We all need to know this. This is mostly about meat which is fine, particularly as it prevents heavy water loss which is a problem for most cooking methods.
However, what about vegetables? I ask this because I grew up with boiled vegetables and leaped gladly to steamed vegetables and some form of frying to deliver flavor. Welcome to chinese Wok cookery. It looks like that it may be possible to prepare a large batch of vegetables in this manner to breakdown the fibers without losing a lot of water. Again it is then a simple transition to the fry pan to caramelize up some flavor.
I suspect that this is how restaurants delver superior results themselves. Now we know. By the by, the slow cooker could deliver this result set at 130 degrees F. I do know that a perfect prime rib is at 125 F though you would still want to sear it before or after. ..
Give your meat a break today
No
matter how you chop, slice, or butcher it, meat can be kind of gross.
Blood, flesh, and viscera can kill your appetite, and that’s before you
get to the uncertain process of searing it on a grill or roasting it to a
crisp. Too little and it’s dangerous; too much and it’s disappointing.
Enter sous vide (“under vacuum”)
cooking, a way of injecting scientific precision into the kitchen. Seal
meat or fish (or eggs, or, sure, vegetables) in plastic with aromatics
and a dab of your chosen fat, then simmer in water at a low temp over a
long period of time. You’ll be rewarded with exquisitely tender morsels
whose protein fibers have been gently massaged in their tiny jacuzzi to
perfection.Popularized in the early 21st century as another tool in the kits of liquid nitrogen-wielding molecular gastronomists, immersion circulators were once found mostly in rarefied fine-dining kitchens. But the past few years have seen them move into the home. It’s almost impossible to overcook something sous vide, so if you have to go pick up your kid from soccer, no worries: the pork chops will just bubble along at the same temperature as the water itself. Still, it takes much adjusting for some cooks, and others find it overly clinical. Time to dip in—slowly.
By the digits
129°F (54°C): Temperature to sous vide half a pound of flank steak to medium rare
90 minutes: Time it takes to cook said steak1-2 days: Time it takes for a tough cut of meat, such as beef chuck, to become fork-tender through sous vide.
$180 million: Size of the sous vide market in 2017
$1.3 billion: Projected size of the sous vide market in 2023
$1,220: 2003 price of a Polyscience circulator, lab equipment that early home sous vide fans used
$449: 2009 price of the SousVide Supreme
$199: Price of Anova and Sansaire immersion circulators in late 2013, the “year of the inexpensive water circulator”
Explain it like I’m 5!
How does sous vide work?
Start
with this: Why do we cook? When it comes to meat, it’s largely about
killing bacteria before they kill us. One way of doing that is making
meat very hot—the US government recommends 145°F for steak,
and even higher for chicken and ground beef. Sous vide might seem
freaky since those numbers are seared into home cooks’ minds. But if
you’re willing to wait longer, 130°F—Cooks Illustrated’s recommended minimum temp—will take them out slowly.
Over 140°F,
the shrinkage of muscle fibers starts to push out a lot of water, which
is why overcooked meat tastes dry. Sous vide lets you stay below that
temperature, but still in the sweet spot where bacteria are killed.
Finally, and most importantly to gourmands, cooking at 130°F converts
tough collagen into gentle gelatin, which is why it can redeem a cheap,
tough cut of meat. The obsessives at Cooks Illustrated have a thorough explanation of the process.
The birth of the warm
The promise of sous vide is that it’s convenient and foolproof yet delicious. And it came, almost simultaneously, from large-scale food prep and elite chefs.
Around the same time, Pralus’s fellow countryman Bruno Goussault, the chief food scientist at a cooking agency, was working on the opposite end of the spectrum: using the method to pre-prepare food for massive commercial kitchens. That’s why sous vide was “considered a technique suitable only to chains and factories,” as Amanda Hesser wrote in the New York Times in 2005, just as sous vide was starting to go mainstream. Eventually the twain would meet: Famous chefs rediscovered its qualities, and home cooks its ease.
Breakin’ the law
Cutting-edge chefs have given sous vide a ritzy reputation, but in the 1980s US law only permitted it for processing plants,
which chilled its use stateside while Continental chefs were perfecting
it. American barriers took a long time to fall: In the early 2000s,
restaurants using sous vide techniques were routinely visited by their
local health departments. As a relatively new technology, sous vide was
not covered in municipal health codes or a restaurant’s HACCP plan.
In the absence of regulation, the health department saw violation, and
chefs like Momofuku’s David Chang were slapped with fines and forced to
destroy thousands of dollars of sous vide-prepared meat.
You are what you eat
Our immersion cookers, ourselves
Now that sous vide has hit a saturation point, the food world is starting to figure out what it all means. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
host Samin Nosrat recently noted that the cult of sous vide can be a
wee bit sexist—after food legend Alice Waters got ruthlessly mocked for
slow-cooking an egg over fire in a $250 custom spoon, Nosrat told the New York Times “is it any more practical to sous vide an egg? No. But it’s this amazing thing because a man is doing it.”
More generally, some home cooks object
to the very thing that aficionados embrace: its lab-like sterility.
Cooking sous vide, they say, strips away the sensory pleasure of searing
a steak, of sweating fragrant onions in a skillet of hot butter. The
joy of dipping into a stock pot, adding a pinch of this or that, gives
way to plastic bags of food drifting in plastic tubs.
Quotable
“I
think sous vide in general is a very controlled, precise way to cook.…
[I]t affords the home cook a higher level of accuracy. I look at it like
the new slow-cooker.”
Pop quiz
Which meat is the dodgiest to cook sous vide?
|
If your inbox doesn’t support this quiz, find the solution at bottom of email.
Brief history
1985: Bruno Goussault, chef Joel Robuchon, and food critic Henri Gault team up to create a sous vide menu for French railroad SNCF.
1989:
Food & Wine declares that sous vide—in precooked, heat-and-serve
form from gourmet stores—will be one of the most important food trends
in coming years.1990s: “In America… sous vide still implied factory food,” according to famed chef Thomas Keller.
2005: “Cryovacking” makes Wired magazine’s Jargon List.
2006: WD-50 chef Wylie Dufresne uses an immersion circulator in his Iron Chef America battle against Mario Batali, the first time sous vide was seen on American TV.
2011: Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
is published. The four-volume, 2,438 page cookbook, with a retail price
of $625, offered the first extensive explanation of sous vide and its
culinary applications.
Watch this!
You
don’t need to invest in a set of nice polycarbonate Cambro containers
to sous vide your steak. Use an old beer cooler instead! If you want to
get a little more MacGyver, here’s how to sous vide with a rice cooker and a Seal-A-Meal.
Fun fact!
Recently, sous vide innovators have encouraged cooks to immerse their food in a tub full of not just water but also plastic balls. Such “sous vide balls” help maintain an even water temperature and prevent evaporation. Don’t want to spring for fancy custom balls? Ping pong balls will work just as well.
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