48hr pork ribs gone bad

christopher.j.esteves

So I set my sous vide to 60 degrees and dropped vacuum sealed pork ribs in the bath and went away for the weekend. Upon returning I opened the svOven and smelled something foul. My pork was horribly spoiled and smelled terrible. All in all a loss of 2 full ribs.

Sous Vide is a self build based on the plans from seattle food geek.

Vacuum sealed using Vacmaster VP112

pork was not seasoned or pre-blanched/seared before bagging

Any suggestions on how to prevent this from happening again? I've got some short ribs that i was planning on dropping tonight and i'd rather not end up with more wasted meat.

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grant

Any of the following will help:

You can do a very quick blanch.

Use gloves.

Add .5% salt to the ribs.

Peel membrane, removes surface contaminates.

lfmichaud

All @Grant tips are good. The only one I don't like is adding the salt at the begining of a long cook. It will change the texture of the meat too much. Turning it to ham.

It's contamination that had time to develop before being pasteurized by the 60C temperature. The probable causes. (It can be both of them)

You packed too much meat in your bath which brought temperature too low and took time to recover.
Bad circulation caused part of the meat to be isolated from the meat.

You can blanch your bag a minute in boiling water or start your bath warmer so that adding your meat won't bring it under 55C. Make sure there is good circulation all around the meat and the bags are well immersed. Never had the problem with a circulators but I have seen (Tasted!) it with the sous vide supreme because of the small bath and lack of circulation.

merridith

@ChrisEsteves The eGulleteers always say, "calibrate your rig," and this is especially true if you use a DIY rig. You probably have done this already but, just in case:

http://forums.egullet.org/topic/139315-reference-thermometers-and-calibration-methods-for-sous-vide/

ipreferale

@ChrisEsteves - Just a thought, while you were away, did you happen to lose power?

christopher.j.esteves

Thanks for all the tips guys, I'm going to do things differently next time. I've done Pork ribs for that longefore and they were awesome. I think next time i'm going to blanch the ribs pre-vacuum sealing, usually i add a rub before hand but this time i didn't and the rub i add has salt. This time i may have over packed my rig, doing two racks instead of just one... looks like i need to build a bigger rig... Thanks for the tip on calibrating it. I haven't spent any time on egullet so i'll have to check that out. I do not believe the power went out while i was away, all the clocks seemed fine.

Thanks again for all the advice. Looks like i got some work to be done.

merridith

There are so many choices in the market now of SV tools - there are at least three different SV rigs available or about to be available for $200 and they are all getting great reviews! Accuracy is the key! I love my Polyscience but I bought it several years ago and I paid $800. If I were buying it today, I would definitely buy one of these.

christopher.j.esteves

i supported the kickstarter sansaire whnen it came out a while back, so i can't wait to get my new one. if it works well i might get a second and transform my home rig to a larger waterbath size for more volume and longer times.

Thanks for all the tips in calibration and what not.

lfmichaud

@Chris - Just be careful not to plug both of them on the same electrical circuit. Easy way to trip the breaker and lose a lot of meat!

Rich_McDonough_67546

I only looked at this thread because I assumed from the title '48hr pork ribs gone bad', it was going to be some sort of food porn. *Sigh*