Will It Be Sous Vide? Meatloaf
Welcome to this week’sWill It Sous Vide? , the weekly column that I usually do whatever you want with my immersion circulator.
This week’s topic is pretty informative in the sense that it is literally a piece of meat. While meatloaf may not be the most glamorous way to eat beef, there is a certain cozy home environment that speaks to people, especially if you’ve grown up eating this fine American staple. (In fact, I have never met a person other than vegetarians who disliked meatloaf, especially his mother.)
If there is anything that can spoil a good meatloaf, it is dryness, and sous vide cooking definitely protects against this. I made this All Recipes bread as a base, but reduced the amount of milk to 1/4 cup as the moisture could not evaporate.
Then I squeezed it into a loaf shape and vacuum sealed it in a sous-vide bag. To be honest, the package is not very pretty.
This recipe recommends a sous-video loaf of meat at 140 ℉ for three hours, so I decided to give it a try.
When the cooking time was up, I took it out of the tub and was amazed at how much it looked like a piece of meat. I also noticed how much liquid was hanging out in the bag.
Then I put it in a skillet, covered it with a nice layer of ketchup and brown sugar, and then toasted it a bit.
Sure, it looked like it, but it tasted less than my favorite.
For lack of a better description, it was pretty darn bland. Plus it was soft. It was so soft that I asked a communist guy to try it, just to make sure my sky was not broken. “It doesn’t taste like anything,” was his hot response, and I went back to the bowl.
Obviously, I needed to remove excess liquid, so I scratched the milk. I also stirred the meat up a bit, adding half a pound of Italian pork sausage to liven it up. After a little tweaking, I got the following list of ingredients:
- 1 pound ground beef 80/20
- 1/2 pound Italian sausage
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup bread crumbs
- 1/2 large onion, diced
- 2 tablespoons of cooked horseradish
- 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
- 1/2 tablespoon Better Than Bouillon beef base
- 1 1/2 teaspoons garlic salt
I seasoned the beef with salt and pepper, then added everything in one large bowl and folded it with my hands. Then I formed a loaf of this new meat mixture and sealed the bad guy in a bag. To be honest, it looked almost the same as the first loaf.
Considering how soft the first loaf was, I decided to raise the temperature to 145 ℉ and reduced the time to two and a half hours.
When the bathing time was over, I repeated the whole frosting and baking procedure with new bread.
Then I tried it.
So. Will there be a sous vide meatloaf?
Answer? Oh sure. This second meatloaf was actually quite tasty, the communist boyfriend agreed, but I don’t know that it was especially better than any bread I made in the oven. It was very moist and very aromatic, but even when frying, there was no real crust and I could not light it. (It would fall apart due to the high humidity.)
That being said, it was nice not to turn on the oven for an hour, especially given the fact that the sun is finally constantly extinguishing. I guess what I’m trying to say is that yes, the meatloaf will be sous vide, but the meatloaf sous vide won’t push your mom’s recipe out of the water. Which is quite funny considering the fact that this is the only meatloaf cooked in water. Well.