Sous Vide Shrimp - Perfectly Cooked for Shrimp Cocktail! Plus a Super-Quick Sauce!

Oh, look, another sous vide post.

Don't worry. It's not going to be all sous vide all the time. But I'm working my way through sous vide cookbooks, looking for the one that will be my go-to book. This time, the book is The Essential Sous Vide Cookbook by Sarah James. I bought this one because the author had a pretty good track record working for Instructables.

Raw, shell-on shrimp were on sale at my local grocery store, so I bought 2 pounds, then I decided to see if the book had any sous vide recipes. Yup. There was a very simple recipe, which was exactly what I was looking for. With sous vide recipes, my first concern is whether the cooking time and temperature will work. If that doesn't work, the rest of the recipe doesn't matter.

Shrimp is a good candidate for sous vide cooking since shrimp go from undercooked to overcooked in the blink of an eye. Overcooked shrimp are the most likely result because if you cook them until they're done, the carryover heat takes care of the overcooking. And then they're kind of tough and rubbery.

The instructions were simply. Put the cleaned peeled shrimp into a sous vide bag with a little bit of olive oil or butter so they'll fit in a single layer. I used butter.

Then, cook at 130 degrees for 15 minutes, drop the bag into cold water to begin the cooling process, then refrigerate. Then the shrimp can be used in salads, with cocktail sauce, or however you want to serve them. The interesting thing was that two recipes where the shrimp was served hot used a temperature of 135 degrees for 30 minutes, with no interim chilling.

But for chilled shrimp, I'm going to say this time and temperature was really nice. I also tossed some into hot leftover fried rice, and the were perfect for that, too.

Sous Vide Shrimp
Adapted from The Essential Sous Vide Cookbook by Sarah James

1-2 pounds of raw, peeled, cleaned shrimp
1 tablespoon olive oil or butter

Heat the water to 130 degrees.

Place the shrimp and butter into a sous vide bag so they'll fit in a single layer.

Put the bag into the sous vide water and cook for 15 minutes. Remove the bag from the water and place it in cold water to start the chilling process, then refrigerate until fully chilled.

Serve cold in salad, with cocktail sauce, or however you like. I even stirred them into some leftover vegetable stir-fried rice that I had left over. So yum!

Super-Quick Cocktail Sauce

This is pretty much the only cocktail sauce I ever had when I was a kid. We always used a brand-name chili sauce to make the sauce, but the folks at Kam's Kettle Cooked sent me some of their mild-flavored sauce as a sample(they make both mild and hot), so I used that instead. Their sauce has a slightly spicier flavor which worked perfectly well for my cocktail sauce.

To make the cocktail sauce, just mix chili sauce with jarred horseradish - whatever proportion you like. As horseradish sits around, it loses strength, so if you have a fresh jar, you might just need a tiny bit. If the jar has been hanging around a while, it will take more to get the same kick. If the jar has been around for a long time, it might have no life left, so it's time to buy a new jar.

If you make too much cocktail sauce for the amount of shrimp you have, mix it with some mayonnaise and a little bit of chopped sweet pickle or sweet pickle relish to make Thousand Island salad dressing.

About the cookbook: I've only made this one recipe from this book, so I can't really draw an opinion yet. I'll be making more recipes soon. The book was NOT free from the publisher. I bought this one.

And here's a bonus for you. Download the Shrimp Fried Rice photo as a coloring book page. It's free. No obligation, no need to sign up for anything. Here's my artwork:

For more blog posts coloring pages, click here or click the Coloring Book Pages tab at the top.

Sous Vide Scrambled Eggs

If you're scratching your head and wondering if I've gone off the deep end with all of these sous vide recipes lately ... well, maybe.

But also, I got a few cookbooks with sous vide recipes that I wanted to try. I recently bought Richard Blais's book Try This At Home, and when I browsed through it, the sous vide scrambled eggs caught my eye.

They're not really a recipe, I guess, but more of a side note about cooking technique. The actual recipe was Riley's Scrambled Eggs with Asparagus and Hollandaise.

I didn't make the asparagus or the hollandaise. But I used the sous vide method to cook some eggs.

The Recipe(ish):

Basically, you whisk together 4 eggs and a tablespoon of milk, along with salt and/or pepper to make you happy.

Preheat the sous vide water to 168 degrees, then drop the bag in for 10 minutes.

Fish the bag out, mush the eggs around in the bag (you'll see some very yellow uncooked yolk in the center of the eggs in the bag) and drop it back into the water for another five minutes, or however long it takes for the eggs to set.

The Results

The first time I tried this, there was a bit too much of the super-loose egg for my taste, so I decided to cook the eggs longer the next time. Then I decided I wanted the eggs a little firmer, too, so I increased the temperature.

Honestly, I'm still fiddling with this. It's not that the recipe is bad, it's just that everyone's taste in eggs is a little different. I think for me, the sweet spot will be somewhere around 171 degrees. Maybe 170. See, it's not that much different from his favorite temperature, but it does make a difference when cooking something like eggs where they can go from custard to curd in the blink of an eye.

As for the book, there are some recipes here than I'm pretty sure I'll make, a lot that I will use as inspiration or that I'll make one component but not the whole shebang, and then a bunch more that I'll probably try as-is.

Instant Pot vs. Sous Vide! A Saucy Food Fight featuring Baby Back Ribs

I've been doing a lot of sous vide cooking lately, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. So, when I picked up a pack of baby back ribs, I decided I'd give them a try. I've cooked pork loins and pork chops with great success.

One thing I've found with many meats I've cooked via sous vide is that if I want to brown them after cooking, it works best to refrigerate the meat first to let it cool down. For me, this means I usually cook the food so it's ready the day before I actually want it, then I refrigerate overnight.

On the day I want to dine, I finish cooking. This way, I'm just searing the outside and warming the middle, rather than driving more heat into the meat, which could overcook it.

This might not be necessary with every cut of meat, but I also find it convenient, particularly for small, thinner cuts. The meat is fully cooked and resting in the refrigerator so I can have it on the table in a very short time when I decide I'm hungry. And these days I'm mostly cooking smaller cuts of meat.

Except when I go on a pork rib binge. That's totally different.

So anyway, After puttering around a bit, I decided to cook the meat three different ways. First, I cooked one batch in my Instant Pot, using my usual method. I know this method works, and I wanted it to be my control sample.

This isn't the same as cooking ribs on a grill or in a smoker, but it makes decent ribs. And crazy fast.

Then I started looking up sous vide recipes. I didn't care so much about spices or sauces, but I wanted to pick two different cooking temperatures and times, to test the results.  I settled on 165 degrees for 12 hours for one batch and and 145 degrees for 36 hours for the other batch.

I cut each rack in half to fit the bags, and for the fun of it, I put a little bit of sauce in one of each pair of bags. I don't know if that made a heck of a difference. I think a little bit of the sauce flavor did get into the ribs, but not so much that it made a huge difference once the ribs were sauced and broiled.

Next time, I might try a rub and see how that works.

When the pressure-cooked ribs were done, I slathered them with sauce, then broiled them to get the sauce all sticky and bubbly.

When the sous vide ribs were done, I let them cool slightly, then tossed them in the fridge, still in their bags. When I wanted to eat them, I took them out of their bags, got rid of the accumulated juices, slathered them with sauce, and broiled them just like I broiled the pressure cooked ribs.

And yes, I had two pots with different sous vide sticks set for different temperatures going at the same time. I know how to have fun!

The Results!

The winner, for me, was the sous vide ribs cooked for 12 hours at 165 degrees. They were slightly pink, very plump and juicy, and super tender. They still hung onto the bone when I cut them into single ribs, and when I bit into them, my teeth knew I was biting something.

They also fared well when reheated, which I find is pretty typical with sous vide meats. They don't seem to tighten up or dry out as quickly as conventionally cooked foods. Of course, the sensible thing to do was to broil as many ribs as I needed rather than broiling all, but I did have to reheat some and I didn't notice any quality issues.

12 hours at 165 degrees

The second best were the pressure cooked ribs. They were also plump and tender, but not pink and not quite as juicy, particularly when I reheated them. What, you thought I ate all of them in one big meal? And not quite as ... hmmm ... fluffy, I guess, compared to the sous vide ribs. Yup, the pressure cooked were just a little more dense than sous vide. Which is actually okay, I like that texture a lot, too.

I'm sure I'll still be pressure cooking ribs once in a while. It's so fast! I can bring home a slab of ribs from the grocery store and have dinner in a reasonably short time. The other advantage to the pressure cooked ribs, though, is that I save the stock and use it to make tomato soup.

Pressure-cooked ribs. Recipe here.

My least favorite (although not actually bad) was the batch cooked at 145 degrees for 36 hours. They were a little too tender for my liking. I had a hard time cutting them into individual ribs because as soon as there was slight pressure from the knife, they just slid off the bone. When I bit into them, it was almost like the meat flaked apart (kind of like flaky fish) rather my teeth letting me know we were biting into something meaty.

While the ribs at the thicker end of the rack fared better, some of them were verging towards being a little overcooked and dry, too. And some parts were pinkish while the thinner sections were more white. I might try the 145 temperature again, but this time limit it to a 24-hour cook time.

36 hours at 145 degrees

Of course, preferences for cooked-rib texture is a personal thing. You might like yours softer than I do, or you might not want to see any pink in the meat. Or you might appreciate more chew. Make 'em the way you like 'em!

Have you tried sous vide cooking yet? What's your favorite recipe? Or, if you're curious about it, is there anything you'd like to see me try?