Newbie Kitchen: A first-timer's attempt at "BBQ" Beef Brisket (Sous Vide)!

Welcome to our second episode of Newbie Kitchen! In this series of videos we tackle a recipe or dish which we've never cooked before, purely with guidance from the almighty Internet! Today, we're trying out a rather ambitious and time-consuming cook: "BBQ" Beef Brisket!

We put "BBQ" in parentheses because we live in an apartment, so actual smoking/bbq'ing isn't an option; Let's see if sous vide works just as well!


Step 1 - Brine:
→ 1.6kg Beef Brisket (we could only find Australian grass-fed beef)
→ 90g Salt
→ 60g Brown Sugar
→ 45g Liquid Smoke

Mix all ingredients & refrigerate. Apparently if you have an injector/syringe, injecting the meat with the solution brings down the brine time to about 48 hours. We didn't inject and brined for 6 days instead.

Step 2 - Fake Smoke Ring:
→ 5g Curing Salt / Prague Powder #1

Dissolve in a small amount of brine before mixing back into the container. This step is purely for cosmetics (to make the brisket look like it was BBQ'ed) and is therefore optional.

Step 3 - Glaze & Sous Vide:
→ 80g Molasses
→ 40g Liquid Smoke
→ 20g Soy Sauce

Use a pastry brush to glaze the Brisket before Sous Vide'ing at 68°C for 24hours. Note: we had quite a bit of leftover glaze so you could probably halve the ingredients.

Step 4 - Rub:
→ 50g Salt
→ 67g Brown Sugar
→ 35g Black Pepper
→ 15g Smoked Paprika
→ 15g Mustard Powder
→ 10g Onion Powder
→ 5g Garlic powder

Use a pastry brush to glaze the Brisket before liberally sprinkling on the rub. Note: we had a significant amount of leftover rub so you could probably reduce the ingredients to a third.

Step 5 - Bake:

We finished the Brisket in a 125°C oven for almost 3 hours to bake on the bark (crust).

Finished Product & Verdict:


This Brisket was amazing! Savory and mega-juicy, with a superb bark; We dare say it's a lot better than the majority of commercial (i.e. sold in restaurants) Briskets that we've tried! The bark might perhaps do with less sugar and more black pepper though, but other than that we're absolutely delighted with the result & can't wait to try it again!

If you enjoyed the video, and/or you'd like to share more tips & tricks, we'd absolutely love to hear from you: Leave us your comments below!

First Try on the 36 hour Sous Vide Porchetta.

We've decided to skip the introduction and just go ahead with a photo of the finished product:


Now that we've hopefully gotten your attention, here's the breakdown! We use the word 'porchetta' liberally here, because traditionally and strictly speaking, Porchetta refers to gutting and deboning a whole pig, and then arranging it carefully with layers of stuffing, meat, fat, and skin, before finally rolling, spitting, and roasting (taken from Wikipedia).

Obviously that's not something that the average home cook would probably undertake, so here we've gone ahead with 600 grams of Pork Belly, bought already rolled and tied up from the local Cold Storage and called that a Porchetta. As per the recipe on Serious Eats, we rub down the surface with a mixture of 1 tablespoon of crushed pink himalayan rock salt and 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder to break down the skin a bit during the cooking process.


From there it's into the zip lock bag and popped right into 68.3° water for what was supposed to be 36 hours. Unfortunately disaster struck here as somehow a sizeable amount of water (200ml or so, by my estimation) got into the bag after the first 10 hours. We replaced the bag but the same thing happened after the next 10 hours, so the poor meat was getting poached in water instead of its own juices. We have no idea what happened; our only guess is that the plastic (maybe the zip lock section) somehow become porous under heat. Any engineers or physicists care to weigh in?


So because of that disaster we decided to cut the cooking time short, and soaked the roll into icy water - I guess it's for the same reason Hainanese Chicken Rice cooks also dunk their chickens in ice water. 10-15 minutes.


At this stage the pork is fully cooked, but you might agree that it looks rather anaemic and not that appetizing. So we dumped the now limp sprig of rosemary, and heated some oil to a little over 200°C ...


... and "deep fried" the Belly! Unfortunately we don't have a proper deep fryer (or enough oil to cover the entire 3 inches), so it was about 8 minutes of constantly rotating the Porchetta and ladle-ing 180-200°C hot oil over the top. And getting scalded in the process. Note to self: wear gloves around hot oil.


It was totally worth the effort though! The crisp skin crackles and encases and OH-SO-GORGEOUS amalgamation of meat and fat in the mouth. The flavor itself was a little weak, and we didn't have much in the way of natural juices thanks to all that water that got into the bag. Nevertheless texture wise it was perfect, and dare I say easily on par with the pork belly we tried at Gordon Ramsay's 1-michelin starred Petrus in Knightsbridge. I kid you not, it's that good.


Now if you're itching to try but don't have the gear, due to the long cooking time you really need at minimum a crock pot / rice pot with temperature controller (something like this setup). We've also learned from this episode that not all zip lock bags are created equal - we'll probably be investing in a set of proper sous vide bags and maybe a vacuum sealer before trying again.

So stay tuned for the second try once we get a little kitted up - now that we know the basic procedure works very well, we'll probably also be buying our own belly and shoulder/loin and rolling it by ourselves. Yummy!

Uber Delicious Sous Vide Citrus Soy Salmon

Looking back at our blog posts lately, we do seem to be putting up more and more cooking and baking recipes, and not as many restaurant reviews. Perhaps it's because good restaurants worth reviewing aren't usually cheap, and we've discovered that with a little trial, error and effort, you can often get much better value by cooking at home!

Today we're going to bust out the sous vide circulator yet again - but this time we're going to water bathe some fish. A stack of salmon fillets, to be exact. As you can see we've cut the skin off the fillets - this is because with sous vide the skin stays limp and soft, and to be honest not very appetizing. So we just skin the fillets with a sharp knife, and fry them up separately in a pan (don't really need extra oil cos the skin is full of natural fish oil) for a crispy snack.


The first step is to brine the fish. Brining means soaking in a salt solution - what this does to salmon is to inhibit the excretion of albumen (pinkish strands of protein) during the cooking process so you get a more visually appealing fillet. Oh, and it adds moisture, too. You want to mix water, ice and salt in about a 4:2:1 ratio (example, 400ml of water, 200ml of ice and 100ml of salt), soak the fish and leave it in the fridge for about half an hour before cooking. Make sure the water is as cold as possible! Brining in water at higher temperatures could cause food safety issues.


Once that's done, mix up about 1 tablespoons each of minced garlic and ginger, 1 tablespoon of any kind of citrus (orange juice, lime juice, lemon juice) and 1 teaspoon of soy sauce for each fillet. Mix it, dish it into your vacuum pack or ziplock bags, and we're ready to bathe!


Surprisingly, salmon doesn't take all that long to cook. 25 minutes is sufficient at anywhere from 48°C (rare) to 52°C (medium rare) to 60°C (medium), depending on how you like your fish. Try not to cook it past more than 40 minutes as although it won't technically overcook, it loses some of its texture and may get a little mushy.


Once done, it's ready to serve! As in most sous vide applications, the low cooking temperature means that the salmon tends to look a little pale. You can serve it as is, or put it under the broiler or blowtorch really quickly just to add a little colour. Serve with whatever takes your fancy - here we've paired the fillet with a side of spaghetti aglio olio and some steamed broccoli.


Looks amazing, tastes even better! The sous vide process ensures evenly cooked juicy fish throughout with melt-in-your mouth consistency. It's an easy dish to whip up, requires hardly any skill, and you can just as easily expand it to a dozen people at a dinner party. Give it a try! I don't think you will be disappointed.

Note: We have an additional SideKIC Kitchen Immersion Circulator available for sale. If you're interested do drop an email at shuigao(at)gmail(dot)com. Singapore, JB and KL only.

Click here for our blog page Cooking Classes for more recipes. Hope you will be inspired~

Cooking the Perfect Steak - Sous Vide then Sear Method

We're back to our Steak cooking exploration! Once again it's worth mentioning our prime motivation ... money! Above all else the #1 determinant for how good a steak will be is how good the meat is in the first place - and good meat doesn't come cheap. Hence the best steakhouses always charge top dollar, and the cheap steakhouses like Aston's almost always suck. So if you're looking to eat quality steak on a budget, cook it yourself at home!

Two weeks ago we blogged about the Freezer then Low Temperature Oven method. Today we're going to try the latest rage - Sous Vide. Sous Vide is literally French for "under vacuum," but in a culinary setting it means sealing your food in a bag and then slow cooking it in a water bath at a set temperature such that it cooks slowly and evenly. We decide to use the SideKIC Kitchen Immersion Circulator, which is a compromise between a full blown home sous vide solution (like the Sous Vide Supreme) and ghetto hacking one out of a rice cooker or a cooler box.


The SideKIC comes in two parts - a combined 300watt heater element and circulator, and an external temperature controller. You can see here that the circulator does quite a nice job of getting the water moving around the container. 300 watts is not a lot of power, though, so you'd be better off pre-heating the water using a kettle or something.


Our meat of choice tonight is an Aussie Wagyu Striploin - gorgeously marbled and a full one-and-a-half inches thick. With a little sprinkling of smoked salt, pink himalayan salt, and loads of freshly cracked black pepper.


Into the ziplock bag! In keeping with the theme of being somewhat budget, we didn't buy a vacuum sealer. Instead we simply used water displacement (i.e. you dip the steak and the bag gradually into a container full of water, and the water pushes the air out. Yes yes you don't really get a vacuum, but it's close enough that it doesn't really matter.


Into the water the steak goes! Fast forward about an hour later and it's done! At this point the steak is entirely evenly cooked perfectly the way you want it (we had ours at 56 degrees Celcius for Medium Rare). You could eat it right now and it would be pretty delicious. But to make it even better, you just have to sear it to get that nice Maillard reaction going on the crust. Blowtorch or Pan Sear as how you like it, and then serve!


With the sear, the steak just becomes more fragrant, more aromatic, and looks a whole lot better too - wouldn't you agree?


And of course, slicing the steak in half shows you just how evenly the meat is cooked. Unlike regular steak cooking methods (and particularly for thicker cuts), a 'medium rare' steak really means only the middle is medium rare, gradually going to medium - medium well and well done on the outer layer. With the sous vide and other slow cooking methods, the steak is medium rare the entire way through. Juicy, fatty, yummy, absolutely delicious!


For Sous Vide, Medium Rare is the best way to go (cooked to 55-56 deg C). Because of the low cooking temperature, the intramuscular fats don't quite render if you cook it to rare. If you really must have your meat a little less pink, Medium is about 60 deg C and Medium Well is about 64-65 deg C.

Now, Sous Vide doesn't magically make your steak 10 times better. Don't expect it to be better than Morton's or Cut or The Fat Cow. What you do get, though, is brainless, zero-skill required, perfectly cooked meat. Every single time. Because the steak's temperature will never go above whatever temperature the water is at, it is impossible to overcook it even if your dinner gets delayed by a couple of hours.

Of course the main drawback is the (relatively) lengthy cooking time - at least an hour, so it's perhaps not the best if you're home late from work and just want a quick dinner. But if you've got a bit of time to put in, the 'dunk and forget' and sheer consistency of cooking in a water bath means this is perhaps the perfect way for the home chef to cook steak.

Note: We have an additional SideKIC Kitchen Immersion Circulator available for sale. If you're interested do drop an email at shuigao(at)gmail(dot)com. Singapore, JB and KL only.

Click here for our blog page Cooking Classes for more recipes. Hope you will be inspired~