sous vide burgers
Once a quarter, any associate, supervisor or manager can nominate a leader of the quarter. Usually supervisors and managers meet off-site for some team building, fun, food and drinks, when the winner is announced. Since times a quite rough this year we have not had one of these outings in a year and we will do some catching up for the last three quarters. The usual ballpark, harbor cruise, bowling alley outings are above the budget and the executive committee decided to have a “fun on the beach” outing this time around. Where we supply our own food; burgers and dogs with all the fixings, no alcohol, since it is not allowed on the beaches anyway.
As my sous chef and I think about what we can do, and that we probably wont have much time other than grilling four burgers at a time on those mini grills on the beach, we already see ourselves doing just that for 60 other managers and supervisors, unless we take a chance and hand over the zepter once in a while. Past has though us that everybody things of himself as the ultimate grill master, and every time it ended in a disaster. After a few ideas what we can do, realizing that we wont bring one of our RATIONAL combi ovens and absolutely trying to avoid dragging our over sized propane grill to the beach and then back, I though of vacuum packing the burgers cooking them in the kitchen, blast chilling them and taking them to the beach. All we would need to have to do is to throw them on the grill, bring them up to temp and serve. Would it work? Who knows there is only one way to find out, that is to try it out. We tried a few different temperatures as well as using raw frozen and plain raw patties.
| raw patty 55C | felt a little mushy, nice color, sticks to the grill bars | |
| frozen patty 55C | perfect in my book, perfect color, grills up nice, | |
| raw patty 58C | mushy like the raw 55C, sticks and breaks on the grill | |
| frozen patty 58C | nice mouth feel, nice pink coloration, cooks up nice | |
| raw patty 60C | firmer than raw 55C and 58C, overcooks on the grill | |
| frozen patty 60C | held up nicer than the raw patty, overcooks on the grill |
Personally I would go with the 55C frozen patty, though already can see the grief or the burger being too rare. The frozen 58C seem to be a happy medium and there are always a few who want hockey pucks so we might as well cook a few up to 60C or even 65C.
The interesting thing though even the cooking time between the raw and frozen patties, like the 55C and holding them the required 121 minutes once the temperature is reached was not that big, less than 20 minutes, thought the difference was enormous. First of all the raw patties all felt unpleasantly mushy, and we had a hard time grilling them, they broke easily and did not show any uniform grill marks, where as the frozen patties held up much better and did show uniform grill marks.
