I cooked the pork shoulder sous vide for 24 hours at 150F, then diced it, tossed in a char siu sauce and broiled. Not to be outshone, the Brussels sprouts also rose to the occasion:
I am especially pleased to have tentatively solved a technical problem that had plagued me since I started sous vide cooking so many years ago. The juices from the cook bag can be used as the base for a sauce, but because they cooked at a low temperature, the proteins have not yet denatured. When you heat them in a sauce, they tend to cross-link, coagulating into an unappetizing mass that needs to be filtered out. I feel dumb for never realizing this before, but if there is already liquid in the pan and the juices are added slowly, they denature separately and don't cross link to other proteins that have already denatured. The result was a very good sauce which I cooked down to a glaze. I still need to do some further testing and tinkering to make sure this method is robust, but it's exciting.
Here's my porky sauce, happily bubbling away:
By the way, given the COVID situation, it's just unrealistic to have a full stock of herbs available whenever you need them. So I decided, I will just have cilantro all the time. It's quite at home in this dish, but I have also been putting cilantro on a lot of things that normally would not get cilantroed. I'm pretty happy with this situation, personally.
Anyway, gosh, you cannot take a bad picture of that pork.
