Sous-Vide Experiments / Butter and thyme-marinated king oyster mushroom seared "scallops"

Happy Valentine's y'all! My fiancée and I will actually be celebrating a bit later, but I thought I'd share an interesting new dish and technique that I've been trying recently.

Ingredients for vegetarian "scallops": king oyster mushrooms, thyme sprigs, crushed garlic cloves, butter

A popular new technique touted on both ChefSteps and Seriouseats (with accompanying sponsored products, the Joule and Anova, respectively) is sous-vide. This technique involves sealing food in airtight plastic bags and immersing them in immersion circulator-controlled water baths.  When set to a specific temperature, the immersion circulators can rapidly reach and maintain that temperature, accomplished by using a small fan or impeller to constantly mix the water, keeping water flowing past its heating element and keeping temperatures homogeneous throughout the bath.  Key benefits of this technique are:

• You can cook any ingredient, provided you know what internal temperature you want
• Ingredients are cooked extremely uniformly and reproducibly
• As opposed to boiling the ingredient directly in the water bath, sealing in a pouch allows for concentration of added flavors
• Once a desired internal temperature is reached, most ingredients have a large window of error before they become "overcooked" or texture is compromised

My Anova Sous-Vide

What these benefits translate to is that cooking things like thick steaks to precise done-ness is now foolproof.  Accompanying apps provide recommended internal temperatures and rough cook times for a wide array of ingredients.  Cooking virtually any ingredient is as easy as bagging it up, filling a pot with water, starting the sous-vide, and coming back at your leisure.

Butter and thyme-marinated king oyster mushroom seared "scallops"

To illustrate the benefits of this technique, one of the earliest things I tried cooking were king oyster mushrooms, which I have had troubles with in the past.  For these, I placed 5 whole mushrooms in a ziploc bag with ~1.5 tbsp butter (vegan alternatives can be used), along with crushed garlic cloves and whole thyme sprigs.  The air from the bag can be removed using techniques like this.  I then set the Anova to 185 F and let it run for 45 minutes-1 hour.  After that, I removed the mushrooms, cut them on a bias, seasoned the outsides with a pinch of salt, and gave them a quick sear in a hot pan with oil, 3-5 minutes per side.  The finished product looked scallop-like, had an amazing crispy-outside, buttery soft interior texture, and had a deep flavor of butter and thyme flavor throughout.  Be sure to give it a try and let me know of any other neat sous-vide ideas!