Tim wrote:
Hi,
...
I would argue that "cooked sous-vide in roasted chicken fat" constitutes confiting. Nevertheless, I'm off to purchase and Air-Chilled Chicken but might be a bit low on my seaweed supply. Maybe, central Illinois soy beans would provide that umami.
...
I would argue that "cooked sous-vide in roasted chicken fat" constitutes confiting. Nevertheless, I'm off to purchase and Air-Chilled Chicken but might be a bit low on my seaweed supply. Maybe, central Illinois soy beans would provide that umami.
Indeed, the gap is small. Sous-vide is frequently performed with some fat in the bag, both to add flavor and to enhance fat-soluble flavors. Typically the temperature is too low to render the harder fats, so some other fat seems to help. Some taste experiments have proven to be counter intuitive. For example, one I seen where they used some fat so enhance fat soluble flavors made the food less flavorful; it make the fat (typically discarded) more flavorful
But when you add some fat to the bag, for sure you get pretty close to confit. I make confit exclusively this way now. The difference in confit to sous-vide would typically be the curing pre-cooking (not present in all confit, esp by the modern definition which tends to include veggie confits, etc), and the higher (though still well below boiling) temperature it is cooked at. The biggest difference from traditional confit is the amount of fat; less fat is less (possibly) flavor dilution into the fat. In addition, volatile compounds can't really escape the fat either, which may effect flavor. This may explain why certain things don't do well (eg. raw garlic) but most things taste better.