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.

Cue-Vide Baby Back Ribs

For Memorial Day this year I wanted to try something a little different and combine two cooking techniques that I frequently use, smoking and sous vide.  My local grocery store had baby back ribs on sale for the holiday weekend so I bough a rack and went about trying to plan my cook.  After doing a web search figure out time/temps for baby backs I settled on 149°f for 24 hours.

After removing the rack of ribs from the cryovac packaging they came in they were rinsed, cut in two (so they'd fit in my 12 quart Cambro) and the membrane removed by loosening a bit with a skewer, grabbing it with a paper towel and peeling it off.  For the rub I mixed the remains of two types of commercial rubs I had in the pantry from last season, Bad Byron's Butt Rub and McCormick's Brown Sugar Bourbon Seasoning in roughly equal portions.  I filled up a 12 quart Cambro container to the 10 liter mark, attached my ChefSteps Joule circulator, put on the lid I had cut to fit the circulator and used the Joule app to set the bath temp to 149°f.  While the bath was heating I liberally applied the rub mix to the ribs and vacuum sealed them with a FoodSaver.  Because this was going to be a long cook I double bagged the ribs, first each 1/2 slab was vacuum sealed in individual 8" wide bags then those were put in to an 11" wide bag and vacuum sealed again.

Ribs tend to float in the bath so I used a couple of large, stainless steel spoons to weigh down the bag during the cook.  Once the bath was at temp and the ribs added I set the timer on my Joule app for 24 hours and just let them soak, checking back occasionally to make sure the bag was still fully submerged and repositioning the spoons when needed.  The cook was started on Saturday and when the timer went off on Sunday we were on the other side of town.  This is when wi-fi connectivity comes in handy, when the timer went off I was able to lower the set temp of the bath down to 130°f remotely so the ribs wouldn't overcook and get mushy by the time I finally made it home a few hours later.  The ribs were removed from the bath and chilled overnight.

On Memorial Day morning I grabbed my Bradley Smoker from the storage shed and hooked it up using my homemade PID controller set to 250°f.  There were still a few pecan bisquettes left in the hopper so I left those and added some Jim Beam bisquettes on top.  The ribs were added once the chamber temp got to 225°f, below are some baked beans with a little diced onion, green pepper and garlic added.  After an hour on smoke the ribs were sauced with a bottled barbeque sauce (Simple Truth Barbeque Sauce) that I doctored by adding a little balsamic vinegar from Old Town Oil and some of the rub mix.  The ribs were put back on the smoker for about 20 more minutes for the sauce to set.

After bringing them in the ribs and beans were put under the broiler for a few minutes to get a little char on them and to make sure the sauce was nice and set.

Here are the ribs after cutting, they're extremely juicy and tender.  Easy to bite through, as close to the "perfect bite" I've seen on barbeque competition shows as I've ever been able to do at home.  I was concerned that putting rub on at the beginning would make the finished ribs too salty, but that was not the case.  They had just the right salt level and the flavors of the rub permeated the meat.

The final plate, next to the ribs are the smoked baked beans, gochujang coleslaw (bagged coleslaw mix with a dressing of mayonnaise, gochujang, sherry vinegar, celery salt, salt, shichimi togarashi, minced dry garlic and minced dry onion) and a Caesar salad.  

Labor day dinner

Just wanted to make a quick post about Labor Day dinner this past week.  More of a lunch, we had to go to a funeral that evening so the meal was pretty early.  On the menu was sous vide ribeye steak, air fried potatoes and broccoli puree.

The steak was seasoned with salt, pepper, minced dried onion, minced dried garlic and ground togarashi (found this stuff at my local supermarket and have been using it on everything lately!).  It was vacuum sealed with the trusty old FoodSaver and cooked in a 130°f water bath (heated with my Joule immersion circulator) for about 2 1/2 hours then pressed under a weighted sheet pan for 15 minutes and finally seared in a screaming hot skillet.  The potatoes were first boiled to get the cooking process started, then allowed to dry out a bit before dressed with salt, pepper, togarashi and olive oil and placed in my air fryer to crisp up.  The broccoli was trimmed and cooked in the same water as the potatoes, once tender it was put in a blender with a little of the cooking liquid and pureed.  I added a bit too much water to the broccoli which made the puree little too loose, so I added a few of the potatoes to tighten it up.  All in all a great meal.

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.