Sous Vide for confit?

Guys,

Generic question not just for Joule but Sous Vide in general.

Since the way Sous Vide works is maintaining the cooking liquid that it is immersed in at a set temperate, I'm wondering if a Sous Vide stick can be used in place of oven for confitting? e.g. putting a piece of cured duck leg in a pot of cooking fat and using Sous Vide stick to set the oil at the optimal temperature?

Also do you guys think Sous Vide can be used for Chinese hot pot? :P

I already pre-ordered Joule and is patiently awaiting its arrival

Hope everything gets sorted out soon!

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Comments

FrankM_3301

Sous vide is very effective for confit. It has the advantage of requiring less fat. Times and temps remain about the same. I do duck confit at 85-90C.

Brandon_Byrd_40557

Modernist Cuisine found that there's no detectable difference between a traditional confit with tons of fat and sous vide confit in the bag with just a tablespoon or two of fat. All the fat does (apart from conducting heat) is coat the outside of the meat and give it that delicious oily mouthfeel.

pantala

The two responses below are correct, but not what exactly what you were asking about. Confit by vacuum sealing fat with meat is great, however most immersion circulators (including Joule, Nomiku, Annova, etc) are NOT designed to circulate anything but water. There are laboratory/commercial circulators that can, but don't use your Joule to circulate oil or anything but plain water.

brian_martin2001

I'm going to echo what @Phong_Huynh_66207 said. sous vide is great for maintaining that ideal temperature, however, you're going to want whatever it is that you're going to confit sealed in a bag with the oil. if you put your immersion circulator directly into the oil, you run the risk of seriously damaging it.

HHYPHOTO_118295

exactly what I was asking thanks

HHYPHOTO_118295

thank you. I was concerned if it sticking it in oil will damage it

FrankM_3301

yea...sorry...I should have read your post more carefully. Firstly, nowadays, I assume most people use the term sous vide to simply mean a cooking in a circulating water bath, and not necessarily under vacuum (as the name implies). I do my confit, in a baggie, with just enough fat to help me eliminate the air from the bag. So, cured duck (for example), a few tablespoons of duck fat, in baggie, then circulated in water bath...traditional times and temps.

Ryan_McCauley_282887

What they all said. And I'm assuming you want to explore the extent of the use of your circulator but I wouldn't recommend sticking a circulator into a hot pot. I imagine you could set up some sort of rig to immerse your hot pot vessel into a water bath and control the temperature of the water, or the opposite way with a large pot and a bain marie of water for your circulator to heat soup in the pot around the bain marie. But then you'd have to worry about diluting your soup from getting water in it, or tainting your water with the soup and potentially harming your gadget. Maybe if you had something custom built to maintain a decent amount of water, sufficient exposure to transfer heat through to a separate chamber for your other liquid, and port accessible to your circulator you could use it for a more traditional confiture or hot pot, maybe even mad scientist chemistry experiments and other nefarious misdeeds.