Tempeh, Tofu, and Seitan oh my!

First timer sous vide here. My partner and I are both vegetarians so we cook with tempeh, tofu and seitan often. We are excited to try and experiment different things with them.

Question one, what time and temperature is a good starting point? I did find one sous vide tempeh recipe that uses a basic marinade and cooks sous vide at 83C for 2-3 hours.

Question two, I am worried about gassing from the product itself if there is any. I did try chamber vacuum sealing at the default 30s for a "chicken" cutlet with some carrots and basically ballooned enough to float on top of the water so the cutlet and carrots were not exactly in good indirect contact with the water bath. Perhaps I didn't use enough vacuum.

Question three, I assume marinade infusions are possible especially seitan (wheat gluten) with the strongest vacuum possible?

There may be more questions, but this is all I can think of at the moment.

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Comments

coryhansen78

Interesting questions - I would imagine that any reasonable temp would work-- since the tofu etc is already coagulated (denatured?), I would think you just need to cook to a core temp of whatever serving temperature you want. But I've never tried to cook any of these sous vide. I like fried or grilled tofu too much to do anything else (except Ma-Po Tofu).. I'd try 60C first and see if you like that and go up from there. I would guess that any temp for cooking veg (85C or thereabouts) would be higher than you need for tofu etc, but again, just a guess. The bonus of cooking veg and tofu (etc.) at the same time is nice though.

Question 2 - At temperatures high enough to cook carrots, it is likely that you could've gotten some steam within the bag (which has very high specific volume, causing the puff). Vegetables are relatively light, so you really need to get as much air out as you can. I run my chamber vac for the longest cycle possible on my machine (an extra 30 sec over a "99.9%" vacuum) for low weight vegetables like carrots etc. I saw someone mentioned butter knives in the bag in another thread. I do this for light things like sous vide (bread) stuffing routinely, and/or set a metal mesh colander over the bag with a weight on top.

Question 3 - I would think a chamber vac would crush tofu and tempeh (maybe not seitan?), that might not always be a bad thing-- I think the marinade infusion would work just fine as long as it doesn't deform too much. Maybe you could "brine" this way too? I may have to try this.

Rick_Ruiz_125018

Good information thanks Cory!

The tofu is already coagulated yes and the tempeh is fermented soy beans basically. I didn't really think about cooking it at whatever serving temperature desired but makes sense.

Interesting about the vegetables, I would've never thought it'd puff so much. It drove me crazy trying different methods of weighing it down. I'm reading a few books about the science of cooking and eventually into some sous vide books. Yeah I think I misunderstood about the butter knives, I thought he meant outside the bag, not in. And I'll try a longer vacuum next time.

I can see it crushing the tofu, but the tempeh I usually buy is vacuum sealed already so it may not crush as easily nor the seitan. Brine unfortunately is out of the question since I have HBP. I actually plan on making a simple marinade for sous vide tempeh at some point, maybe this weekend.