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Sous Vide taught me resting meet was a farce. There's zero rest time when cooking that way, and it causes the meat, especially steak, to come out perfect every single time. There's a reason why it's pretty much banned in most cooking competitions.

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> There's a reason why it's pretty much banned in most cooking competitions.

In what competitions is it banned? There’s a lot more to an award winning plate than just a perfectly cooked steak.

If you mean those TV shows, then I would speculate it has more to do with being slow and boring to watch.

Compared to a gas stove flaring up in streams of salty meat juice you can imagine a tremendous difference in audience appeal.

Just wait until chef pulls out a flamethrower to make a gray slob of meat into a delicious steak.

Resting meat is needed if you don't use sous vide, because of the temperature differential in the inside and surface.

Reverse sear is a similar situation, but not sous-vide.

What cooking competitions ban sous-vide/low-temp cooking?

Pretty much all rib cooking competitions ban it.

I would be shocked if you could win a rib competition with sous vide ribs. I've done them a bunch of times. They're fine. They're not revelatory.

I mean it's not unheard of: https://kbindependent.org/2023/04/17/after-sous-vide-controv...

Yeah, I acknowledge that low-temp is banned in a lot of competition BBQ. Weird! But ok!

Then why the need to ban it?

I don't know! Apparently I'm just wrong about this! For the record, I'm just expressing surprise, not trying to refute the claim.

Weird. Most cooking is about temperature control. Funny thing to ban the technique which is so effective.

That a sous vide rack of ribs could win a competition to me speaks to the artificiality of competition BBQ.

Yes? It lowers the degree of difficulty tremendously.

And most people, even bbq judges, probably can’t taste the difference between a sous vide with smoke finish and a full smoker preparation.

But bbq competitions are about making the best ribs the same way car racing is about going around an oval the fastest. Equipment rules matter more than bare outcomes.

I get what you're saying but I don't just mean that it's unsporting or defeats the purpose of the conversation, but rather that it suggests the outcomes are judged on a rubric that doesn't capture what makes extremely good BBQ good, but rather basic textural and visual things. Like, Green Street in Chicago is, IIRC, combi-cooked before it's smoked; it's also just OK.

I think we probably disagree on the impact of the sous vide preparation then.

Green street is just ok for lots of reasons. I don’t think the sous vide is one of them.

Interesting. You've had sous vide BBQ where you were like, "this is as good as anything I've ever had"?

Yes. By people who compete in bbq competitions. I’d also argue that most smoker designs are a matter of tradition and competition rules, not outcomes.

Food judging will always be subjective. Famously wine tasting is mostly just pretentious bunk.

That's why silly things like plating often matter more in a restaurant than actual taste.

IIRC, wine tasting isn't bunk, wine pricing is. People can tell the differences between wines, and reasonably reliably if they are trained, but those differences (and the tasters' preferences) have weak/no correlations with $$$.

Not as much as you'd think. In this article [1], one expert failed to identify that a white wine dyed red was the same. They used different descriptors for the same wine.

And none of this should be too surprising. Our brains are complex things that like to hallucinate details. If you tell someone a bottle of wine cost $1000, their brain will happily invent reasons why it's one of the best wines they've tasted.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...

I wonder whether something similar applies to spirits. I feel absolutely sure that I could tell the difference between, say, a long-aged rum and an unaged one. But if you added food coloring to an unaged one and told me it was aged, would my brain invent oak barrel flavors behind my back? Who knows.

You can always give yourself a blind taste test. Get two (or more) opaque bottles, add the various rums in test, mark the bottom of the container for the type of rum, mix it up and see if you can reliably tell the difference.

My assumption is you could because that oak flavor is pretty strong, but who knows.

Worst case scenario is you find out you still prefer expense alcohol :)

For some statistical rigor, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea

But not knowing what rum you’re tasting is not the same experiment as someone actively tricking you and telling you it’s something it’s not.

The law applies to cooking as well as programming: any metric that becomes a target ceases to be a valid metric.

A car could win a bike race too

I naively thought it was about delivering the best plate of food, regardless of equipment and technique. A “rib” competition, not a “smoker” competition.

If they’re trying to measure skill, I can understand the rationale. The competition is more of a spectacle than an attempt at finding the most reliable and best tasting rib making process.

Imagine a glassblowing competition where participants were judged on how consistently they could make a certain piece. The people using moulds would end up winning, and they would do so with a fraction of the skill and effort.

You are really this shocked that some competitions ban certain methods of achieving the goal? Are you shocked that traditional wood chopping competitions ban chainsaws?

No, my surprise has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with how unlikely I feel it is that circulated ribs would hold up to ribs smoked end-to-end. But people downthread with more information disagree, so...

I wonder if it's banned simply because it doesn't feel enough like BBQ. Similar to why FIA banned CVTs in racing. It's kind of arbitrary but also I get it. Racing and BBQ have culture behind them, and dare I say 'vibes' that their practitioners will want to retain.

I would be a bit disappointed if I went to a BBQ and saw them pull up a big tub of water in which they dumped the meat. My caveman brain wants to see fire.

I've also heard that sous-vide is typically banned in BBQ competitions. A quick google search did find some examples to support it:

https://www.texoassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/O...

That's like saying jet engines are banned in IndyCar. Umm . . . yeah? Because they're competing to see who makes the best SMOKED meat, and sous vide would be using the wrong cooking technique.

People would probably do stuff like sous vide and then finish with 5 minutes in the smoker.

Probably the reverse becasue you want to accurately control the end temperature.

And, atleast with a pressure cooker, comes out amazing.

From Meathead's posts, he talks about the smoke only being absorbed in the first part of the cooking.

I had assumed that correlated to the temperature... I would be smoking first, then sous vide if I was going for smoke and internal texture.

But if you're going for a bark/crust, I am not sure sous vide helps, as the moisture coming out of the meat is part of that process.

Yeah that's probably true about the bark

You don't need to rest slow cooked meat. That's the difference

I am really interested in Sous Vide cooking. But cooking meat in plastic bags turns me off.

I work with someone who does national steak cooking competitions to the level where he has sponsorships. They sous vide.

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