What if ChefSteps Showed Us How To Prepare...Prepared Foods

So I was just at Trader Joes and I bought this Rosemary Lemon Spatchcocked Chicken and when I picked it up I thought "hmm, what if I Sous Vide this and then finished it off in the broiler?"

Then I had the thought "Why doesn't ChefSteps do something like this?"

I mean we all have busy lives and sometimes we just don't have the time to get the chicken, clean it, prepare the marinade, etc. And what's super cool is places like Whole Foods, Trader Joes and others have these really great almost prepared foods that really just need to be cooked.

It would be awesome if ChefSteps could show us the most ideal way to make something like like this chicken so that it's perfectly cooked and juicy all the way through. What do you guys think?

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Matthew_Snyder_68770

https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/tips-tricks-the-world-s-best-bacon-cooks-allllll-night-long

Shivam_Daryanani_92859

I think that there are other companies that do this, and Chefsteps' goal is different. The fun part of me is to actually prepare the marinade, clean the chicken etc. and I think many members can speak to that too.

Theo_129732

I don't trust any meat from Whole Foods that I haven't smelled first. I also don't trust "house branded food". Trader Joe's and whole foods like to put their name on everything. Why can't they just be grocery stores that sell trusted and well liked brands made by professionals? Brand 365? give me a break!

fisher23

You should give it a try. It's already vacuum sealed, just put them directly in, if your worried about the bags put them in a Ziploc. 155°F for about 4 hours on the spatchcock chicken, 140°F for an hour on the pollo asada, as it is breast only, those would be my suggestions.

Abdel_170072

Yep! The bacon one is great. I'd love to see more of this. That's why I mentioned it.

Brandon_Byrd_40557

Somewhat inspired by this post, I picked up a package of the Asado chicken from TJ's along with a package of curry chicken. One issue with prepared items (or vacuum-sealed unprepared meat from the grocery) is that paper labels with the weight and price information will discolor and come off over the course of a long cooking time, and they can float around the bath and get sucked into your circulator... and they're a bitch to clean up and fish out even if that doesn't happen. (I speak from experience.) So I popped them in a larger SV bath, cooked them until pasteurization at 62C, and did a rapid chill down in an ice bath. The plan is to dump the chicken with the sauce/marinade in a sautee pan and retherm on the stovetop when the time comes. Should make for a relatively easy dinner.

Another thing to look out for with vac-packed raw meat from the grocery is the inclusion of the juice-absorbing maxi pad thingies that you sometimes find. I'm sure you wouldn't die or anything if you ended up cooking meat with one of those, but I'd rather unbag, remove the pad, and reseal than cook the pad along with the meat.

Brandon_Byrd_40557

Tonight I tried the curry chicken. I'm going to tell you right now that the best way to cook this chicken, and likely the asada chicken that I haven't opened, is in accordance with the instructions listed on the back of the packaging. Go from raw, oiled meat to a large pan over medium-high heat... or grill them. Cooking them directly in the packaging produced a lot of flaky goo bits of chicken protein throughout the marinade and sauce and they never went away... it ended up making a supremely chunky, fall-aparty, shreddy, mushy, sad curry chicken. Not looking forward to the asada. Will grill next time for sure.

Mike_Belmont_886389

That would defeat the whole point of Trader Joe's.