A partridge (but no pear tree)

I should have been visiting my friends Sébastien and Laurène in Toulouse at the weekend, but the weather here in the UK conspired against me and my flight was cancelled at the last minute. I was half-way to the airport when I learned about the cancellation, so found myself with some time to kill in central London.

This would have been the perfect excuse for another visit to St John, only they were fully booked that lunchtime. Fortunately there are plenty of good places to eat in London, and Corrigan's was happy to oblige with a table. Being in Mayfair, this is a bit more upmarket than St John, and the food a bit more dainty. It's more expensive, too, unless you go for the market menu, which is very tempting and excellent value for money at just £27 for three courses and a 250ml carafe (a.k.a. large glass) of wine.

The offerings on the à la carte menu were more tempting, though, and I opted for a partridge dish: roast breast and confit leg served with pumpkin ravioli. It was very good, but not quite perfect: one half of the breast was nicely cooked, but the other half a bit dry and tough, and the confit leg was extremely dry. Could I improve on this at home? I thought both breast and legs would benefit from sous vide cooking.

My local butcher (Barker Brothers in Great Shelford) had some nice looking partridges in the window, so I snapped one up for my experiment. Roasting a whole bird is always a challenge, as the time and temperature needed to cook the tougher leg meat will dry out the tender breasts - hence Corrigan's approach of cooking the two separately. Following his lead, I removed the legs and breasts from the carcass and prepared the legs for confit. (The breasts were simply brushed with olive oil, seasoned, vacuum packed, and put to one side in the fridge.)

To make the confit, start by salting the legs. About 1tbsp coarse salt and some crushed bay or thyme leaves will do, but I used some of the cure left over from my last batch of home-made bacon (a mix of salt, sugar, bay leaves, peppercorns and juniper). Toss the legs in the cure and set aside in the fridge for at least 12, but no more than 24, hours.

It would be a shame to waste that carcass, so it went into the pressure cooker with some roughly chopped onion, leeks, celery, carrots, parsley stalks, peppercorns and a litre of water. 30 minutes at high pressure and you have partridge stock. Strain, cool, and refrigerate until needed.

When they've had their time in the cure, remove the legs from the fridge, rinse off the cure, and dry thoroughly on kitchen towel. Vaccum pack with a good dollop of goose fat and transfer to a 68℃ water bath.

After 24 hours, reduce the temperature of the water bath to 62℃ (add some cold water to bring the temperature down), and add the breasts. They will be ready in an hour. To finish, drain and dry the legs and pan-fry to crisp the skin. Drain the breasts and pan-fry to colour, then rest for 10 minutes.

I served these with fondant potatoes (cooked in the partridge stock), creamed cabbage, and a white wine butter sauce (made with the partridge stock and cooking juices). It turned out to be quite easy to separate the cooking juices from the goose fat floating on top: simply snip a small corner off the sous vide pouch and let the juices run out, pinching it shut as soon as you get to the fat. The reserved juices can be added to the sauce.

Corrigan's win on presentation, but I think my partridge was better cooked: both the leg and breast were moist and tender. That was quite a lot of effort (2 1/2 days) for one meal, but I have some stock and a little meat left over, so dinner tomorrow will be a nice quick risotto.

Risotto, poached salmon

A rich, creamy risotto topped with a salmon fillet cooked sous vide. Farmed salmon is quite cheap these days, but it is cheaper still to by a side (half a salmon) or a whole fish and portion it yourself. My freezer is well-stocked with fillets vacuum packed and ready for the water bath. The salad in the background is from one of Riverford Organic's salad packs. These always provide a really tasty selection of salad greens - some bitter and pungent, others hot and mustardy. The flavour is fantastic, and it's impossible to go back to regular lettuce after discovering these. I really ought to find out what it is I'm eating. Here's a close-up:

Can you identify any of those leaves?

Salmon fillet, hollandaise sauce

Salmon fillet cooked sous vide (30 minutes at 48℃) and served with hollandaise sauce. Unfortunately I let the hollandaise  get too cold so it started to split when it hit the hot plate - mostly a cosmetic problem, as it tasted fantastic.

There's a bit of a back-story here too: I split the sauce completely first time round, but managed to rescue it by starting with a fresh egg yolk and whisking in the split sauce. While I was rescuing the sauce, I let the broccoli overcook slightly (you can tell from the colour). The salmon took no harm with an extra 5 minutes in the water bath. Meat is very forgiving when cooked sous vide, and can be held for an hour or more; with fish you have about 10 minutes leeway, giving you just enough time to rescue a split sauce.

It's great to see the start of the English purple sprouting broccoli season, and the carrots from Riverford are still very tasty. The new potatoes are from France, a variety called exquisa, and are delicious simply steamed. I didn't put any butter on the vegetables here: the hollandaise is almost 70% butter, after all, and is perfect for dipping your potatoes.

Pigeon Wellington

This is something that appears on the menu at The Kingham Plough from time to time. Emily's version is better than mine, so I mustn't have been paying enough attention when she was making it. Still, the home-made version was very tasty.

Here it is served with sautéed spinach, glazed carrots, and steamed Exquisa potatoes:

The pigeon breasts were cooked sous vide (25 minutes at 54.5℃) then fried for 10 seconds each side in a smoking-hot pan. The cooked breasts were then encased in puff pastry layered with blanched spinach and duxelle mushrooms. This was a very flavoursome dish, and the buttery puff pastry complemented the pigeon well. The only downside was that the pigeon was slightly overcooked when it came out of the oven - a shame given that they were a perfect medium rare after cooking sous vide. Next time I'll stop there.

Beef Brisket

This is an inexpensive cut of beef that needs long, slow cooking to tenderize. It is usually brined and cooked in chicken stock to make corned beef, or braised with vegetables and served as a pot roast. Somewhat counter-intuitively,  braising (cooking in liquid) can result in dry meat, especially if the temperature gets too high (at temperatures above 60-65℃, juices are lost from the muscle fibres). Although the braised meat can end up dry and stringy, this is compensated for by serving the meat in the flavoursome, gelatinous cooking liquor.

Another approach is to counteract this drying by cooking the meat at a lower temperature. Douglas Baldwin, in A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking suggests brining for 2-3 hours then cooking at 80℃ for 24-36 hours. He mentions that the French Laundry cooks their brisket at 64℃ for 48 hours. I decided to try the French Laundry method.  McGee notes that collagen doesn't dissolve into gelatin until 70-80℃, so the higher temperature suggested by Baldwin might be better: something to try next time.

My local butcher only had rolled brisket, so I bought a 1.3kg piece and undid his rolling. I cut it into two pieces and placed them in a 5% brine, where they stayed for 48 hours. After brining, I dried them off and browned the outside with a blow torch before cooling and vacuum packing. Then it was time for the water bath.

I took out one piece after 48 hours and used it to make a big batch of hash, following a recipe from Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking. There's not much to it really: cook some sliced onions in butter, add tinned plum tomatoes and cook off some of the liquid, then stir through some cooked mashed potatoes and the shredded salt beef; you only need to cook it until the meat and potatoes are warmed through, but I like to leave it until it forms a golden crust on one side, then turn it over and cook until the other side is nicely crusted too.

The hash was great, but the meat was not as tender as I expected. The same cannot be said of the 60-hour batch - it was melt-in-the-mouth tender. Both batches had plenty of natural gelatin, so this would also be a good way to cook brisket for corned beef: just shred the cooked beef, and set in a terrine with the gelatinous liquid that collects in the vacuum bag during cooking.

Venison haunch, chocolate oil

I had friends around for dinner on Friday, which gave me a good excuse to do something with the venison haunch I had been saving in the freezer. I hadn't cooked this cut of venison before, but I thought it would benefit from cooking sous vide. There is very little fat in venison, so sealing in all the juices could only work in its favour (larding is recommended if roasting conventionally).

I took a gamble and cooked it medium rare: an hour and a half in a 54.5℃ water bath worked a treat, yielding beautifully pink and tender meat. (Holding the meat for a while in a water bath at this temperature will do it no harm, so this is also a great way to cook if your guests are driving from Oxford and liable to get stuck in traffic.) Just before serving, I seared it quickly in a smoking hot pan. The chocolate oil was a bit of a gimmick, but worked well with the venison.

Chicken breast, crisp chicken skin

This chicken breast was cooked sous vide for 55 minutes in a 63.5℃ water bath (I'm following the times for safe pasteurization given in Douglas Baldwin's guide to sous vide cooking).

To crisp the skin, it was sandwiched in baking parchment between two baking trays (to keep it flat) and cooked in a 200℃ oven for 45 minutes. (I tried crisping the skin with a blow torch, but just ended up with burnt rubber; I must be doing something wrong.)

The carrots were also cooked sous vide (85℃ for 1 hour), while the cabbage and potatoes were cooked conventionally.

I served this with a white wine butter sauce, following a recipe I learned at Ashburton Cookery School. This is similar to a beurre blanc, but contains reduced chicken stock and a splash of double cream which acts as an emulsifier, making the sauce more stable (McGee has an illuminating section on cream and butter sauces, worth a read if you're interested in the science).

Cooking the carrots sous vide kept their shape and retained all their flavour. The chicken was succulent and very tender; it was tasty, but definitely benefited from this creamy but slightly sharp sauce.

White Wine Butter Sauce Recipe

For 2 portions:

• 1 shallot, finely chopped
• 50g butter, cut into small dice and kept chilled
• 100ml white wine
• 300ml chicken stock
• 50ml crème fraiche or double cream
• Salt and peper

1. Melt a little of the butter in a small saucepan and add the shallot and a pinch of salt. Sweat gently to soften the shallot without letting it colour.
2. Add the wine and increase the heat, letting it bubble and reduce until the wine has almost gone.
3. Add the chicken stock and simmer until it has reduced by two thirds.
4. Stir in the cream and cook gently until the sauce thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon.
5. Gradually whisk in the diced butter. You should end up with a sauce the consistency of double cream - adding more butter will give you a thicker sauce.
6. Season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Pork belly, Jerusalem artichokes, and mushrooms

The pork belly here was cooked sous vide for 12 hours at 82℃. Before vacuum packing, it was boned and rubbed with ground fennel seeds, rosemary and salt. If I'd had some, finely grated lemon zest would have been  added to the mix. After cooking, it was chilled in an ice bath and refrigerated until needed.

To serve, it was pan-fried to brown then heated through for 10 minutes in a hot oven. I haven't quite mastered the art of crisping the skin without it colouring too much (and coming close to burning) - some more experimentation needed there.

The mushrooms and Jerusalem artichokes were cooked en papillotte following this recipe from Riverford Organic, omitting the goats cheese. The greenery on the side is shreded leeks and savoy cabbage, blanched for 3 minutes in boiling water then tossed with a knob of butter and some black pepper. I've found that a teaspoon of Dijon mustard mixed into cooked cabbage just before serving gives it a real lift, but I omitted that here as the mushrooms and artichokes were cooked with lemon juice, which I didn't think would go well with the mustard.

In the past, I have braised pork belly with aromatic vegetables, then cooled and pressed it overnight before finishing as above. This "twice-cooked" pork belly is a great dish, but the sous vide version wins hands down on texture and succulence. The only downside to the sous vide method is that you don't get the delicious stock that comes with a slow braise. To make up for this, I roasted the bones with some onions and made a dark pork stock, which I then enriched with the gelatinous juices from the sous vide bag and sharpened with some sherry vinegar.

Lunch today: the perfect soft boiled egg

After months of indecision, I finally took the plunge and bought one of these - a digital water bath that enables low temperature cooking at temperatures accurate to ±0.2℃.

The first thing I cooked was the perfect soft boiled egg. It couldn't be simpler: set the water bath to 62.5℃, wait for it to come up to temperature, gently lower in your eggs, and come back in an hour. This gives you eggs with a runny yolk and the white set just enough for it to hold its shape, smooth and creamy, without a hint of the rubberiness that comes with cooking at a higher temperature.

If you want to know more about cooking times and temperatures for eggs, see this article by Martin Lersch over at Khymos.