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Comment by chomp | Hacker News Reader

> Since enzyme activity increases up to those temperatures, slow cooking can provide a significant aging effect during cooking. Meat should however be quickly seared or blanched first to kill surface microbes.

I want to call out shio koji here. I prepared a steak dusted in it for 3 days, and it tasted identical to a 40 day dry aged steak. If you're looking to maximize enzymatic processes, dust your meat in mold!

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pasteurization is a ratio of time and temperature (and other factors), so you can actually pasteurize things like chicken/eggs at lower temperatures, as long as you hold them at that temperature for long enough -- see https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-complete-guide-to-s... for some graphs

Prepared it in your refrigerator? What’s the process? Sounds very interesting.

Serious Eats has some coverage of this. https://www.seriouseats.com/shio-koji-marinade

Sure, so I grabbed a normal ribeye, dusted it with shio koji powder (might be at your local Asian food market, definitely on Amazon) and put it covered in the fridge for 48 hours. Make sure you get the actual powder, because if you get inoculated rice, you'll have to grind it up into a powder and it's a pain. The steak should look like a giant slab of brie when you put it in the fridge.

I then washed off the powder, and cooked the steak like normal (read: sous vide). Steak had the familiar nutty day dry aged flavor (I compared with a dry aged steak I had cooked previously), and caramel coloring with the slightest, almost imperceptible sweetness of miso. It was magic. Be careful with the sear though, because I think some of the sugars are left behind, and it takes only maybe 30 seconds on each side instead of a minute. It'll get crusty much quicker than normal.

Highly recommend if you're ok with molded food (e.g. blue cheese, brie, miso), and it's way way cheaper than getting something off the shelf as dry aged.

Great, thanks. I just placed an order for shio koji on Amazon, can’t wait to try it out.

I can't wait for you to try it!

Also, you can shio koji any meat, not just beef for what it's worth, but I personally feel like the flavors start to go sideways. Pork and chicken I feel need a bolder flavor to prop up the dry age taste; shio koji alone on those overwhelms the flavor and wasn't that great. So if you experiment with those, you may want to try smoking them too. Good luck!

For medium rare, what do you use for sous vide temps and for how long? Also is there an alternative to using plastic bags?

Medium rare has a quite large range when you consider sous vide (129 - 134) because you can select any of them and get a medium rare steak in all cases.

When testing my sous vide device, I noted that the device is off by one degree. Not sure if that's intentional, but makes sense considering 130F is pasteurization temp, and you'd rather be over than vs under.

Since I have kids, I try to stay over 130 - I think I end up dialing it in around 131 F for 1.5 hours (which should be 132-ish, around the middle of the range), and I increase the time depending on the thickness. Fist size filet mignons get 2 hours, and I did a prime rib once for 24 hours.

And for your plastic bag question, there exist reusable silicone bags for sous vide. I can't promise you'll be able to do the prime rib in one of those, but for a single steak, most definitely.

Douglas Baldwin's Practical Guide to Sous Vide cooking is the only place you need to look to determine pasteuration times vs. temperature. It is an outstanding reference that just so happens to be free.

https://douglasbaldwin.com/sous-vide.html

BTW, try pasteurizing raw eggs, beat one into a bowl of rice, and top with a bit of kimchi and sesame seeds. Delicious.

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