Will It Be Sous Vide? Delicious Meat Casserole for Breakfast
Hello friends and fans, and welcome back to another vulgarWill It Sous Vide? , a weekly column where I do whatever you want with my immersion circulator.
After weeks of bridesmaid work on the sous vide principle, the breakfast casserole was finally able to put on a pretty white dress and walk down the aisle. I have long been a fan of our culinary hot tub eggs and hoped that cooking casseroles like this would give us a particularly tasty cream.
I do not morning people in any part of someone – the fantasy, so there is always a certain amount of appeal to the morning meal the night knowing aimed first and then cooked with minimal effort. This method seemed well suited to my constantly jaded pigeon lifestyle, but like all things cooked in small cans underwater, I was a little worried about the moisture content and how it would affect the delicious breakfast meats.
Instead of limiting myself to one pork jerky, I bought three: bacon, ham, and breakfast sausage. To prevent what could only be described as a “greasy, sticky, sluggish mass”, I pre-cooked the bacon and sausage to remove the grease and make everything crispy. After the meat was cooked, I let it drain on paper towels and then collected my casserole tins. For every can of casserole you want to eat or give someone else to eat, you will need:
- 1 egg, beaten
- 1/2 cup frozen fritters, thawed
- 1/4 cup of your favorite cheese (I used cheddar)
- 1/4 cup meat of your choice, precooked and dried as needed
- Freshly ground pepper to taste
Simply mix it all in a bowl, scrape into a jar and tap on it to expel any air bubbles. I made three cans – one for each meat – put the cans in the refrigerator, went out to have some holiday bourbon, and went to bed.
The next morning I got up the road early (7:30 am), turned on ANOVA, and went back to bed. After about half an hour, I heard the circulator beep, signaling that it had reached the target temperature of 167 ℉, so I rolled out of bed, put the cans in the tub and went back to sleep. An hour and a half later, I took out the can and opened it to poke a little. Although it basically froze and turned into a custard, it was still a little damp on top, so I closed the jar and put it back in the bath for another 30 minutes.
That extra time was exactly what he needed, but he still lacked something, and that little something was more cheese.
I put some more cheddar in each jar and let them hang under the brazier for about three minutes.
Now we were ready to eat. I grabbed the only clean cutlery in my crockery drawer and took a bite.
This bite told me a lot, basically it is an answer to the question: will there be a casserole for breakfast sous vide?
Answer: Eh, of course. It was okay . The egg was nice and tasty, but with some meats it went better than others. As you’d expect, the ham was the best and didn’t undergo any real texture changes. The sausage was fine too, although it tasted a little muted after two hours in the bath, but the bacon lost its crispness and turned into sad rubbery pieces of salted meat.
However, the potatoes were fried and the processed cheese was melted cheese, which is never bad, so – again – these breakfast casseroles were just fine . With all that said, I don’t know what 30 minutes or so to prepare and then two hours of making breakfast casseroles that are “just fine” are worth it. Although I could sleep most of the time while cooking, it should be noted that I work from home and that most people might not want to get up two and a half hours before breakfast to put a few cans in a water bath. So while a breakfast casserole works like a sous vide, I don’t know if you should use a circulator this way, especially when you can achieve similar results by baking the pan in the oven in less than an hour.