Chefsteps Red Wine Poached Pear

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Ingredient
Pear	8	ea
Red wine	1480	g
Sugar	275	g
Cinnamon stick, whole	10	g
Nutmeg, ground	2	g
Mace, whole	3	g
Cloves, whole	4	g
Allspice	3	g

Yield

Timing

Equipment and Materials

Optional Equipment and Materials

1

Ingredient
Red wine	1480	g
Sugar	275	g
Cinnamon stick, whole	10	g
Nutmeg, ground	2	g
Mace, whole	3	g
Cloves, whole	4	g
Allspice	3	g

Combine all ingredients listed.
Reduce at a simmer to about 1/5th the starting weight.
Strain the reduction.

2

Peel pears.

Tip: As you work, keep peeled pears submerge in water to stall browning.

3

Rub the peeled pears with a new kitchen scrub pad to smooth out the surface of the pears. Doing this will remove the peeled appearance.

4

Place a pear into a vacuum sealing bag, and add 35 g of poaching liquid to each bag.
Vacuum pack in a chamber sealer.

Note: You can prepare the pears without a vacuum chamber sealer, but the final texture will not be quite the same.

5

Cook the sealed pears sous vide at 176 °F / 80 °C for 30 minutes, or until soft to the when squeezed.
Chill pears after cooking.

6

Clip open the vacuum packing and decant the cooking juices from the pears into a pot.
Carefully remove the pears.
Reduce the juice until it has the viscosity of a light syrup.

7

Cut the sous vide poached pears into slices.
Serve the sliced poached pears wither warm or cold with the reduced poaching juice.

Salmon and albumin

My family really only like salmon cooked sous-vide in oil, we also don't really have much access to good seafood in Denver unless you pay an arm and a leg.

I've done quite a bit at 50C as well as much shorter cook time at 57.5C. Is brining the best way to get rid of the albumin, if so is a typical 6.4% brine what should be used? And for how long?
Johan Edstrom

So-called albumin protein is mostly a function of cooking temperature more than anything else. Worth trying 113 °F / 45 °C to see what you think of that temperature, you will certainly see less albumin percolating to the surface of the flesh.

Adding salt via a brine tends to help retain juices in the flesh—for complex reasons that I hope to explore in a future course—and so at any given temperature you'll see less juice percolate to the surface, which means you'll see less albumin.

Have you checked out the salmon 104 °F recipe on our course page?
Chris Young

I love Salmon, Sushi first!! :) I have always Cedar Planked my salmon and have love the results. Now that I have seen the 104F video, I am going to have to give it a try.
Allen Johnson

@Johan, 43C is my favourite temp too, as 40C is barely warm once it gets served. Have the same problem in UK too with fish, salmon is great, but good seafood here costs a bomb!
Grace