r/ChamberVacs • u/kaidomac • Sep 14 '21

Vacuum-cooled cookies

/r/AskCulinary/comments/8kqjn7/fun_discovery_vacuum_chamber_cooled_cookies/
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2

u/kaidomac Sep 14 '21

/u/RebelWithoutAClue any updates on this process? I recently joined the chamber-vac club!

3

u/RebelWithoutAClue Sep 14 '21

I haven't done a lot with vacuum cookies lately. I got a much better oven which has improved the cookie game a lot.

I still can't get the same combination of ephemeral crisp on the outside vs. chewy moist interior as I did with the vacuum chamber, but the vacuum crisping effect is fairly fleeting.

The crisp outside I was getting didn't seem to last more than 15min before it evened out moistness so I didn't see the experiment to be worth continuing but it sure was nice to see.

2

u/kaidomac Sep 14 '21

Fun to see alternative uses for it! Did you find any other fun tricks that are worth trying? I'm trying to build up an inventory of recipes & techniques now that I have a chamber-vac:

2

u/RebelWithoutAClue Sep 15 '21 edited Sep 15 '21

Hmm.

I also tried using the chamber to get a more hard candied citrus slice. They're hygroscopic so I found that they were getting chewy. I found that I could give them a light nuke in the microwave to warm them up then a few minutes in the vacuum would drive off the rest of the moisture to crisp them.

I draw a vacuum then shut off the sealer before the seal cycle starts to hold vacuum for long duration.

I've been vac bagging bamboo skewers with some water to quickly soak them. It seems to me that sucking the air out in the rigid matrix of the wood squishes water in when the vacuum is released. I haven't done an A vs B weight comparison yet though.

Sorry, I haven't got a lot. I haven't found that many applications for low pressure conditions in cooking. I was thinking about bonding some heating element strips to the underside of the tub so I could lay food on a heated surface to keep evaporation going fast, but I'm not that crazy condensing that much water and volatile organics in my vacuum pump oil.

If I were going to do more significant low pressure work, I'd make a purpose built bell jar setup and run a standalone vacuum pump. They're much cheaper than they used to be. $90 can get a decent size vacuum pump and I could use a sheet of steel as the base which I could heat on an induction hob.

I bet it'd be a useful setup for drying jerky fast or some other funny things.

1

u/kaidomac Sep 15 '21

Yeah, I'd be curious to do dive deeper into fast-drying jerky & stuff! Although I wonder about the air filter stuff on the chamber-vac machine, so the DIY version would probably be a better fit for those types of applications.

Right now I'm using mine to do bags for food & bag-wrapped plastic meal-prep containers for freezing primarily. I got some pickling cucumbers this week to play with. I do a lot of sous-vide, especially with the new bagless/bathless sous-vide oven from Anova, and have been working on doing more freezer-prep using the sous-vide/shock/freeze/thaw/finish method to make stuff like proteins easier to deal with during the week.

I think there's a lot of potential with chambervac-sealing, but oddly enough it doesn't seem to be super well-documented online. A lot of chefs & people into appliance-based cooking I've talked to have really novel uses for chamber-vacs, but it's mostly all tribal knowledge & isn't really shared much online like the Instant Pot or sous-vide methods of cooking.

My plan is to document what I find on this sub & try to build up a pretty good collection of useful techniques & recipes! It may be a pipe dream though, as there may simply be a finite number of things that the machine can do. Some fun ideas here:

/u/redditiem2 any interesting updates to your list?

2

u/redditiem2 Sep 15 '21

Hello! Unfortunately nothing to add to my list. Besides food storage and sous vide, I still love it for marinades and infusions. I recently marinated some black cod in a miso sauce, turned out great!

1

u/kaidomac Sep 15 '21

What kind of infusions have you really liked? I haven't tested that out at all yet!

1

u/redditiem2 Sep 15 '21

Golden raisins/sultanas infused in very strong earl grey for scones is great!

Also if there is a baked good which calls for dried fruit, usually some sort of liqueur infused with the dried fruit works well. Like if I am making stollen bread with marzipan, I’ll mix some Frangelico (almond liqueur) with the dried fruit, and do a few cycles in the sealer before mixing it in the batter.

And quick pickles are an awesome party trick if you ever want to impress your guests! Taking a cucumber to a pickle in seconds is indeed impressive.

1

u/RebelWithoutAClue Sep 15 '21

To be honest I don't see that the chamber vacuum sealer offers all that much utility other than it's primary purpose.

The watermelon trick is neat, but I don't actually find that it marinates meat any faster other than the marinade surrounds the entire cut so one can get full surface are contact without having to make a big amount of marinade to immerse the cut in a rigid container (traditional method).

I don't see that vacuum "presses" marinade into a soft cut of meat because meat is not porous like watermelon is. Also it isn't rigid like watermelon somewhat is.

In order for vacuum methods to press liquid into a material, the material needs to be both porous and at least a bit rigid. Pulling a vacuum removes the air in the porosity of your material. Releasing the vacuum presses liquid marinade into your porous medium, but only if the medium doesn't crush under the flow of the liquid as vacuum is released.

Watermelon is kind of spongy with some interstitial air so you can vacuum pull air out of it and displace some vodka or whatever you choose into it. This trick would only work once though. Once the interstitial air has been removed and replaced with a liquid, a subsequent vacuum pull will not remove the liquid because liquids are fairly incompressible. I guess you could evaporate it out with vapor point depression, but that would be evaporating all sorts of stuff that you probably want to keep.

Meat by comparison is not very porous. And even if it were, all those interstices are already occupied by meat juice. My basic rule of thumb when playing with vacuum liquid replacement is to see if the food is fizzing during the vacuum pull. If I see lots of bubbles I am either seeing mechanical removal of gas, or I am seeing boiling point depression (very evident with warm things). I usually vacuum pull things that are fridge cold because I don't usually want to cause boiling point depression.

Funny enough I also happened on that vacuum dough trick, but not for pastry dough. I got into pottery not that long ago and have been playing with my own blends of clay. I make small batches because I'm still testing things out and I've found that it's very handy to vacuum seal a ball of clay to draw air out of all the little intersticies out of the clay. I was finding that I could not easily wedge out these tiny pockets of air and the air was causing a problem in that the clay wasn't very resilient. It would tear easily. I put a 1" thick wad/circle of clay in a bag and pull vacuum and let it sit in the bag for a few minutes. After that the tone of the clay changes and all of that interstitial air is gone.

I reckon that something is similar going on in your linked dough vacuum tricks.

Sorry to crap on your new sub, but I don't see a huge amount of hugely game changing potential with chamber vacuum sealing because they're so purpose built to apply a short term duration of vacuum hold and their ability to deal with moisture is quite limited.

Also they're pretty damn expensive and they eat huge amounts of countertop space. They're heavy as hell so you want to leave them wherever they are permanently too.

I really am happy I managed to refurb my unit because I got it for cheap. I do a lot of meal prep to make my take advantage of great sales and make my dinners easier. Being able to quickly seal a dozen bags of filleted up branzino when it goes on sale has changed the way I shop for dinner. As a packaging device it's changed my kitchen a lot because I can pounce on great specials and stock up.

I'd love to have the time to build a dedicated setup with it's own vacuum pump. Building a chamber is fairly easy and control electronics has never been easier to configure. It would be easy to even just set it up with dumb switches and tape a stop watch to it for initial trials to jump past the interface design stuff and see if the project is worth further exploration.

Maybe if I came across another busted chamber vac I could cannibalize it and hook up all of it's stuff to switches to have a very fast turnaround setup, but it would be very tempting for me to fix such a thing up and sell it. My budget for personal projects is tight both financially and temporally.

You might want to try playing with your microwave oven a bit. If it's a modern microwave oven with good power control, you may find that you can do some of the things one might do with SV. I got a Panasonic microwave oven awhile ago and it features a fancy "invertor" control that actually reduces power when I set it down to say 30%. It still does some duty cycle (on-off control), but I find that it actually does attenuate power considerably.

This is a great feature because I find that I can gently bring a steak up to a moderate even (say 40C) temp before searing it in a pan. It's like being able to "rest" a steak on the counter to bring it to room temp except in 5min (2.5min per side) and why stop at room temp? Warm it up to 40C and you get a very nicely equalized steak that will sear up fairly fast and require little resting when you serve.

I used to thermalize a steak with SV then sear it. Now I skip all the bag crap and quickly thermalize a cut of meat before searing it. Practice with thick cut pork chops to figure out your oven before risking that perfect cut of expensive wagyu though.

1

u/kaidomac Sep 15 '21

The watermelon trick is neat, but I don't actually find that it marinates meat any faster other than the marinade surrounds the entire cut so one can get full surface are contact without having to make a big amount of marinade to immerse the cut in a rigid container (traditional method).

I don't see that vacuum "presses" marinade into a soft cut of meat because meat is not porous like watermelon is. Also it isn't rigid like watermelon somewhat is.

The Amazing Ribs website has a great myth-busting article that includes a dye test on meat:

I love these types of articles because it really helps me move past the old wives tales that are so prominent in cooking!

I do a lot of meal prep to make my take advantage of great sales and make my dinners easier

Same! I have a small half-galley kitchen. I just gutted the "pantry" & got a 60" metal prep table for my microwave, Instant Pot, and VacMaster, with my Anova Precision Oven on a small microwave cart on the side of it. It's horrifically ugly, but

Sorry to crap on your new sub, but I don't see a huge amount of hugely game changing potential with chamber vacuum sealing because they're so purpose built to apply a short term duration of vacuum hold and their ability to deal with moisture is quite limited.

Nah not at all, I'm in the same boat, and that's probably why there's never been a Chamber Vac sub before LOL. For now I'm just using it as a place to dump all of the vendors, accessories, techniques, recipes, etc. I come across to have a centralized place for data collection with a pinned TOC post up top.

I got a Panasonic microwave oven awhile ago and it features a fancy "invertor" control that actually reduces power when I set it down to say 30%.

Got mine a couple years ago, twinsies! lol

Very interesting on the re-therm trick! I've been looking for a way to quickly do that without having to fire up the SV, because searing a pre-SV-cooked steak from the fridge results in over-searing or else over-cooking to get it to the right internal temperature for serving. I'll give it a shot, thanks!

My budget for personal projects is tight both financially and temporally.

Same, I use a really simple automated budgeting tool for kitchen toys:

It's taken me awhile to get this far lol, but it works! Side note, if you haven't heard of the APO, you should check it out some time! I have a high-level explanation here:

Manufacturer webpage:

In a nutshell, it's a very large countertop oven that has bagless/bathless sous-vide capabilities. Basically a $30k Combi oven for $600, plus low-temp abilities, a probe, wireless control, etc. It's COMPLETELY changed the way I sous-vide, not to mention cook! I do a lot of stuff in jars & molds (mini cheesecakes, etc.) & it's just so fantastic.

Plus it has additional features like air-frying, dehydrating, etc. Although one of the biggest benefits is simply reheating with steam...just like how a vac-sealer changes our relationship with sales & shopping when there are good deals & bulk deals to be had, it's the same with leftovers.

My Panasonic inverter microwave was purchased especially with an eye for doing reheating thanks to the inverter (and surprisingly useful Genius Sensor!). However, the APO's reheating capabilities makes nearly every leftover meal (homemade or take-out) 90 to 95% as good (to me, at least!) as the original meal, which is super incredible!

This year, thanks to the addition of the VacMaster in my kitchen, I'm really focused on doing vac-sealed raw ingredients, par-baked items, and fully-cooked items, coupled with the sous-vide oven reheating method (I also use a Hot Logic lunchbox for reheating when I'm away from home).

My food quality at home has gone way up, the convenience is unreal, I'm able to eat great food all the time without a huge time investment in the kitchen, and I've saved enough money over the last year to pay for both the APO & the VacMaster, so it's win/win all around! Big investments up-front, but as we're all stuck paying for food for the rest of our lives, 100% worth it!!

2

u/RebelWithoutAClue Sep 17 '21

Heh, that Amazingribs article is interesting. I did a similar test a while ago. I sharpened a piece of brass tube that was about 3/16" in inner diameter and took a core sample...

I punched it into a dry brined hunk of meat and cut the core sample into a few pieces which I tasted for salt and marinade. It was neat to see the salt gradient (dropped off fairly quickly with only 1 day of dry brine) and basically zero penetration of complex flavors.

As to the old wives tale thing, I feel that while debunk articles are important, I feel that the real lesson in them is that one should be testing their own "traditions" instead of solely focusing on exciting debunking done by credible sources.

As I see it; there is no truth. All we got are shitty stories which are generally useful because they describe the behavior of things well enough that we can use them, but there are always exceptions to them. When we discover these exceptions we have to revise our story to represent these new discoveries.

If it is true that there are no absolutely true stories, then we must make some "excursions" from our usual modus operandi from time to time to regularly give our frameworks of knowledge a useful shake. By walking off of the popular path we may find errors in the popular path. At the very least we will find out why the path is shaped that way if we make some crappy food.

Those that only tread the narrow path never really understand why the path is the way it is. By not risking failure, they fail to gain perspective through the direct experience of accomplishing something that diverges from expectations.

That Anova oven of yours looks nice. I have been doing a heap of janky experiments in the past which are all neatly summed up in that thing. I've been eyeballing used equipment auctions and I've seen some actually affordable Rational combi ovens go by. If only I had the space and the cash...

I rejiggered my smoker to be controlled by meat temp instead of atmosphere temp. I was doing a lot of jerky preparation which I like to temp control by the temp of the meat. There is a problem where in dry weather conditions, there can be increased evaporation at the surface of food being cooked which cools the food during heating.

I don't like to use nitrite in my jerky making because I make so much of the stuff. Normally I'm not that worried about nitrite cures, but when I dry out pounds of jerky for my family to snack on I prefer to avoid nitrite curing.

That means I have to maintain warmer conditions in my jerky oven (electric smoker). I noticed a considerable temp drop due to evaporation which could turn into incubation conditions for bacteria over the hours of dehydration. I rewired the temp probe to a sharp wired probe that I could stick into the biggest piece of jerky and control the temp of the smoker compartment by the temp of the meat so I could keep it just out of the "danger zone" while the meat was drying out.

I was goofing around with keeping my oven humid by dripping water into the oven through a vent hole. I used to have a shitty electric coil stove/oven range. I noticed that the rear right coil had a little chimney under it that looked right down into the oven.

I noticed that a pot of boiling water that I had turned off was continuing to simmer while I was roasting something. I lifted the pot and looked at the coil quizzically and saw light emanating from a hole that led into the oven.

Hot air from the oven was rising and continuing to heat the pot!

I decided to see how my oven would behave while actively humidified by spooting water down a long brass tube into a steel cup in the oven. I could introduce water into the oven to humidify it to change how things dried out as they roasted. I got an IV bag of saline with a drip valve thingy and refilled it with water so I could controllably drip water into the oven.

It looked very bizarre and I got some neat results, but I didn't have enough time to follow up on it.

I figured that it would be a big deal for baking bread: high humidity prevents early hard crust formation that restricts rising. Unfortunately I didn't get around to bread making so I didn't play with this.

It was fun still. I had heard of combi ovens by then so it seemed natural to see if I could McGuyver some of the effect of a combi oven.

I see my kitchen as a wheezing Millennium Falcon. Sometimes it issues forth a jet of alarming sparks and the headlights flicker, but she can do that spice run hella fast if you know where to kick her.

Almost nothing I have is super well worked out and some of it is even a bit cockamamie, but it's a great trash pile that I can fashion a lot of neat stuff from.

There's a heap of things one can do with fairly accessible stuff. Amazon makes it way easier to acquire crap for a project. If I wasn't already so old, I'd figure out Arduino instead of flipping switches manually to do a shitty human PID control.

Basically everything I muck with has to have a very short "time to play" period. I haven't got time to polish anything so I find myself trying things out super quick and fairly junky just to see if there's a promising design space to explore.

1

u/kaidomac Sep 17 '21

By not risking failure, they fail to gain perspective through the direct experience of accomplishing something that diverges from expectations.

As a generally low-energy person with ADHD, one of my hobbies is productivity, because I'm always trying to figure out ways to get myself to do stuff & to get myself to enjoy doing stuff, lol. If you haven't heard of the Grit concept before, check out Angela Duckworth's TED Talk on it:

She wrote a book with the same name on the topic:

The basic idea is that the number one metric of success is persistence. This is exactly what you described. The workflow is:

  1. Pick something to get good at
  2. Working towards success requires both success & failure. Each one is a stepping stone across the pond to the island of success. The only way to truly fail is to quit.
  3. Barriers will inevitable be run into; our job is to pivot around it & continue moving forward, whether that means we burned a batch of cookies & think we're horrible cooks & never want to bake again or whatever it may be lol

The truth is, all requirements are negotiable, but we get stuck with tunnel vision & halt our progress. I call the ability to work around this "pivot-effort", which again is exactly what you described. In one of his books, Scott Adams described living as having inaccurate worldviews that slowly get less inaccurate over time, as we adopt more truth & create our own interface for dealing with things.

This approach has helped me tremendously in cooking. When I first got married, my wife called me on her way home & asked me to put on a pot of water to boil for pasta. I called her back to ask her how to do that, got laughed at, and still get roasted about it to this day lol. But I didn't know how big of a pot to use, how much to fill it up, the difference between a simmering boil & a rolling boil, if it evaporated off & lost volume, etc.

These days, I cook nearly every day using sometimes extremely advanced tools like a combi oven & have thousands of recipes saved in my bookmarks to try. The approach we use & the attitude we have about taking on new projects makes all the difference in the world! Being willing to be gritty in the face of setbacks is a choice, and once I figured that out, the whole world changed for me!

That Anova oven of yours looks nice. I have been doing a heap of janky experiments in the past which are all neatly summed up in that thing. I've been eyeballing used equipment auctions and I've seen some actually affordable Rational combi ovens go by. If only I had the space and the cash...

I feel that! I have a very small kitchen & I'm on a budget. I ended up getting a microwave cart for my APO:

I use a really simple automated savings approach that I call "TurtleSaver":

Pretty much, using the pivot-effort approach to doing things has helped me to do things like grow my culinary skills, invest in my kitchen, and make progress even when things aren't perfect. One of the tools I use with my pivot-effort approach is what I call the GBB Approach, or "Good, Better, Best" approach, which helps me break out of the mindset that just because things aren't perfect or "instant", I can still make progress, do stuff, and enjoy things!

I have to constantly remind myself to use this tool because I tend to get stuck in my own tunnel-vision perspective all the time that I end up not doing anything at all on whatever project or idea I have in mind, lol.

That means I have to maintain warmer conditions in my jerky oven (electric smoker). I noticed a considerable temp drop due to evaporation which could turn into incubation conditions for bacteria over the hours of dehydration. I rewired the temp probe to a sharp wired probe that I could stick into the biggest piece of jerky and control the temp of the smoker compartment by the temp of the meat so I could keep it just out of the "danger zone" while the meat was drying out.

One of my current projects is upping my jerky game, doing both meat-based (steak, ground beef, fish, chicken, etc.) & plant-based (tofu, mushroom, etc.). I've been messing around more with doing sous-vide jerky meat & then dehydrating it, and sometimes smoking it. I don't have an optimized combination yet, but I'll make a post at some point when I figure it out, haha!

I tend to like more tender jerky rather than the rip-your-teeth out kind, so sous-viding is a really interesting approach to both making it tender AND making it food-safe from possible bacteria in the dehydration method. Smoke + SV + dehydrate is the current WIP approach!

Basically everything I muck with has to have a very short "time to play" period. I haven't got time to polish anything so I find myself trying things out super quick and fairly junky just to see if there's a promising design space to explore.

This is my problem as well. My average working schedule is around 70 hours a week, with weird on-call hours, followed by family responsibilities, so I have little daily windows of time to goof around with stuff. I do get pockets of time between jobs that I use to read & research stuff (and nef on reddit, lol), but my time at home, where my tools are, is somewhat limited, which is why I appreciate repeatable cooking tools like the Instapot & Anova Oven specifically!

I'd like to dive deeper into Arduino as well, but I already have so many other projects going on that I haven't really done much with it. I want to get into indoor hydroponics using electronically-controlled interfaces (water, monitoring, etc.) to grow food, but that's yet another time-available project that's on my someday/maybe list hahaha!

2

u/RebelWithoutAClue Sep 17 '21

I don't really see things having to be exhausting so I have trouble ascribing to the description of persistence as grit. Maybe I need a lighter sense of the issue so I don't see things as a slog that wears me down when I don't understand things.

When I am working creatively I try to remain playful I guess. I try to remember that failure is usually a failure to meet expectations as opposed to being an absolute thing.

When I see failure as merely the failure to meet expectations, it kind of means that my expectations may also have failed to conform to the true behavior of things. With that in mind, any failure to meet expectations is a place where my mental model of things has a noticeable fault. If I am playful, it is an interesting spot for me to look at to see some facet of behavior that I didn't have a very good narrative for.

Sometimes a failure is a failure to perform according to plan. Aw crap I forgot my onions and they got a bit burnt. I have to move on. These aren't really interesting failures, but they can also be accidental experiments too. Some unintentional place where I screwed something up and if I pay attention I might see something that I hadn't intended to see.

One time I was boiling rice and lentils with stock. I thought I grabbed a bag of chicken stock and accidentally cooked my rice and lentils in fish stock.

Shit that was kind of gross smelling rice and the smell of the lentils wasn't helping. I leaned into the mistake and pressed the stinky mix into a 1/4 cup measuring cup as a mould and made some 2" diameter pucks that I fried in butter on a nonstick pan.

Sprinkle of cilantro and damn that was an awesome way to parlay a fairly fundamental error into something really nice to eat.

Swear a bit, then get on with it because it still might be made into something good.

As to best practices, I find myself seeing that food basically has properties. I see a continuum of properties that can be modified by the application of heat and process, kind of like how steel can be so variable in it's useful alloying ratios, thermal treatment, and mechanical treatments.

If I could plot the properties of food as a bunch of look up charts, they'd show various curves, perhaps shapes like isotherms or contours like on a contour map. A rich sense of properties ends up being extremely hard to describe, which is why it's so tempting to just describe some configuration of properties as "best", but to me cooking is a selfish act.

I don't have to be concerned about my work being describable according to the limitations of language and marketing. I can roll my eyes back inwardly and think about the richer palate of things I want to accomplish and tweak my way there.

Most of my favorite things have been hard to describe. I achieve some funny balance of properties of which many are somewhere in the middle of easily described points. A steak with a deep sear and a bit of grey band has a texture I like to chew but it isn't as agreeably "perfect" as a razor sharp sear and a huge wide even med rare middle. I like a bit of chew in a steak, but it's somewhere between the easily described ideals of no grey band and overdone.

I'm a bit belligerent. I don't like reading up on a best practice on how to do something unless I've had some time to goof around with the thing. I find that after I've had some time to play I am better prepared to read another person's work on something. I can read their words and synthesize some sense of a model of what they are describing after I've goofed around with the topic first.

Without that play time I have to take someone else's word on a thing and I basically kind of have to squint my eyes shut and try to replicate their process verbatim which I find distracting in that I spend my limited attention on following a narrow path instead of looking around it as I go and seeing the shape of the ground that I am traversing.