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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

Well, it seems more like the standard food vacuum isn’t strong enough, not necessarily that vacuum marination in general can’t work:

The one used in the article was half an atmosphere. On the other hand, a pressure cooker goes up to a full atmosphere, and in half an hour can produce meat that tastes like it was marinated for a day or two. Yes, the heat helps here too, but that’s not enough on it’s own: boil a piece of meat in something like beef broth for that long and you don’t get a result anywhere near the pressure cooker, not at all.

So pressure can absolutely make a difference, just not the low end food-saver countertop versions used for simple preservation and storage of food.

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> Yes, the heat helps here too, but that’s not enough on it’s own

It absolutely is. Biochemical reactions run exponentially faster as temperature increases. In most cooking, the limiting factor on cooking speed is that water (and, thus, any food that contains water) can't be heated beyond 100°C without boiling away, so the food never exceeds that temperature. Pressure cooking breaks that limit by using pressure to raise the boiling point.

Is there a food safe cooking liquid that can heat beyond the boiling point of water?

Oil?

Ha fair enough.

I was just focused on heating being enough and not pressure and the only reason water gets to that point is pressure.

Though I wonder if you can get the same result of a pressure cooker by submerging meat in oil heated to 250 degrees Fahrenheit

See my sibling answer: if you dip meat directly into oil at above 100°C (212°F), you will get something resembling leather, as the high temperature will make any water inside the meat boil and escape as vapor.

What you want is to coat the meat with something that prevents water from escaping: usually a tempura batter.

I'm wondering if any of you have cooked before. You don't allow the meat to reach 212F in any method of cooking. If you do then you get something resembling leather because you way overcooked the meat.

The only parts of the meat that get above 212 are the surfaces in direct contact with the heat source.

I don't recommend letting a piece of meat reaching so high a temperature!

I'm just saying that if you plunge it directly into oil at 180°C, that's what's going to happen.

Nobody does this for "cooking", but you can try to do it, as an experiment.

No, the water inside the meat is still not pressurised, so it limits the temperature to 100 degrees Celsius.

There's even a recipe for a chicken made in lava (actual volcano) and it doesn't go faster than a normal oven.

Yes. Deep frying is done at 170-190° C; but it dries the food because any water inside boils away. Drying can be good (such as in fries) but is usually very undesirable as it hardens meat.

That's why one coats nuggets in batter for example; batter turns into a hull and traps the water, preventing it from escaping the meat; and the cooking is fast and thorough because of the high temperature.

It is not just the heat, it is also the pressure forcing more moisture and liquid into the food: https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/FS446

Consider for example deep fried meat. You can deep fry a steak and achieve even higher temperatures but the the oil will not pervade it nearly as much as the liquids around that same piece of meat in a pressure cooker. Instead the deep fried meat can become tough because the moisture boils and the oil is not forced into to provide a replacement

I heard a quote in an interview once from a michellin star chef:

Paraphrasing from memory:

"One of the best preserved secrets in haute-cuisine is that the best way to perfectly cook a steak/filet mignon is to deepfry it and then sear it in a pan at very high heat."

Haven't tried it, but I buy it. I would think the deepfrying is fast enough to avoid making the meat too dry. And I personally don't really find briney water oozing out of my steak to be all that sexy anyway.

By the way, KFC fries in high-pressure fryers. Not sure I can tell the difference.

https://kfcfryers.com/

> It is not just the heat, it is also the pressure forcing more moisture and liquid into the food: https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/FS446

That is the exact myth which is addressed by the article we're discussing.

Yes, the linked article called it myth based on usage of a 1/2 atmosphere food-saver vacuum. I responded that such pressure was too low, and higher pressure especially combined with heat worked very well, and I linked to UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences as a source to confirm this.

The linked article’s author showed that counter top food savers aren’t effective, but I’d trust the university’s food science department when it comes to the broader use of pressure in general, specifically when used with heat as in a pressure cooker, which uses significantly more pressure.

1 atmosphere is still basically nothing, due to the incompressiblity of meat. The article goes into this. It mentioned that high-pressure machines reach 10,000 atmospheres. That's a lot more that 1.

Rather, what that (comparatively) low pressure of a pressure cooker is doing is raising the temperature at which water will boil. So that means that the meat will become way hotter. Much hotter, in fact, than putting it in a scorching hot oven, because even in a hot oven the inside of the meat can only go above 100⁰C when the water inside boils away.

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