Today marks the start of a short mini-series featuring recent adventures with Sous Vide and learning to cook in this style at home. While many here may be familiar with the term, we thought it would be a good idea for a short introduction to this technique.
Sous Vide was pioneered in France in the 1970s. It was based on the centuries old technique of water-bath cooking. Many airlines used water baths to keep their in-flight meals warm (something many opponents of the technique will remind us of). The technique picked up steam in the last 5-10 years as some of the worlds finest chefs started to adopt recipes and ingredients with Sous Vide. It is now a semi-normal tool that is seen on Food Network competitions such as Iron Chef, Top Chef and others…
The principles of Sous Vide are fairly common. Generally speaking, the cook places chosen ingredients in a vacuum-sealed pouch and places that in a precisely heated water bath for a long period of time. The name is French for UNDER PRESSURE but it could have been called slow-slow-cooking.
The water baths have to control temperature within 1 degree fahrenheit to control the results. A traditional water bath (used to make Sous Vide) could easily run a kitchen close to $2,000.
Now that we’ve discussed the HOW, let us turn to the why…
A traditional roast is a difficult thing to cook. We choose an ideal serving temperature and attempt to raise a log of meat to that temperature. For the sake of argument, imagine that we are trying to cook it to 120 degrees. It is popped into a hotter oven and warmed until the center its that temperature. The exposed exterior reaches a higher temperature than desired and we risk over cooking the roast. The accelerated cooking process also does some odd things on a molecular level that change the structure of the roast such as a dark and crunchy exterior (in this example the molecular change is often desired).
With Sous Vide we start by determining our end temperature of our ingredients and heat the water to that temperature. We then place our food, often in vacuum-sealed bags into a water bath at that temperature and bring the contents of this parcel up to a uniform temperature which we want. We can never overcook the end product (it can not get any hotter than the water and the water is set to our goal temperature) and our molecules do not become transformed in the same way (more about that later this week when we post about eggs).
The result is a different way to cook which is very precise and interprets ingredients in totally new ways. It is possible to cook proteins, veggies and just about anything with the right equipment, patience and experience.
We had a few weeks to try a demo unit of a new Sous Vide appliance for the home chef in early January named the Sous Vide Supreme. We used the unit several times and will share the adventure over the next 4 posts…
Wonder if you also try out sousvidemagic by FreshmealsSolutions which is a PID temperature controller costing one third of the price of Sous Vide Supreme and doing basically the same job.
I have been cooking Sous Vide now for around 1 year and I dldn’t need to spend $2000 to get all the equipment I needed.
If you use a PID controller like a Sous Vide Magic from Fresh Meals Solutions (Costs around $160) and a dumb rice cooker (which you probably already own or can purchase for <$100) you can easily control temperatures within 1 degree C.
Zip Lock bags can be successfully used but most people use a Foodsaver (or similar) which can be purchased for <$100. You would need one of these with the Sous Vide Supreme as well.
There are a lot of comments on the net about the high cost of entry to sous vide, but they are just not true.
Anyhow keep up the interesting posts.
Cheers,
Peter.
Look forward to read your comment about Sous Vide Supreme. I have a SousVideMagic, but considering getting SVS in the near future. It looks really nice and sleek.
Cool, found what i was looking for.