Worlds collide when sous vide meets MEATER™

Worlds collide when sous vide meets MEATER™

Dedicated to The Heart Foundation

Worlds collide when sous vide meets MEATER™

Saturday tea. Sous vide duck breast MEATER™ made chicken thigh cabbage laksa. #yummylummy #foodphotography #lowcarb #noaddedsugar Duck, Chicken, Laksa paste, Cabbage, Spring onion, Red onion, Coriander, Coconut cream, Tomatoes

The Heart Foundation recently updated its nutrition advice. The advice lifts restrictions on eggs and full-fat dairy products. The advice does, however, place further restrictions on red meat (meat from mammals, including horse, beef, pork, lamb, goat, llama, alpaca, rabbit, deer, cat, dog, platypus, echidna, wombat, kangaroo (and other macropods), and koalas to name some mammals which may be eaten in Australia).

If I’m going to reduce the amount of mammalian meat in my diet, I’ll need to increase the amount of poultry and fish as well as consider more meat-free meals.

This also fits into some advice from the international agency which advises health authorities on risks of malignant diseases. Red meat has been classified as a probable carcinogen.

Overall, the Working Group classified consumption of processed meat as “carcinogenic to humans” (Group 1) on the basis of sufficient evidence for colorectal cancer. Additionally, a positive association with the consumption of processed meat was found for stomach cancer.
The Working Group classified consumption of red meat as “probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A). In making this evaluation, the Working Group took into consideration all the relevant data, including the substantial epidemiological data showing a positive association between consumption of red meat and colorectal cancer and the strong mechanistic evidence. Consumption of red meat was also positively associated with pancreatic and with prostate cancer.

[maxbutton id=”12″ url=”#photos” ] [maxbutton id=”11″ url=”#questions” ] [maxbutton id=”14″ ]

I bought all the ingredients from Coles.

Yummy Lummy is not sponsored by anyone.

Recipe

Sous vide duck and MEATER™ made chicken cabbage soup
Prep Time
30 mins
Cook Time
3 hrs
Faffing
30 mins
Total Time
4 hrs
 
Asian influenced Sous vide duck and MEATER™ made chicken cabbage soup. I made this with some laksa paste and coconut cream. No noodles though.
Course: Main Course
Cuisine: Australian, Chinese
Keyword: Chicken thigh, Duck breast, Laksa, Low carb, MEATER, No added sugar, Sous vide
Servings: 1 Hungry Human Macrophage
Calories: 500 kcal
Author: Gary
Ingredients
  • 1 Duck breast
  • 1 Chicken thigh
  • Red cabbage
  • Sugarloaf cabbage
  • Spring onions
  • Coriander
  • Cherry tomatoes
  • Chicken stock
  • Laksa paste
  • Coconut cream
  • Limes
Instructions
Sous vide duck breasts
  1. Remove your duck breasts from the packaging.
  2. Treat your breasts carefully, with gentle handling and touching.
  3. Gently rub some iodised salt and garlic powder into your breasts. Don’t be aggressive with your breasts.
  4. Insert your duck breasts into a vacuum bag and seal it with a vacuum sealer.
  5. Raise the temperature in your water bath to 76 °C (169 °F) and then put your vacuum sealed breasts into the water bath for two hours.
  6. At the end of the two hours, turn off the precision cooker and remove your breasts from the water bath. Dry off the surface of the bags and put them into your refrigerator so you can use them later in this soup and for another meal.
MEATER™ made chicken thigh
  1. Preheat your oven to about 200 °C (392 °F, you know, 400 °F will be close enough, to be honest, if you live in the USA, Myanmar, or Liberia, why not be brave and change to using SI units. You’ll find it’s a lot easier using a base ten system. You can then join the rest of us living in modern democratic societies). I trust anyone reading this from the USA, Liberia, and Myanmar will recognise these words as sarcasm. You know, the lowest form of wit.
  2. Remove your thighs from the packaging. You don’t need to be that gentle with thighs. Thighs are more robust than breasts which you should always handle with a gentle touch.
  3. Put your thighs on a wire rack which sits on a baking dish.
  4. Put some water in the baking dish because you want the water to transform from liquid to gas and in so doing produce not only the invisible gas known as steam but also the visible entity known as water vapour which is commonly misrepresented as steam by people who didn’t listen in primary school science classes (or who were taught by ignorant teachers with little or no science training that you can see steam when you can’t). Anyway, the reason for adding the water is to help prevent your thigh from drying in the oven. You need to keep your thighs supple and moist.
  5. Now, take your MEATER™ wireless meat thermometer and with some firmness penetrate the thigh meat deeply with the hard probe.
  6. Put your thighs into the oven and then open the MEATER™ app and set up the cook. Go for an internal temperature of 76 °C or thereabouts. You can figure out the temperature in the other scale (not Kelvin which I’d be happy to usby reading about how to cook the sous vide breasts in the section above.
  7. Cook your thighs according to the MEATER™ app.
  8. When your thighs are cooked according to the MEATER™ app, it will be perfectly rested and at the right temperature to put into a Tupperware™ container to refrigerate your thighs for use later.
Making the soup
  1. With a sharp cook’s knife, cut your red cabbage and sugarloaf cabbage into 1 centimetre wide strips.
  2. Cut the white part of the spring onions on an angle and put into a small bowl.
  3. Open up the green part of the spring onions, roll the green part up, flatten the rolls, and then make curls by cutting parallel with the length of the long fibres of the spring onions. Put the curls into some ice water to help the curling.
  4. Clean coriander including the roots. Chop the roots and stems and put into a small bowl. Chop the leaves and put into a small bowl.
  5. Halve the cherry tomatoes with a paring knife.
  6. Use your boning knife (I have a Dick™ boning knifto remove the luscious thigh meat from the thigh bones and then using your fingers tease apart of the muscle bundles to get small chunks of juicy thigh meat.
  7. Use your butchers knife (I have a Dick™ butchers knifto slice your breasts across the grain of the meat into thin slices.
  8. In a large hot saucepan toss in the cut red cabbage and sugarloaf cabbage along with a couple of tablespoons of the laksa paste. Stir that around to get the laksa paste to coat the cabbage and to assist the cabbage to absorb the laksa paste flavours.
  9. Add in enough chicken stock so the cabbage can soften as the stock boils and reduces.
  10. When the cabbage is soft and the stock has reduced, add in enough coconut cream so you have the volume you want for soup plus a little more to allow for reduction during simmering and flavour enhancement.
  11. Add in the juice of half a lime while the soup is simmering.
  12. Toss in the breast and thigh meat and stir through.
  13. Cook until the meat is warmed through.
  14. Toss in the halved cherry tomatoes.
  15. Toss in the chopped coriander stems and roots.
  16. Stir everything through.
Plating up bit
  1. Pour the soup into a bowl.
  2. Garnish your soup with the angle cut white bits of the spring onion, the green spring onion curls, some chopped coriander leaves.
  3. Add some fried shallots if you have them too.
  4. Eat with chopsticks and a big spoon.
Blogging bit
  1. Shoot a photograph and a short video because Google now wants video on recipe cards.
  2. Eat the meal.
  3. Wash the dishes (hint, wash as you cook, it makes life easier).
  4. Write the recipe.
  5. Write the blog post.
  6. Hit publish and hope this blog post gets shared on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.

Recipe Video

Recipe Notes

Disclaimer

I have no culinary training nor qualifications. This post is not intended to convey any health or medical advice. If you have any health concerns about anything you read, please contact your registered medical practitioner. The quantities are indicative. Feel free to vary the quantities to suit your taste.

Photographs

This is a gallery of photographs. Click on one image and then scroll through the photographs.

Questions and answers

I thought you preferred legs over breasts? What’s with mixing dark and light meats?

Yes, in general, I prefer legs over breasts. That said, ducks have darker breasts which are juicier, more moist, and more succulent. I’m happy to eat a couple of duck breasts, although if duck thighs were available for sale I’d probably go for ducks thighs too. Ducks have lovely thighs.

Chickens though have awful breasts. There’s nothing attractive about chicken breasts. Chicken thighs are much superior.

I think for this dish I got the best of both worlds in terms of thighs and breasts.

Is this a laksa?

I don’t think so. There’s no œstrogen-laden tofu in this, nor are there any noodles.

I don’t need any extra œstrogen in my system yet. Maybe if my growing prostate turns and malignant cells develop from mutated hypertrophic cells I may consider œstrogen, but to be fair, as someone who used to perform orchidectomies as an intern, I make go with the surgical approach.

Will you really reduce your consumption of mammalian meat? Why did you mention horse meat, cats, dogs, and wombats?

I will try to eat less mammalian meat and eat more fish and poultry. Given the hatred many people have in Canberra towards magpies (not me mind you), it would be interesting to know what magpie meat tastes like.

I’ve eaten horse meat. I’ve not eaten cat or dog, but I know some people do. I’m not sure about wombats and koalas, but I assume they’ve been used as food by someone sometime somewhere.

[maxbutton id=”15″ ][maxbutton id=”16″ ][maxbutton id=”17″ ]

Final thoughts

Do you like laksa flavourings? Have you ever replaced noodles with cabbage? Do you treat your breasts gently?

Sponsorship

Yummy Lummy has no sponsors but maintaining a blog isn’t free. If anyone or any company would like to contribute please contact me.

11 Responses

  1. Yum! I love laksa flavourings. Cabbage is under-rated. Let’s all eat more of it. Breasts treated gently applies across all levels… but a let-down to eat most of the time?!

    1. Thanks, Emma. I really enjoy the lip tingling feeling after eating a meal made with spicy laksa flavourings. Cabbage really is so good at absorbing flavours and a great fibre rich alternative to noodles.

  2. Your food looks delicious, Gary 🙂
    I view cats and dogs as family and I don’t eat family!
    I don’t eat much meat at all and red meat less than bird and fish.
    I prefer the chicken breast and treat it with lots of spices, mixed strong and green.

Hi there, leave a comment if you want.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.