the high moisture in the air keeps meat moist over long cooks which allows the breakdown of collagen.

The other cool thing is that the bigger a cut of meat, the longer it takes to cook, the MORE TIME it spends traversing from 160 degrees until the finish temperature. More time = better collagen breakdown.

Anyway, completely concur, slow cooking meat is king. Where I dissent is that meat shouldn't be cooked IN water or fluid, and shouldn't be steamed. Crust is everything. Built that crust!

Can't I just turn on my oven? That's even easier. ;)

If you want to go to meat hell ;)

Where I dissent is that meat ... shouldn't be steamed.

For every rule, there's an exception. Pastrami is the exception to this one.

There's a place here in town that brines brisket for a week, and then slow smokes it for 14 hours or so like a bbq brisket. It makes it hard to have pastrami any other way now

I do pastrami the way Franklin BBQ book describes cooking brisket using their recommended side barrel smoker mods. I use scrub oak logs off the back lot, leave the door open, and smoke it for say 4-5 hrs. Then I take the still tough pastrami and stuff it in the oven with foil covering, no water underneath, and give it another 4-5 hrs at ~200F.

Yeah. Store pastrami is sorta disgusting now (unintended bad side effect). Good gawd my pastrami is delicious.

I use Ruhl and Polcyn's "Charcuterie" for the seasonings and prep. I roast the whole coriander and pepper and then grind it right before. And that book if fantastic for a whole variety of slow cooked preparations.

Hmm.... You may be correct

Poached chicken is also quite nice in the right place, like Hainanese chicken rice.

If you're going to have to use a digital temperature control, I'm not sure a Kamado is really necessary.

I really like my PitmasterIQ[1]. It's a couple hundred bucks, and doesn't require a smartphone app, which means it won't stop working in a few years. Hooks up to pretty much any grill -- which, presumably, you already have -- and near-guarantees perfect results every time.

Sure, you'll need to foil wrap (3-2-1 is a good place to start), but otherwise, it's minimal work. Did a six-hour smoke of some babyback pork ribs a couple of months ago, and if I closed my eyes, could easily imagine I was in Texas, not Tokyo. Flavor, texture, and color were all amazing.

For those that don't know: These work by controlling airflow to the coals, with a thermocouple-driven feedback loop. I went with the cheaper Pitmaster, but I'll likely invest in one that also has a thermocouple for the meat as well.

[1] https://pitmasteriq.com/

A pitmaster is a digital temperature control, so you are on the correct path.

I use a Thermoworks Signals and Billows as my digital control. It allows me to have 4 probes, 1 of which is positioned to control the temperature, 3 of which can monitor other parts of the Kamado or be inside meat.

It also allows me to see a graph of all 4 probes over time. It connects to my wifi (and Bluetooth as a redundancy) so I can check temperatures when im out shopping or working (via Thermoworks, which collects and serves the data back to me). It also allows me to change the temperature from anywhere. I can start a cook at 300, go to work, and drop it to 225 anytime I want.

It's the ultimate piece of kit.

As for not needing a Kamado, I disagree. The 345lbs of mass that I have give ultimate temperature buffer control. It can't be overstated the difference holding a cook between 223-227 and holding a cook between 210 and 240 makes. The steadier the better.

Love me my Thermoworks instant read. They do nice silicone scrapers and trivets as well!

I'll revisit the Kamado once I'm in a place where I can justify a grill that weighs in like a sumo wrestler. :)

Sous vide and slow cooking are great, but Maillard browning is also great. So if you're interested in this article you're probably also going to be highly interested in this Kenji Lopez-Alt article: https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-reverse-sear-best-way-to-...

Usually when I sous vide something, I do a quick hot sear at the end to build a nice crust. I used to reverse sear before I got my sous vide and made some amazing steaks, but doing it with the sous vide takes the cake imo

I've been "reverse searing" my carnitas for several years: start in a crock pot, end in a cast iron skillet. Didn't know there was a term for it. Tender but with that Maillard crunch.

We have a rather dumb slow-cooker left by a previous tennant. 170W on High, with some lower value on Low and Warm. 95% of the heat added once it reaches temperature is lost the environment. Lame!

Low Tech Magazine has a nice article on the topic [1] of 'Fireless Cookers' which while a bit bulky look like they could cut a lot of energy waste, esp. if there is a mini heating element to top-up heating losses.

Thermos also make a 4.5L vacuum cooker ("Shuttle Chef") which looks ideal but it for some reason is eye-wateringly expensive and apparently only made in or for Japan.

[1] https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/07/cooking-pot-insulati...

From your article:

> the thermal efficiency varies from 13% for electric hobs to 23% for gas hobs

They also have a graph showing induction as being less efficient than gas.

Everything I have read recently says the exact opposite, that gas spews most of its energy into your house and very little into the pot, while a good flat top electric gets a large % into the pot and induction gets 100% of generated heat into the cooking vessel. (Though I don't know what efficiency induction operates on, obviously electric stoves are nearly 1W of energy in, 1W of heat out!)

Unfortunately most articles comparing gas and electric compare energy costs to the consumer, not thermal efficiency, but I do come across papers such as https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2014/data/papers/9-7... that are basically the exact opposite of what the site you linked says.

Digging further, it looks like lowtechmagazine based their findings on https://mb.cision.com/Public/MigratedWpy/91653/9014629/ae07e... which is measuring losses due to grid transmission which seems to put electric at a distinct disadvantage.

That paper does show the massive amount of heat gas stoves dump into the surrounding air, which depending on climate may then have to be removed, likely by an electric air conditioner, taking that into account gas shoots way up in energy costs.

And of course that paper is from 2010, as the grid becomes renewable electric starts winning out in every possible direction.

Yeah, I was mainly talking about the heat once coupled to the pot. If "23%" means 77% of the heat goes straight past the pot, I'm still wondering if this is a heat 'delta' or quiescent heat flow required to keep a pot at a temperature.

Taking a spherical-cow approach, exactly how much energy would be required to (pressure?) cook 1kg of meat in an utterly lossless container? I'm picture stove-top pots more akin to helicopters that hot air balloons -- you're paying a lot of energy to keep the pot at a given temperature only because most of the heat is convecting and radiating out even after it manages to couple into the pot at some low factor. A tiny, tiny bit actually goes into changing the chemical state of the food.

So, an electically heated pressure + vacuum pot would surely be the most efficient (at making probably entirely untasty food.)

My instapot is not burning hot while I am cooking with it, so there is some insulation there for sure.

Heck my rice cooker seems reasonably well insulated.

> Everything I have read recently says the exact opposite, that gas spews most of its energy into your house and very little into the pot

That graph is showing thermal efficiency end-to-end, at least when assuming fossil fuel-based power plants. That's made clear in the article, where they also point out that gas burners are horribly poor at heat transfer--but not poor enough in their model to make them worse than electric stoves, induction or resistive.

Chef's rule of thumb: everything you do in a slow cooker (crock pot) can be done better and faster in a pressure cooker.

Dried beans, for example. 4:1 water ratio; e.g., four cups of water per cup of dried beans. 1 tsp of sea salt per cup of dried beans. Bring to high pressure and cook for 25 minutes. Allow to naturally release.

2:1 yield (two cups of cooked beans out for every dry cup in) Perfectly soft, yet still intact, as long as you kept the temperature low during the cook. Steam should be just escaping from the pressure valve once you hit pressure, no more.

Counter argument: Making yoghurt.

Point. :)

A bit about smoking meats, which is an ancient, but wonderful way of cooking them, would make an interesting addition.

For instance, something that surprises some people the first time they cut into smoked meat is the red "smoke ring" at the edge of the meat, rather than the center: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_ring_(cooking)

Yeah, lot of myths about the smoke ring - you can put on some prague powder #1 about 20 minutes before cooking in the oven and you can replicate the ring. It's not a sign of a well done cook in all aspects, though it does add to the visual appeal.

Another misconception is the people who aim for exact degrees when smoking (e.g. brisket) - 195 F, 202 F, etc. It's the total time spent above 160 (roughly where the stall is) that matters (if I remember correctly there's a peak around 170 F or 180 F that is maximum breakdown rate). A small brisket is going to get up to 202 quicker than a 15 lb brisket, and will wind up "drier" because the collagen did not break down as far. If the cook dialed their recipe in for total time for collagen to break down, the results might not be identical, but there would be a lot less variation.

I find non-modern methods of food preparation more rewarding, since I quit smoking. After about a year I noticed that I gained a lot of appreciation for acidic food and started fiddling with lacto-fermentation. Now I'm not even attempting a mango-hananero sauce unless peppers aren't fermented for 3 months or more. I pressure cook, I slow cook, I smoke the shit out of everything that can be smoked. Tastes are awesome.

Fermented peppers are amazing, easily one of my favorite toppings for burgers, ramen, pizza, etc.

If you haven't tried it, fermented tomatoes are super interesting. They create a weird yellow liquid that doesn't taste like anything I've ever tasted before.

My daughter sealed a cherry tomato in a tiny jar at the start of the pandemic, just so we could watch it change. It's been just a parchment of skin floating in a pool of yellow liquid for months.

I'm not going to taste it, though.

I ferment more pungent Chinense peppers in 3-5% brine for 6+ months in low temperature and then smoke them on apple+pecan wood with typical bell peppers soaked in 15% brine for 6 hours. Then there's drying, crushing and this makes a "smoked paprika" condiment very different to store bought. Less pungent Chinenses usually go dry or are smoked and dried for later use. Less pungent Annuum peppers like jalapeño go for 3-6 months of fermentation in 2% brine and are then turned into "cowboy candy" by soft-boiling in syrup, wrapped in sugar and dried. This is my favorite candy with no fat. Left-over bacteria water is my daily probiotic and pre-workout drink addition kept in the fridge.

Related: pickled onions on pork sandwiches (and about anything else you would normally use onions for) are a fantastic way to add some acidity to a dish.

> Since enzyme activity increases up to those temperatures, slow cooking can provide a significant aging effect during cooking. Meat should however be quickly seared or blanched first to kill surface microbes.

I want to call out shio koji here. I prepared a steak dusted in it for 3 days, and it tasted identical to a 40 day dry aged steak. If you're looking to maximize enzymatic processes, dust your meat in mold!

Prepared it in your refrigerator? What’s the process? Sounds very interesting.

Serious Eats has some coverage of this. https://www.seriouseats.com/shio-koji-marinade

Sure, so I grabbed a normal ribeye, dusted it with shio koji powder (might be at your local Asian food market, definitely on Amazon) and put it covered in the fridge for 48 hours. Make sure you get the actual powder, because if you get inoculated rice, you'll have to grind it up into a powder and it's a pain. The steak should look like a giant slab of brie when you put it in the fridge.

I then washed off the powder, and cooked the steak like normal (read: sous vide). Steak had the familiar nutty day dry aged flavor (I compared with a dry aged steak I had cooked previously), and caramel coloring with the slightest, almost imperceptible sweetness of miso. It was magic. Be careful with the sear though, because I think some of the sugars are left behind, and it takes only maybe 30 seconds on each side instead of a minute. It'll get crusty much quicker than normal.

Highly recommend if you're ok with molded food (e.g. blue cheese, brie, miso), and it's way way cheaper than getting something off the shelf as dry aged.

Great, thanks. I just placed an order for shio koji on Amazon, can’t wait to try it out.

I can't wait for you to try it!

Also, you can shio koji any meat, not just beef for what it's worth, but I personally feel like the flavors start to go sideways. Pork and chicken I feel need a bolder flavor to prop up the dry age taste; shio koji alone on those overwhelms the flavor and wasn't that great. So if you experiment with those, you may want to try smoking them too. Good luck!

For medium rare, what do you use for sous vide temps and for how long? Also is there an alternative to using plastic bags?

Medium rare has a quite large range when you consider sous vide (129 - 134) because you can select any of them and get a medium rare steak in all cases.

When testing my sous vide device, I noted that the device is off by one degree. Not sure if that's intentional, but makes sense considering 130F is pasteurization temp, and you'd rather be over than vs under.

Since I have kids, I try to stay over 130 - I think I end up dialing it in around 131 F for 1.5 hours (which should be 132-ish, around the middle of the range), and I increase the time depending on the thickness. Fist size filet mignons get 2 hours, and I did a prime rib once for 24 hours.

And for your plastic bag question, there exist reusable silicone bags for sous vide. I can't promise you'll be able to do the prime rib in one of those, but for a single steak, most definitely.

Douglas Baldwin's Practical Guide to Sous Vide cooking is the only place you need to look to determine pasteuration times vs. temperature. It is an outstanding reference that just so happens to be free.

https://douglasbaldwin.com/sous-vide.html

BTW, try pasteurizing raw eggs, beat one into a bowl of rice, and top with a bit of kimchi and sesame seeds. Delicious.

pasteurization is a ratio of time and temperature (and other factors), so you can actually pasteurize things like chicken/eggs at lower temperatures, as long as you hold them at that temperature for long enough -- see https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-complete-guide-to-s... for some graphs

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8566965 from 7 years ago.

Also the connection to Science Of Slow Cooking at sciencecooking.com has timed out. I love irony.

EDIT: it seems to be working properly now

I mean it's pretty standard braising technique for something like chuck roast or short rib to go for 3.5-4 hours up to 205F internal temp and it to be amazing and not dry at all. Not sure why this page is ignoring this.

This should be the "Science of Slow Cooking Meat". Rather than slow cooking in general.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com