Been wanting to try sous-vide for a while now, and finally got around to ordering a device, which arrived today. I'm excited to try it out.

Which one did you get?

Sounds good to me!

Smoking something after the sous-vide is interesting. If the temp is over 140 it will take smoke very very slowly, and at 170 it completely stops.

OK, it's not like we avoid plastics 100% of the time, but we just don't cook in them and try to avoid storage, even in lined metal cans (canned goods) and such. Thank you for the valuable input.

Indeed. The science says that smoke sticks to cold things and wet things much better than hot things and dry things. That's why it takes so long to make smoked salt - it becomes hot and dry REALLY quickly. One things I failed with this time around was that I took the brisket out of the bag I did the sous-vide cook in, to let the outside dry in the fridge a little overnight, the same as I would for a steak to make it sear well. About half an hour before I put the meat on the smoker I realized my mistake, and spritzed it down with some water to try to undo that. Next time I'll just leave it sitting in beef stock in the bag.

For smoked salt, I cheat. If you have ice in water the water won't significantly gain temperature until the ice melts (except for very locally, like dipping a soldering iron in, or something). This means that if you have some ice or water with ice in and you put that in the smoker you won't lose much of it to evaporation until the vast majority of the ice has melted. This means that you can smoke water. If you heat it up in a pan, add salt until it won't dissolve anymore, and then let the water evaporate off either over time or while still being heating in the pan you end up with salt crystals with all of the dissolved smoke on the outside - also known as smoked salt, with only an hour's smoking instead of many hours of smoking. The speed the water leaves the saturated solution gives you the difference between smoked table-salt and smoked crystal-garden salt.

Another thing to do is get an ice-cube tray with 3/8" cubes, and re-freeze your smokey water in there. One or two in a rye whiskey or rye-whiskey cocktail are rather good, but more than that starts to get overpowering with the smoke.

We need to create a WAGUN cook book.

Thanks, this is exactly the info I was looking for. I wasn't sure what "fry" meant. I kept imaging deep fat frying something, but there is no way anybody would do that to a steak after cooking it. Then I thought about "frying an egg".

I bet my refurbished cast-iron pans would work great for this.

They should do. And... well, it's funny you should mention deep-frying. It's about the most efficient way to get heat in to something, which means searing the outside without enough time for the to get any heat to the rest of the steak.

Here's a video demonstrating the technique, filmed in Bellevue, WA. You only need the first 2 minutes and 45 seconds. Look at that thing when it comes out of the oil - that's a crust! No seasonings, though, because they wouldn't survive the fry. Now skip ahead to 13:48 and pause it. That steak is literally medium all the way through, side from a millimeter or two of crust. That's what you get from deep-frying for a short time. And from using liquid nitrogen to stop the part immediately next to it from overheating during the fry.

These are the guys that publish Modernist Cuisine, though. A 500 dollar cookbook...

Funny you mentioned Modernist Cuisine....their 5 Volume Cookbook(s) on bread comes out today.

I knew that was coming out, but I had no idea it was today.

I had been saving up Amazon gift cards to by an Anova, but this one popped up in my alerts for the very reasonable price of $48 with decent reviews:

https://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id= ... LC-1122587

If I like it and end up using it I may look to upgrade.

Made anything yet? How did it come out?

Not yet :( Been lazy and haven't gotten to the store yet. Was going to cruise down the road to Blue Max Meats and get a decent steak to try it out with, but just haven't been able to find the time.

My advice would be to not do that, actually. It's easy to get a good steak right, but it works for more than just good steaks. Get an entirely average steak from your local supermarket, but leave it in the bath for 2 hours instead of half an hour, and it'll become more tender.