A bit softer. Not mush, but definitely more easily chewed.

My favorite aspect of all of this is total separation of the raw vs cooked prep.

My kitchen is not large. You can be sure there is bacterial splatter during prep. I scrub and wash constantly as I'm moving around touching yucky stuff.

Before I do anything I do a major cleanup. I don't mean there's dishes in the sink. But I go over the counters and backsplashes and everything I might touch with a hydrogen peroxide scrub.

Then I take out everything I'm working with. Some dishes require working with raw and cooked stuff for simultaneous prep and cooking as you move through a recipe. I hate that. I won't do that anymore.

So anyway, all raw prep is done at once and you can do a large quantity of it to make the effort of the clean pass worth it. And I don't go back and forth washing my hands many times. All yucky stuff is done at once.

Then I spice and package it up. When I say package it up I mean I put the meat in the freezer bags and seal it up. I then actually wash the outside of the bags including the lip area above the seal with hydrogen peroxide. This stuff is clean.

I drop everything in the sous vide machine at that point and do the cleanup. This includes another hydrogen peroxide scrub on the final pass.

Whenever I take a bag out to use it I have no concern about any bacterial presence. I can let it sit and defrost and any condensation liquid is clean.

I cut the bag open and that's not blood anymore. It never was, I know, but that's how I viewed it.

When I pick it up with my hands I'm not terrified of anything getting into a minor cut. I use gloves whenever touching raw stuff but at this point they are not necessary.

When I put it in the pan with tongs I can use the same tongs to take it out of the pan without washing in between. I can use the same fork that I took it out of the bag to eat with. I can use the same knife that I did a fat trim with. Same plate that I used to position the meat before cooking, I can then eat off of.

This is the difference between a large cleanup run 3 times a week versus once every two months while dramatically limiting my daily cleanup during meal work.

My mother was a crazy germaphobe who ended up as a hoarder. My brother is a crazy germ phobe.

I just spent the last 10 years of my life in an environment that I could not control. And that environment turned into a filthy pigsty. The people in that environment had much better immune systems than mine. So they produce an environment which I could not enter into.

Seriously, these people have T cells that wipe out everything without the slightest hint of sickness. And they didn't give a s*** about the flies. I did. So I could not enter into my kitchen for the last 6 months of my life.

So I might be overreacting. But I'm not taking any chances.

I had the sous vide chicken and steak prepped, along with the lovely reduced sauce sides filled with onions and shallots and garlic and mushrooms.

The steak was $7 a pound chuck steak that I had let sit in the sous vide for about 60 hours. It was then frozen and then reheated for about 6 hours sitting in the bath just under cooking temperature but higher than danger temperature. The chicken had been previously sous vide for about 4 hours and frozen and reheated in the same bath. Hot enough to keep basting in the butter and keep it safe but cool enough not to actually cook it.

When they showed up I was able to finish the chicken and steak in under 3 minutes and hand it to them and it was better than anything they ever had in a restaurant.

It would have been the exact same effort to feed 20 people.

And my cooking effort while they were there was almost nothing so I was able to talk.

They said they are picking up one of these machines. It was just too good.