The SousVide Supreme – CliqueClack review, part two

Now that you've heard of our initial experience with the Sous Vide Supreme, it's time for our first actual cooking test. So how does cooking a leg of lamb hold up in the SVS?

I wrote about my initial experience with the SousVide Supreme cooker last month, and I promised I’d follow up with some specific meals we tried in it. Before I continue on, make sure you read that original post if you’re not familiar with the SousVide Supreme (SVS) or cooking Sous Vide in general.

I love lamb, and I especially love lamb when it’s cooked to perfection. Beef has a good range of done-ness that will still make me love it all the same, but lamb … it has to have that perfect, medium-rare temperature for it to really stand out. Being that the SousVide is made for cooking to that perfect temperature, throwing a leg of lamb in that baby was the first thing that came to mind.

Let me again explain the first problem I had with the SVS, besides the initial problem of getting a faulty review unit. The small guide/recipe book that comes with the unit has contradictory and confusing information regarding cooking times. For someone unfamiliar with this cooking method, it can be quite intimidating to see a recipe call for a maximum cook time of 48 hours and a minimum cook time of 24 hours. No, really — apparently you can safely throw a whole leg of lamb in here and cook it for two whole days and not worry about it coming out wrong (not sure I agree, but I’ll come to that later).

In addition to the overwhelming time & temperature chart, the recipes within the book often contradict what the chart specifies — it’s frustrating! Think you can do a simple Google/Bing/Bang/Bong search to find the right cooking times? Not so fast! There’s no definitive guide to be found. Want to call the SVS people to get help? Nope — you’re on your own.

Alright, so getting back to the leg of lamb. We decided that cooking this for two days seemed creepy, so we opted to start cooking it late the night before, around 10 PM or so. We put the kinds of spices we wanted on the meat (salt, pepper, garlic, thyme, rosemary), sealed it in the bag and immersed it in the SVS bath, which was already set to the proper temperature for medium-rare (as defined by the guide book, at least).

Let me share a handy tip for you when trying to get a spiced piece of meat into one of these bags, without getting spices all over the bag seal. Take the bag and fold over the ends so the zipper seal is folder underneath, then put the meat in the bag and seal it up. Makes for a much cleaner seal.