Ginza Festival Teriyaki Chicken, Sous Vide

The Midwest Buddhist Temple in Chicago throws an annual Japanese food and culture event called the Ginza Festival.  One thing people flock to the Ginza Festival each year is their famous teriyaki chicken, unfortunately I was unable to partake this year due to some dental surgery a few days before the event so I decided I would make some myself once I was cleared to resume eating a normal diet.

The Midwest Buddhist Temple prints a recipe booklet for each year's festival and it always includes their teriyaki chicken recipe, originating from Chef Tony Naito it can be found online on local news websites and blogs.  Basically the recipe calls for marinating the chicken in teriyaki sauce overnight, then putting everything in a pan and simmering the chicken in the sauce covered for about 20 minutes.  Finally your finish the chicken on a charcoal grill while basting with the reduced sauce.  I decided to utilize sous vide to ensure the chicken would come out moist and juicy.

First step is making the sauce, the ingredients are...

3/4 cup soy sauce (I used low sodium)

1/2 cup brown sugar, packed

1/4 cup sweet red wine 

1" ginger, grated

1-2 garlic cloves, crushed

The original recipe uses Mogen David Concord Grape wine but I didn't find any at the grocery store so I went with a merlot.

Put all ingredients in a saucepan and heat until the sugar is dissolved.  Allow to cool to room temp.

At the festival they use 1/2 chickens, but since bone-in, skin on chicken thighs were on sale at the local supermarket I opted for those.  The chicken and cool teriyaki sauce were vacuum sealed together using my VacMaster VP215 Chamber Vacuum Sealer.  Chamber sealers have an advantage here because they make it much easier to seal liquids in the bags, if using a suction sealer like a FoodSaver you could freeze the marinade in ice cube trays and just seal the frozen cubes up with the chicken.  Once the marinade cubes thaw you would just need to massage the bags to make sure the marinade is well distributed.  The bags of chicken were then put in the refrigerator to marinate over night.  The next morning I filled up a 12 quart Cambro  with water, attached my Joule immersion circulator and opened up the Joule app to set the bath temperature to 163°f.  Once the bath was up to temp the bags of chicken went in and the timer was set for 3 hours.  When the time was up the bags were removed from the bath and chilled down before going in the refrigerator until later in the day.

It was a dark and stormy day, so I had to finish the chicken indoors instead of on the Weber as I had intended.  The chicken thighs were removed from the bags and patted dry.  I drained the purge in to a saucepan and put it over medium heat to start reducing.  This stuff is pretty high in sugar so it'll boil over if you don't keep an eye on it.  A separate non-stick skillet was put over medium high heat and filmed with a little oil.  Once the oil was shimmering and just about to start smoking the chicken thighs were put in skin side down to brown.  They only took about 2 minutes for the skin to get browned and crispy, they were then flipped over and the now reduced marinade was added to the skillet to get everything warmed through and for it to reduce a bit more.  Once warmed through the chicken was turned over in the sauce and then put skin side up on a rack over a sheet pan, the rack was then put in a 400°f oven for a few minutes for the teriyaki glaze to set.

The chicken turned out pretty well.  I would have preferred to finish it over charcoal or even in the pellet grill to get some wood flavor on it but the weather gods had other ideas.

I used low sodium soy sauce this time by request, but I think it turns out better with the regular stuff.  When I made this chicken previously it turned out WAY too salty, but I think that was because I used a bottle of soy sauce that had been in the back of the pantry for a long time and had concentrated quite a bit due to evaporation.  Next time I'll just buy a new bottle of good soy sauce.

 Simmering the sous vide cooked chicken in the reduced purge from the bags helped heat everything through quicker and resulted in a nice, sticky glaze on the chicken thighs once they were put in the oven to set.  I used a lower temperature for the water bath than I had seen suggested on line (163°f vs. 167°f) so I wasn't too worried about overcooking the meat during the finishing process.  I probably could have gone with a bit of a higher temp in the water bath to get a more traditional texture in the finished product but the lower temp/longer cook helps ensure the chicken stays nice and juicy.

It's Here!: ChefSteps Joule Edition

I started having problems with my WiFi Nomiku giving me erroneous low water alarms again.  This is the second or third unit I've had the same problem with.  I'm not sure why this keeps happening, maybe it's something with the water in my area or something I'm doing.  This last time it started happening after I added some vinegar to the bath to take out some scale that was building up (we have pretty hard water), the manual suggests using citric acid for that.  It's possible that the acetic acid in the vinegar is somehow damaging the water level sensor in the circulator, I'll try a few things to see if I can get everything working again before contacting customer service for another replacement.

Since I'm currently down a circulator I decided to finally try one I've been interested in for a while, but couldn't justify buying...the ChefSteps Joule.  Shipping was amazingly fast, I placed the order for the circulator directly from ChefSteps.com on Sunday and it arrived at my door (all the way from China) on Wednesday.

The Joule is different from my other circulators in that it has no manual controls on the unit itself, with the exception of a single button on top.  The circulator is controlled using an app installed on an Android or iOS.  My understanding is that it can use either Bluetooth or WiFi depending on the situation.  Pairing was pretty straightforward, after setting up the Joule in a bath and plugging it in I just opened up the app and saw a little button that said connect to Joule.  After pushing the button my phone connected to the Joule via Bluetooth and then a screen popped up asking me to select my WiFi network and ask for my password.  A few moments later and we were ready to go.  I pushed the power button at the lower right hand corner of the screen, selected the temperature and the Joule came to life!  At that time I had to leave, so I opened the app and turned off the circulator.  Just as we were about to return home I fired up the app again to see how controlling the circulator from afar via WiFi worked, I touched the power button and selected a different temperature than I had entered earlier to start up the Joule.  On the way home I received a push notification telling me that the bath had reached temperature and was ready to cook.  When we did arrive at the house I pulled out my Thermapen to check the bath temperature and it was spot on at 140°f.  I'll do some more playing around with the Joule tonight after work.  One thing the Joule can apparently do, but that I can't test out, is be controlled by voice commands using an Amazon Echo.  I may have to look at the Echo to see if there are enough other reasons to fork out the cash for one, for now I'll just have to stick to using the app.

Some initial thoughts...

Pros:
Very compact size for easy storage
Powerful heating element (1100 watts)
Water resistant (due to lack of manual controls)
WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity
Magnetic base to stick to the bottom of induction ready pots
Voice control option (with additional gadget)


Cons:
Lack of manual controls means you have to have an Apple or Android smart device to use.

That's pretty much all I can think of at the moment.  I'll have to see if requiring a separate device to use the circulator is a hassle, I have two other "connected" circulators (WiFi Nomiku and Anova BT Precision Cooker) that can be controlled via apps but I almost never use that feature, preferring to set the temperature using the manual controls on the units.  Having to use the app may take a little getting used to.

It's Here!: WiFi Nomiku Edition

My first real culinary immersion circulator was the original Nomiku, which I received from backing their first Kickstarter campaign.  Prior to that I was using an old surplus Fisher Scientific lab circulator that I had bought off Ebay and would constantly trip the GFCI if I plugged it in to a kitchen outlet.  I found the original Nomiku to be easy to use, well designed and had a lot of fun with it.  Later when Anova launched a Kickstarter for a bluetooth enabled Precision Cooker I jumped in for one.  The Anova Precision Cooker is a nice circulator but I found the bluetooth connectivity very limiting, to utilize the feature you have to be in close proximity and it's just as easy to adjust the settings on the circulator itself.  I liked the idea of being able to remotely control a circulator but wanted something that would allow controlling from further away than bluetooth would allow, so when Nomiku announced their new WiFi enabled circulator in mid August 2014 I was in.  As soon as I heard about the campaign I logged in to Kickstarter, made my pledge and became backer #40!

The original delivery date was in March 2015, but of all the projects I've backed on Kickstarter not a single one has shipped on time.  The original Nomiku was supposed to be delivered in December 2012, actual delivery happened quite a bit later than that but they did deliver so I wasn't too worried.  I'm happy to report that my WiFi Nomiku was finally delivered today!

When I opened the box I was surprised to find the circulator packed with a shirt, I had completely forgotten about that!  The box itself takes up much less space than the original model which should make it easier to store when not in use.

Here is the WiFi Nomiku attached to a 12 quart Cambro filled with 10 liters of water.  Unlike the original Nomiku (and the Anova Precision Cooker), the screen faces away from the bath.  This is something that several people had suggested when giving feedback about the original model and something I was pleased to see implemented.  The new model also doesn't have the external power brick that the original model had, I never minded it that much but others thought that it could be easy to inadvertently splash water on it damaging the circulator.  Local controls are pretty simple, there is a menu button below the screen to the left with a action button immediately the right.  Without reading the manual I was able to figure out how to connect to WiFi, entering the router password is a little clumsy since you have to scroll though all the lowercase letters to get to uppercase and scroll all the way through those to get to numbers/symbols.  It can take a while if your router password is strong with a mix of upper/lower case and symbols/numbers.  It would be nice if this could be done automatically like the Google Chromecast works.  Once the circulator was connected to WiFi I was having problems pairing it to my phone, I eventually had to uninstall the Tender app and reinstall.  After that it seemed to work fine.  Tomorrow when I'm out I'll see if I can turn the circulator on from standby and heat up the bath, the ability to have the bath already heated up when I get home from work will save me a lot of time!

The only testing I had the time to do today was to see how fast the WiFi Nomiku can heat up the water bath.  I filled the Cambro with 10 liters of cold tap water (I know, I usually fill it with hot but this was a test!), the initial temp was 52.4°f and I set the circulator to heat it to 130°f.  Yesterday I did the exact same thing with my Anova Percision Cooker, it took 50 minutes to go from the same starting temp of 52.4° to 130°, the WiFi Nomiku did the same thing in 27 minutes and 36 seconds!  Both baths were uncovered, I expect the time to go down a little once I cut the Cambro lid to fit the new circulator.

So far I'm really liking this new circulator, even without the WiFi connectivity it's a solidly build piece of equipment and I foresee it becoming my go-to circulator.  That being said, I think the clip could stand to be improved.  I've been thinking of a way to make a bracket that I could use to attach the circulator to the side of a beer cooler without having to make permanent modifications.  If I come up with something I'll put DIY instructions on the blog.

Crock fermented, low temperature processed dill pickles

This was a project 6 weeks in the making.  A while back I stared making naturally fermented sauerkraut in glass jars, and since that was working out so well I had the urge to take things to the next level.  The opportunity came around Christmas, when I received some Amazon gift cards and decided to use them to buy my own stoneware fermentation crock.  The crock I selected has a 5 liter capacity, straight sides, stone weights and a water channel around the lid to help keep out oxygen while the fermenting is going on.  The first thing I tried was sauerkraut, and it turned out OK but not great.  After doing a little on-line research I believe that the issue is that I didn't fill the crock with enough cabbage, which left a large air space in the crock above the weights.  Next time I'll shred up two heads of cabbage and see out it turns out then.  I also read about a method of making sauerkraut where you ferment the head of cabbage whole in a brine and then shred it, might be interesting to try but I'll probably wait until it's a little warmer out to give it a try.

One of the things I've always wanted to try but never did was to make my own fermented dill pickles.  The process is simple, you take cucumbers, put them in a crock with herbs, spices, and a brine, then wait.  I looked around and found several recipes but was confused about the amounts, they all measured the salt in volume instead of weight and none specified what type of salt was used.  In the end, I assumed they were using pickling salt, found a weight for a given volume of salt on the Morton website and calculated the weights I would need.

The first step was to measure out all the ingredients I would be using.  The recipe called for 8 cups of water (Brita filtered), 1/4 cup white vinegar (5% acidity), 144 grams of kosher salt, 2 TB dill seeds, 2 TB yellow mustard seeds, 4 TB pickling spices mix (Spice House), 4 cloves of garlic, a dried chili and a couple sprigs of fresh dill.  The water, vinegar and salt was mixed together until dissolved, this resulted in a brine of about 7.4%.  I saw recipes using brines anywhere between 2.5% and 10% so this seemed like a reasonable level.  While the salt was dissolving I washed the pickling cucumbers and cut 1/4" off the blossom end, I read that if this isn't done enzymes present in that area will cause the pickles to get mushy.  The while spices were toasted briefly to wake them up and places in the bottom of the crock, then the cucumbers were packed in tightly (to help prevent them from floating), garlic and fresh dill places on top of the cucumbers and the stone weights added.  Next the brine was poured over and I shook the crock a little to let any trapped bubbles rise to the surface.  Once the lid was put on some watter was added to the channel to seal the crock but allow produced gasses to escape.  The crock was put aside in a cool corner and left alone to allow the magic to happen, a few times a week I would add water to the channel to keep the crock sealed.

The recipe I used said it would take anywhere between 4 and 6 weeks of fermentation before the pickles would be ready.  How long the fermentation takes depends on the strength of the brine, a weaker brine of about 2.5% can give you what are known as "half-sour" pickles after as little as a week of fermentation.  A stronger brine will inhibit both the types and rate of bacterial growth, which requires a longer fermentation and will result in what are called "full-sour" pickles.  After 4 weeks I opened the crock and pulled out a pickle to try.  The first thing I noticed when cutting up the cucumber
was that it wasn't completely pickled through to the center, it needed a little more time to finish.  The flavors were good, but I found the pickle to be a little too salty for my taste.  I added another cup of filtered water to the crock to reduce the brine concentration to around 6.6% and closed it up for another 2 weeks.

This past weekend it was finally time to open up the crock and process my pickles for storage.  Pickles will lose their crispness if they are heated to above 85C (185F), the temperature at which the natural pectin will start to break down.  Normal canning procedures where you process in boiling water will result in a limper pickle, so I opted to go with a lower temperature process using a water bath maintained at 180f with my Nomiku immersion circulator.

Here you can see the crock sitting next to a stockpot where I'm sterilizing jars for canning.  Apparently some of the brine was able to seep through the walls of the crock and evaporate, leaving a salt residue on the sides.  Hopefully this will provide a safe haven for the good bacteria to sit between fermentations so future batches will just get better and better.  The cucumbers here removed from the brine, cut in to spears (quarters) and packed in to sterilized jars.  Each jar received another teaspoon of mixed spices (dill seeds, mustard seeds, chili flakes, pickling spices) and a clove of garlic.  Brine from the crock was ladled in to the jars to about 1/2" below the rim and the lids placed on loosely to allow gas expanding during the heating to escape.

Here is the bath set up with the Nomiku for processing.  It's difficult to see in this photo, but I am using a cork from a bottle of wine to raise the circulator so the top of the jars falls between the Nomiku's max and min level markers.  Once the jars were placed in the bath container I added just enough water to bring the level up to about 1/4" to 1/2" below the top of the jars, the Nomiku was set to 82.2C (180F) and turned on.  I placed the lid on the bath container to help keep in the heat and the jars were allowed to process for a few hours.  Once I was sure that the contents of the jars had reached 82.2C and held there for 30 minutes I removed each jar from the bath, tightened the lid and put it back in the water.  I now added additional water to the bath to raise the level above the tops of the jars.  This was done to kill any bacteria that might have been survived by being above the water level during the first phase of processing.  after 20 more minutes in the bath the jars were removed to a cooling rack, as the jars cooled the centers of the lids popped down indicating that a good vacuum had formed.  These should be shelf stable for a good long time, but I don't intend to allow them to sit around for long.

The pickles are very good and still have a nice snap to them, unlike the quick pickles I'd made in the past.  I still find them to be a bit on the salty side, even after diluting the brine down to 6.6% after week 4.  Next time I'll try using a 5% brine and see how that turns out, I expect the weaker brine will cut the fermentation time down by a few weeks.  Before I make another attempt I'm going to do some research and try to come up with my own blend of pickling spices, the ready-made mix I used for this batch is more for corned beef than dill pickles.

It's Here!: Anova Precision Cooker Edition

I've heard good things about the Anova immersion circulator so when I heard that they had started a Kickstarted campaign for a second generation of their circulator I jumped on board.  Since I got in so early, I was able to get one at the "Founder's Club" level for $99 and yesterday it finally arrived!

And here it is!  The packaging is very good looking, a cylinger about 5" in diameter and 25" long with a yellow cap and black body emblazoned with their logo.  Once you twist off the cap you'll find the circulator nestled in the package with some foam rings and caps.  Everything about the packaging seems to be well thought out and should provide a great deal of protection for the circulator when I'm taking it on the road with me.

Here is everything removed from the packaging.  The circulator is quite a bit larger than my Nomiku but looks good and has a really nice, bright, large display.  There is no manual included in the box so I highly suggest downloading it from the Anova Culinary website.  The controls are somewhat intuitive but there are a few things that may not be so obvious, such as how to switch from farenheit to celcius.  The clamp attaches to the cooking vessel and allows you to easily adjust the height of the circulator so you can use smaller pots.  There are minimum and maximum water levels marked on the stainless steel sleeve of the circulator, however I did see some issues with the measurement of temperature when running towards the minimum water level mark.

Here is the circulator mounted to a 12 quart Cambro.  If you look closely you can see the MAX water level mark, there is also a small indentation in the stainless steel sleeve at this level.  In the picture to the left I had filled the Cambro to the 8 quart (7.57 liter) mark with cold tap water, normally I would fill the bath with hot tap water but I wanted to see how quickly the new Anova would heat it up.  First I filled the container to the 8 quart mark and attached my Nomiku to see how much it would heat the bath in 15 minutes, then I dumped the container, refilled it with cold tap water to the 8 quart mark and put on the Anova which brough the water level to just a few inches above the MIN mark on the sleeve.  This is were I noticed something odd, when started the temperature display on the Anova started going up considerably faster than the Nomiku's had.  When I touched the power button to turn off the circulator the temperature reading dropped quickly.  A temperature probe confirmed that the reading on the Anova was high during the heating phase, but once the set point was reached the reading was spot on.  This only happened when the water level was near the MIN mark on the sleeve, when I filled the Cambro up to the 10 liter mark the temperature display on the circulator and on my probe thermometer stayed in sync.  As a final test I fulled up the Cambro with 10 liters of cold tap water (15.5C), attached the Anova Precision Cooker and set it for a 60C bath.  On an uncovered polycarbonate container it took 63 minutes to heat the bath up to the set point.  This is on par with other circulators I've used and is why we always want to start by filling our baths with hot tap water.  My first impressions of the Anova Precision Cooker is that it looks great, is quiet and easy to use.  I have not had a chance to play around with the Bluetooth connectivity since the Android app has not been released yet, I may have to dig up my old iPhone just so I can play around with the feature until an app for my phone is released.

Nomiku Immersion Circulator

I was first introduced to sous vide back in culinary school, but it wasn't quite the same technique that's popular today.  Sous vide is french for "under vacuum", and what they covered in class was the "boil in bag" method of vacuum packaging pre cooked items at a central commissary to be reheated on site by immersing the bags in simmering water, unbagging and plating.  The sous vide technique that's popular today is a low temperature cooking method where items are vacuum bagged in a raw or almost raw state and cooked by immersing in a water bath maintained at a precise temperature using rather specialized equipment.

Back in 2009 I first became interested in playing around with the low temperature version of sous vide.  I started lurking around on Ebay until I was able to pick up an old Fisher Scientific immersion circulator in 2010 at a good price.  It was pretty dirty when it arrived and needed a lot of TLC to get working.  I took everything apart, cleaned all the electrical connections, descaled and scraped off a lot of gunk and was rewarded with a (mostly) working immersion circulator.  I say mostly because there is some issue that I haven't been able to remedy which causes the circulator to trip any GFCI protected outlet, like all the outlets in the kitchen.  Because of this I had to do all my sous vide cooking out in the dining room.  I wanted something a bit more reliable and modern, but new immersion circulators suitable for kitchen use were all in the $500-$1000 range.  That changed in June 2012 when a Kickstarter campaign started for a low cost immersion circulator for the home cook called the Nomiku.  For a mere $299 contribution a backer would receive one of the first Nomiku units, which were supposed to ship out by November 2012.  I jumped at the chance, knowing that there was no guarantee I would ever see anything.

The Nomikus were originally estimated to ship in November 2012, but that month came and went with no Nomiku.  The founders of the company had to deal with repeated delays, changes and roadblocks along the way but they persevered, and on October 1st I came home from work to a brand new Nomiku sitting on my doorstep!

The Nomiku is a much more attractive circulator than my old Fisher Scientific model, it consists of the circulating/control unit and a separate power supply.  In the box is a user manual, an illustrated "getting started" sheet and a sous vide primer.  The circulator feels solidly built, the only thing I noticed was that the green ring that you rotate to set the target temperature seems a bit loose but that seems to be by design.  I grabbed a large stockpot (about 28 quart capacity), attached the Nomiku and started filling until the water level reached the "Max" level indicator on the stem of the Nomiku.  That took 14 liters of water.  Normally I would fill the bath with hot water from the tap, but since I wanted to stress the unit to shake out any bugs I used cold water (about 20°C).  The reason I like to stress new equipment is that it allows my to find any faults early on that may require the item be replaced while still under warranty.

As the inaugural dish I decided to make sous vide carrots, this required a 90°C water bath that should be the hottest I'll ever need.  After filling the bath with the 14 liters of 20°C tap water I plugged in the Nomiku and tapped the screen to turn it on.  The desired bath temp is set by rotating the green collar around the screen, which I did until the display showed 90°C.  It took a LONG time for the bath to heat up.  At the 2 hour mark we were just getting up to around 76°C, so I tried to improvise a lid to help reduce the effects of evaporative cooling.  That helped, but I needed something a bit more effective so I ended up covering the pot with s sheet of aluminum foil and covered that with a dish towel.  That turned out to be effective and by the 2 hour 40 minute mark the bath had reached the desired 90°C temperature.  I made a simple preparation of carrots, just the vegetable, some butter, a little cumin and salt.  This was bagged using a Food Saver Vacuum Sealer and dropped into the bath for about 20 minutes.  As long as I had the foil top on the pot the Nomiku was able to maintain the bath temperature within +/- 0.1°C of the target point, I could see the light over the stove dimming as the heating element cycled.  Once the 20 minuted was up the bag was removed from the bath and I lowered the set temperature on the Nomiku to let it start cooling down.

If you've never tried sous vide carrots I suggest you give them a try.  The technique allows all their natural sweetness to some out and they retain an intense flavor.  The Nomiku performed like a champ, I think I can definitely get by with a smaller bath size for most applications and finding a bath container with a cover that I can cut to accommodate the circulator unit will help reduce the energy spent maintaining temperature.  Since I will be able to use my Nomiku in the kitchen I'll be able to pre-heat the bath water rather than let the circulator do that extra work on its own.  Now that I have a circulator that is so much easier to set up that my old one I'm going to be able to really play around with sous vide cooking.

One of the things I often hear from people is that sous vide cooking of meats is dangerous because you aren't raising the internal temperature to what the USDA recommends.  People need to understand that the USDA recommendations are based on a short exposure time at that temperature while pasteurization is a function of both temperature AND time.  A longer exposure at a lower temperature will kill pathogens just as well as a short exposure at a higher temperature.  Douglass Baldwin has an excellent sous vide guide including pasteurization tables located here.

Visit the Nomiku website for more information.

Edit:  I heated up another bath of 14 liters from 20°C to 90°C with the pot covered in foil and a dish towel from the start, this knocked almost an hour off the heating time (1 hour 45 minutes down from 2 hours 40 minutes).