Sous Vide Pork rib testing and bags not staying vacuumed?

So Ive done some baby back ribs the past two days to test them out. To start all I did was salt the ribs as if I was seasoning them like normal and bag them in a vacuum chamber. I did 180 for 6 hours each day. Bout half way through each cook I noticed the bag had blown up. Not literally but there was a lot of liquid and some air in the bag. The first day I rebagged thinking maybe a seal had failed and water had gotten. Same thing happened to a smaller extent with the second bagging. Today on the second batch I just left them in the bag and weighed them down. When the bags cool they almost get back to their original vacuum. Is this just a mix of water displacement with the salt and the higher cooking temp? For all I can see my bags are fine, using 4mm Vacmaster bags, no leaks I can find unless they are microscopic or something. I salted the ribs because my rubs don't contain salt and I was just planning on smoking for 2-3 hours just to reheat, get smokiness, and incorporate the rub.

Probably just collagen and other juices in the bag. Is the bath water discolored? If water is not getting out it's likely not getting in either. I've had a couple blowouts and it's not pretty. And it's not ambiguous.

BTW I use very little salt when bagging anything - pretty well accepted that it will draw too much moisture out of product. Read somewhere to use salt equal to 0.5% of product weight.

And 180 is pretty warm for pork in SV. Are you using a time/temp table or recipe? Or freewheeling? I recently did pork shoulder steaks, 4 shoulders at 147F and 4 at 154F, both for 16 hrs. 147 was nicely done, and held together for slicing. 154 was starting to fall apart when sliced.

Bath water was not discolored. Recipe from somewhere on the interwebs but could not find it after the first time. I just remember 180 for 5 or 6 hours and then 3 hours on the smoker. I know it's a little counter intuitive to what the machine really does well but wanted to give it a try and see if I could have ribs in a day. Thinking back to when I did not have an anova, 180 would be a hard temp for me to keep accurately and is still pretty low in the grand scheme of things. If I smoke ribs I will do them for roughly 10 or 12 hours total. Smoking till I get desired color and then finished in the oven for desired tenderness. Thought this would just be kind of be the opposite. Have yet to actually try the ribs, gunna smoke them today and will report back.

No mention of the vacuum machine, how long it vacuumed, negative pressure achieved, etc... Is it possible you did not get enough vacuum pressure prior to the end of the vacuum cycle?

Vp112a, 45 sec vacuum, -28.5 hg, maybe 29 can't remember exactly.

okay, cross that off the list

Try poaching in simmering brine instead.

Pfft conventional methods with conventional equipment!? Hehe I could just braise in the oven at 180 degrees. Thought I would give it a try with the anova and also learning about the limitations of the vacuum machine. One thing is I don't trust the oven I have at 180 degrees and I figured the salt with whatever liquid cooked out of the ribs would be a bit like a brine. Wasn't too worried about over salting since it was such a short cook time. I may have just pulled all of the liquid out of the ribs though and that's why the bags inflated so much. Smoking them now and will find out shortly. Was mainly curious about why the bags inflated so much. Did some googling before asking here and the main thing that came up was bacteria. No fermenting bubbles and just a lovely pork smell so kinda ruled that out.

I've had a lot of issues with the vacmaster precut bags leaking in the past. I stopped using them and switched to cutting my own from the rolls, never had another problem (NOTE-it has been many years since I have used them, so my experience my no longer apply).

I've had issues where if I pulled too high a vacuum for certain boney items in my 115, a bit of bone sort of protruded through the bag and so the vacuum was lost, cured by double bagging ...

Gotcha, they sat out for about 10 or 15 min before they went into the water bath after vacuum, figured that would be long enough to see if any pin pricks happened. Didn't seem like any holes as when they cooled they shrunk back down to a vacuumed state, not quite as hard of a vacuum before the water bath but still some kind of seal. And if anyone is interested the ribs came out fairly dry after smoking. Next time I will stick to a cold brine for a bit instead of raw salt, and a lower temp. Pretty sure the salt just pulled any juices out, thus the bags inflating so much. Didn't think about it at the time but there was no liquid medium for the salt to bring into the meat. Didn't think it would be too big a deal since ribs are generally pretty fatty. Can't learn unless you screw up right? And breakfast taco's are sounding pretty good with some left over rib meat hehe.

I had a rack of St Louis style leftover after a recent BGE thing and wanted to try the "ribs in a day" concept.

I basically used Chef Steps 4 and 4 procedure. Vacmaster the ribs (30 seconds and 5 second seal) then 4 hrs in the 165F bath and 3 hrs maybe in the BGE @ 225F. Was going for 4 hours but.... Used bag juices to add to sauce. Might be the best ribs I've put on the table. (The sweet potato was leftover - tasted much better than it looks)

yum!

For those that have Vacmaster chambers, the default sealer setting of 5 seconds is insufficient. On the 112 the highest setting is 9, I use 8. This might be the reason for bags coming unsealed in the water bath. I've never had one open up on me in the bath.

It may not always be practical, but I wrap all my proteins in shrink before bagging. Especially when storing meat with bones to be frozen. Wrapping also does a better job at preserving the original shape of SV product. I go through about 1000 bags a year of various sizes.

Thanks to Mucho's visit for the ECG, I started sealing at max. duration, which has helped a bit as I am getting a lot less failed seals now. I had been using 7 seconds (using VacMaster bags), and now I'm using 9 seconds.

. I also always use 9 seconds on my 115 on everything, worth the extra 4 seconds