Wednesday, October 12, 2011

New 52 | Week 41: Cooking Salmon Sous-Vide

…in the kitchen sink!

A while ago, Todd had read a Lifehacker article about cooking salmon sous-vide in the kitchen sink.  The idea intrigued him.  He told me about it and I thought it was so weird.  I didn’t know about sous-vide cooking, so I had to read up on it.  I also recently came across Jen Caputo’s blog post about cooking a sous-vide steak.  She used a sous-vide machine, which we don’t have.  It’s okay though, because salmon cooks in 15 minutes sous-vide style, so the kitchen sink it is!

First, we cut the salmon up into smaller pieces.  Then we put them into ziplock bags with some olive oil and squeezed all the air out and sealed it.
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Todd took some hot water he had heated up on the stovetop and put it into the sink.  We measured the water temperature and it was around 120 degrees.  The ideal water temperature for cooking salmon sous-vide is 122 degrees.  We put our salmon into the water.
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We had to heat up more water and add it into the sink a couple more times to get the temperature to 122 degrees.
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Salmon cooking in progress!  This was almost cooked.
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We made a broccoli side dish.
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Salmon after we took them out of the sink and out of their bags.
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Then we just seared them in the pan very quickly with some olive oil, salt, pepper, ginger, and garlic.
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Salmon all done!
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And our first sous-vide dinner is served!
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This was very interesting.  The salmon was fully cooked and pretty tender.  I’m just not sure that I’m a big fan of sous-vide cooking yet.  And we can’t cook other meats sous-vide style without a machine, because it takes hours.  It was a cool experiment though!  If it hadn’t turn out well, we were going to go down the street to Smashburger!  :p

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About This Project

New52 is a project started by Peppermint and I to encourage each other and others around us to try something new every week in 2011. The "new" each week doesn't have to be something big. It could be something as simple as ordering a new dish instead of old standbys at your favorite restaurant. It's simply opening your heart up to NEW possibilities.
Don't worry if you're late getting started on joining in. It's totally OK if you miss a week here or there. We encourage everyone to keep an open mind about trying something new. This is a life project, and a photography/blog and even scrap challenge if you wish. If you participate this week, please leave a link to your blog post in the comments of this post.

3 comments:

  1. Wow, now that's an adventure... =) Can you do sous-vide in the crockpot, do you think?

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  2. No, you can't cook sous-vide in the crockpot because the temperature has to be low (for salmon it's 122 degrees) and it has to be very consistent.

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  3. My first time witnessing sous-vide was during the 2nd season of Top Chef, when winner Hung admitted it was his favorite way of cooking fish and chicken because it was healthier and got a lot of flavor out. Even his competitors say cooking sous-vide was his sort of trademark. :D Glad your first sous-vide adventure was a success! :)

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