Sous-vide with frozen ingredients and reheating meals

Raki_57840

Does anyone know where to find information/suggestions about how much time to add for frozen items? Sometimes the planner in me falls down on the job and I realize all of my wonderful frozen steaks are in the freezer by the time I get home from work.

On the flip side, after it's been cooked & chilled how long would I re-heat in the circulator? I've heard (by anecdote) the same amount at a slightly lower temp (seems extreme with a 48 hr cook) or 1/2 the time with the same temp as cooked.

Also how does timing work with cooked & frozen foods? Recall I'm not always a good planner, but getting better every meal.

Brandon_Byrd_40557

The Joule app has an option for cooking from frozen. There's not a hard rule about how much longer it will take because that also depends on how thick the steak is. As for retherming, it will take the same amount of time for the core to reach the target temperature as it did when you initially cooked it. For extended cooking times, you're not just cooking to a specific core temperature, but also allowing the meat to hang out for hours (or days) for its connective tissue to break down. That's not necessary when you're warming up pre-cooked meat for service. A nice thing about retherming pre-cooked SV steaks/chops/whatever is that you don't *have* to let the core reach the target temperature because it's already cooked and will keep getting hotter when you finish it; even if the core is five or six degrees cooler than it needs to be, its temperature will continue to rise during the (much more intensely hot) searing process.