Cooking Sous-Vide in Liquid ?

Why do most recipes call for the meat (for example ribs) to be cooked sous vide just with aromatics or a little oil, while the sauce is made aside ? Wouldn't both the meat and the sauce be more flavorful if everything was cooked together like in the classical way ?

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ttpoker

If you seared the meat in advance, I don't see anything wrong with cooking a meat with it's finishing sauce. But most of the time I sear after I cook sous vide, which would eliminate the ability to cook meat inside of a sauce sous vide. Can yoou give a few examples of speciic dishes for a more in-depth answer?

tshewman

Personally, I look at it like this....., where are we getting the flavor from? If we cook the meat and the sauce in the classical way, the heat is generally high. This squeezes the juices from the meat to make the sauce more flavorful, but then we lose the flavor from the meat. If we cook at sous vide temps, much of the juice that would be great in the sauce stays in the meat (over simplified, but I think you get the idea). For some cuts like short ribs and oxtail this can work at lower temperatures, but we're still having to reduce the sauce to make it more concentrated as well as cooking out some of the flavor for a sauce. Where if you make a sauce separate from the meat (e.g. MC red wine glaze), you can use ALL the flavor from the meat and bones and not have to worry if the meat will be dry as it's cooked separately and merged last minute. The other thing we can do however, is make a flavorful stock/sauce and cook the meat at the lower temps in it (which is amazing with things like short ribs and Oxtail BTW) Using this method you essentially get the best of both worlds. so then what juices do come out at lower temps merge with the stock/broth/sauce. IMHO. Lastly, you can always use the juices from whatever meat your cooking and use it as a quick base for a sauce, or add it to marry the flavors of the sauce that you made separately. Thanks for making me think on a Saturday am. :-)

Lukas_67415

Thanks. So basically whether you cook the meat with or without a sauce is not that critical. What matters the most is temperature. What is weird is that I cooked a brisket for 36 hrs. by itself (not even salt) and the thing at the end was terribly dry. When I took the bag out of the water it was full of a super flavorful liquid and the meat was terribly dry and flavorless. The brisket had been in the fridge for 2 months. I wonder if that was the problem. I will do some experiments in the following weeks and keep you posted.

tshewman

temp+time=most critical. I've had good luck with brisket, cheeks, oxtail (my favorite) and short ribs (my second favorite). If you cook the meat in a sauce, you will have to reduce it and if you "add" it to a separate sauce there is a nice marriage of flavors. Please keep us posted (esp with time, temperature, sear/no sear etc). CS is a virtual digital cooking lab and we're all sorta lab rats. :-)