Trip's Sous Vide Rye PrepAs we all know, the forum is littered with prep teks for every type of seed, grain, and everloving nute, possible. Many of these need hours of soaking, waiting for a watched pot to boil, and just way too damn much time and care. The goal of this tek is to keep it mindlessly simple with a set-it-and-forget-it approach. In order to do that we're going to take advantage of the cooking implement sous vide. What is it? I won't go to great lengths to describe here but ultimately it is an immersion unit that has a heating element with a circulator. You can read more
here.

While this tek is built with rye berries in mind, I imagine that it can be modified for any larger grains/seeds like oats or possibly popcorn. I'm using rye because I've got pounds of the stuff sitting around and I need to burn through it before I start playing with anything else. I probably would not try this with WBS as you've got floating sunflower seeds and the millet may be unsettled too easily and wedge in the circulator; that said, I'd love to hear if someone gives it a shot.
The traditional rye tek from RR has 6-24 hours of soaking, followed by 10 minutes of boiling, then drying, and finally loading into jars.
Quote:
RogerRabbit said:
My rye tek:
Measure out your organic rye berries from a health food store, one cup for each quart jar you intend to make. Place them in a large pot. Rinse the heck out of them. Fill the pot with hot tap water, shake and swirl it around and pour it out. Do this three or four times until the water you pour out is clear. You'll be able to see when you have nice clean water to pour off instead of water filled with chaff and dirt.
You want to now cover the rye berries with three times as much hot tap water as you have rye. Use half coffee and half plain water. In other words, if you have two inches of rye in the bottom of your pan, you should have six inches of water/coffee above that, for a total of 8 inches. Add approximately a 1/4 teaspoon of gypsum per cup of rye. Stir these into the water/grain well. For my large kettle with ten cups of rye and two to three gallons of water, or (coffee/water)I add a tablespoon of gypsum and mix in. Cover and leave this to sit for 6-24 hours.
Stir well and set the pot on the stove. Bring to a boil. Boil for ten minutes, then, WHILE BOILING, drain the contents through a very large colander. (spaghetti strainer) If you're making a large batch, you may need more than one colander. Tip the colander side to side to get the rye to drain as much of the water as you can. Then, shake the colander in order to 'toss' the grain. This will cause a lot of steam to rise from your rye. Great. Do this a time or two, then let it sit for five minutes, then repeat. When all the moisture that will drip or evaporate from your rye has already done so, load your jars. The rye should look and feel dry to the touch when you load the jars. All the moisture you need is inside the grain.
Fill jars no more than 2/3 full if they are to receive grain to grain transfers, or no more than 3/4 full if they are to be inoculated by spore syringe or agar wedge. Use a lid with a synthetic filter disk, polyfill, tyvek or similar. Cover with foil and PC the jars for at least 90 minutes at 15lbs. I use 120 minutes. When the jars are cool, they're ready to inoculate.
This is the procedure that's demonstrated on my DVD.
RR
It's a tried and true method - and in fact, it's where I started (thanks RR!) - but we have the technology; we can make him better, faster, stronger! This method skips most of the traditional steps while still meeting the intent: well hydrated, cooked grains, ready for the PC.
Shoutout to SpitballJedi as well as this is where I started experimenting with unmixed gypsum and wet-loading.
The benefit of using a sous vide is many-fold:
- No pre-soak required!
- It is a low and slow method where you will get equal cooking and hydration with a very low likelihood of splitting the grain
- You can walk away and not have to think about it - temperature is taken care of and timing is flexible
- No rinsing the berries before loading
- You load your jars wet and don't have to worry about drying before PC'ing
Ingredients (for 10 jars):
- 3 quarts dry rye berries
- 1-2 Tbs gypsum
- Water
Tools:
Time:
Like many other recipes, the volume for rye is the same: for 10 quarts of finished rye start with three quarts of berries. Throw them into your pot and give them a quick rinse and drain to remove any loose debris from harvesting/packaging. Now, depending on the size of pot you are using you'll have to guauge your water. You'll want the water deep enough that you've got a couple inches between the bottom of your sous vide and the top of the grain, while still meeting the minimum water line on your sous vide. Now just add 1-2 Tbs of gypsum and let it settle over the top of your grain. Set the temp of your sous vide to 150 and the timer to 90 minutes. You're done - you can go blaze and watch a movie.
Initial temperature readout - just know that the timer doesn't start until the water is up to temp:


Sous vide now has the water up to temp - the berries are already starting to hydrate and slowly cook; the color of the water has darkened from the process:


First sample pulled at the point the water was up to temp:

Second sample pulled at 45 minutes:

Third sample pulled at 90 minutes:

Looking good - the endosperm isn't yet 100% hydrated; however, since the grains are going wet into the jars the final round of hydration will take place in the PC.

Copying a couple notes from SpitballJedi as they apply to this method as well.
Quote:
SpitballJedi said:
If you are used to the soak, boil, steam method, you will notice some big differences along the way. You will mostly notice the rye is wet at most of the steps. This is okay because the excess moisture will be absorbed by the grain as it cools.
For this tek, the rye needs to be wet on the outside before it goes in the PC. If it's dry on the outside, it will be too dry later. This is the same principle as the No-cook WBS method and in FooMan's WBS Tek.
The same is not true for the soak and boil method because the soak and boil method puts a lot of moisture in the grain already. This is an important difference.
The final step is to drain the water and load your jars. No cooling, no rinsing, no drying - just scoop 'em in and get ready to PC at 15 PSI for 90 minutes.
Cheers!