Will It Be Sous Vide? Delicious Alligator Bites
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the deliciousWill It Sous Vide? , the weekly column that I usually do whatever you want with my immersion circulator.
Duck confit won the topic picking session last week, but as you can see we’re not doing duck, at least not today. The bad news is that it’s surprisingly difficult to find duck legs in this city that haven’t been cooked yet. The good news is, I was able to find a whole (frozen) duck that’s thawing in my fridge right now, so you get the confit. You will also get duck breast, duck wings and any additional duck I can remove from this carcass. Don’t worry about not seeing a duck today, that’s what I’m saying.
Now that we’ve got that covered, let’s talk about what I actually did sous vide: alligator meat. As I mentioned on Monday, the butcher at my local overpriced snob and hippie grocery store was overjoyed to show me his alligator meat and I was overjoyed to buy it. (And as someone who didn’t like spending time in some sort of SEC college with a certain chubby mascot, I was thrilled to eat an alligator, as some kind of weird culinary revenge.) I’ve only ever eaten an alligator deep-fried. The shape of the nugget – and I loved it – so I was really curious how it would work in our little hot tub.
If you’ve never tasted an alligator before, it is usually described as meaty, sometimes chewy, with a flavor that sits somewhere between chicken, frog’s feet, and fishy. It can get very tough if you don’t cook it well, and no amount of crispy batter or sweet dipping sauce will save an alligator’s rubbery, fishy nugget. However, when cooked properly, it can be excellent. According to Wide Open Country , the alligator “tastes like chicken, but it doesn’t,” and “everyone who doesn’t like it is communists.” (Paradoxically, I fed my communist boyfriend and he said nothing but positive.)
There are several sous-vide gator recipes online, including one for a chicken salad-like dish with a recommended cooking temperature of around 131-135 ℉ and a cooking time of one to three hours. My goal was to make a flavorful, unroasted nugget that wasn’t chewy or fishy, so I set my Anova to 131 ℉ – I like to go slow and slow – and chopped the soup savory and garlic.
If you want to play along at home, my alligator cream is made with the following ingredients, and should be enough to cover a pound of meat:
- 3 cloves of garlic
- 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
- 1 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper
- 1/2 teaspoon pepper
- 1/4 teaspoon freshly roasted and ground cumin seeds
- 1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
I ground it all into a paste using a mortar and pestle , then spread it over three pieces of alligator meat, each about 1/3 lb. Then I put each piece in a bag with a tablespoon of butter on each side, because why don’t we add butter?
Then I sealed the bags, put them in the tub, and let one piece cook for an hour, one piece for two hours, and the other for three hours. (I would insert a three-hour piece first, and then add two others in each subsequent hour so that I could try them side-by-side at once.)
I don’t know how clear it is from the photos, but the cooking time had a slight effect on the texture of the meat. The hour-long reptile’s flesh gritted slightly, and the three-hour serving was mildly chewy, but the alligator that had spent two hours in the suvid bath was completely tender and fleshy. (I had a blind taste for the communist guy to corroborate my unblind observations.)
Everything was good in terms of taste. I didn’t find a single alligator fishy – and it was all soaked in our delicious rub – and found it to be like a slightly more playful chicken, but with a nice steak texture. I finished it in a hot skillet with toasted butter to color a little and covered with plates.
Since I wanted alligator nuggets I needed a dipping sauce, so I prepared the oily liquid from the sous vide bag until dark brown and then added honey and chili paste to taste.
So now we have to ask the question that mainly interested me: will there be a gator sous vide?
Answer? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not to touch your own immersion circulator, but it was one of the best alligators I’ve ever had and it wasn’t even fried. It was tasty and meaty, but also very rich and aromatic, thanks to several hours of bathing in oil and spices. The sweet and savory dipping sauce didn’t hurt either. The communist guy I mentioned earlier was also very pleased. Why do we eat outside at all? – He asked, getting into his mouth pieces of tender reptile, standing over the stove. “Because not everything is so good,” I replied, “and I like it when someone pours me wine.”