The Everything Guide to Cooking Sous Vide (2 page)

Introduction

Even though sous vide has been used in restaurants for years, it was not until recently that this fairly new culinary technique started to pop up in home kitchens around the world. Sous vide will open the door to a whole new way for you to cook food and make delicious dishes by placing food in a food-safe bag, sealing it, and cooking it in a water bath.

In this book, you’ll find all the information you need about how to cook sous vide. You’ll need to get some kitchen tools, such as a sous vide machine, vacuum sealer, and other accessories—this book will walk you through all the different types of products available. Sous vide follows some basic steps almost every time, and this book will clearly map them out, step by step, so that you can make the most of your sous vide machine.

You’ll also find more than 130 mouthwatering recipes, all using the sous vide method. While there are some other cooking tools used in these recipes, including the stovetop, oven, deep fryer and more, the heart of all these recipes is sous vide. The recipes are broken down both by meal type, like breakfast, dessert, soup, or appetizer, and by food type, like beef, pork, seafood, or vegetables. Be sure to check out the sidebars found throughout the book for special information, answers to commonly asked questions, or ways to make modifications to a recipe.

The instructions, temperatures, and times in this cookbook are meant to be a reference and resource for you as you enter into the world of cooking sous vide. Since sous vide is all about precision, there are many factors that can impact the sous vide cooking process. Details like the thickness and shape of the meat, the quality and freshness of the meat used, the temperature of the meat being dropped into the water, and the temperature and size of the sous vide water bath, are just a few factors that contribute to the cooking process. These specifics, and more, will impact how long the cooking will take and when the food is safe to eat. With that in mind, not every recipe, temperature, or time guideline will work with every situation. Along with this cookbook, please use resources like the your sous vide machine manual, FDA, USDA, your local public health cooking guidelines, and your own common sense when cooking sous vide.

Please use this book as a launching point for sous vide cooking. Feel free to change up the recipes once you’ve mastered them—switch up the spices, sauces, or other ingredients. Experiment with the recipes in this book and make your own creations. Cooking should be fun!

Chapter 1

Understanding This New Culinary Trend

Innovation is something that people generally love. Whether it is a new feature in a smartphone, gel in the soles of shoes, or some new way to play a video game, development of new ideas and technology is always popular. The kitchen is not immune to innovation—quite the contrary in fact. There always seems to be some new gadget, appliance, or tool developed to make cooking easier. Recently, a new culinary trend has been gaining steam in the home kitchen. Sous vide, which has been used in restaurants and commercial kitchens since the 1970s, has started to see significant growth in the home kitchen market. With the development of sous vide kitchen appliances specifically designed for the home cook, this new way to cook is really growing in popularity.

What Is Sous Vide?

The term
sous vide
is French and the direct translation is “under vacuum.” This method cooks food that has been placed in a food-safe bag and vacuum sealed. Once the food is sealed in the bag and all the air removed, it is then placed in a temperature-controlled water bath. Since water is a much better conductor of energy than air, the water that surrounds the bag, and comes right up against the food, heats all that is in the bag in an efficient and effective way. Once the bag has been in the water for the allotted time, the food is removed from the bag and often ready to be served. It is that easy.

Sous
and
vide
are both French words, with
sous
meaning “under” and
vide
meaning “vacuum.” Together these words describe the technique that is used in sous vide cooking, where meat or other food is vacuum sealed in a food-safe bag, dropped in a hot-water bath, and then cooked.

How Does It Work?

The basic premise of most cooking, whether using an oven, stovetop, or grill, is that the heat is generally much higher than the target internal temperature of the meat. Consider cooking a steak on the grill. The grill is fired up and the lid is closed to get that grill very hot. Usually grills get up to 500°F+, which is an extremely high heat and great for getting that nice sear on a steak. The steak goes on the grill, and due to the high temperature, it will not take long to cook the steak. For a rare steak you will need to cook it until the internal temperature is about 130°F. Since the grill is way hotter than that, you must watch the steak and time when to remove the meat from the grill. Leaving it on the grill too long will overcook the meat. If the meat stayed on the grill it would eventually reach the actual temperature of the grill itself and develop a texture something like leather. Sous vide, however, uses a completely different approach.

Can I cook sous vide by heating water on the stove?

Not really, because sous vide machines are built to maintain a consistent temperature with very little variance. The stovetop elements regularly go on and off to keep adding heat to the pot. This will create too much swing in the temperature to effectively cook sous vide.

When the vacuum-sealed meat is dropped into a sous vide water bath, the temperature of the water is the same as the target temperature of the meat. Therefore, if you want a juicy medium-rare strip loin steak, the temperature of the water will be around 134°F. Sous vide machines are precise and control the temperature very well, holding it at 134°F for the entire cooking time. While the meat will obviously take longer to come to the target internal temperature of 134°F, since the heat around it is much lower than that of the grill, once it reaches the target temperature, it will not overcook. While it sounds crazy, this is completely true. A steak can be completely cooked and reach 134°F in 1 hour, but it can stay in the water bath for many more hours and not overcook. Instead, it will be held at that medium-rare doneness the entire time. When ready, simply pull the bag from the water bath and remove the steak from the bag. If desired, give it a very quick sear on a hot skillet and it is ready to eat.

Sous vide is great for cooking more than just steak. It can cook a chicken breast so that it is tender and juicy with no fear of it drying out. This is an excellent way to cook a wonderful fillet of salmon or make pulled pork so that it is moist and fall-apart tender. Sous vide is also a great way to cook vegetables and so much more. This method is simple, convenient, and almost foolproof.

Isn’t This Just a Fancy Way to Boil in a Bag?

At first glance, many people look at
sous vide
and think that it is essentially just a new term for “boil in a bag” cooking. Most commonly seen with rice, “boil in the bag” cooking has found a niche with some people, and you can easily find a box of Uncle Ben’s Boil-in-Bag Rice on most major supermarket shelves. In fact, campers have long used freezer bags and vacuum sealer bags to quickly and easily reheat meals while out in the wilderness. It is quite convenient.

Is sous vide cooking the same as this? There are some similarities between these two techniques; for example, they both vacuum seal food in a bag and cook it in hot water, but that is where the similarities end. Sous vide cooking is all about precision and consistency of temperature. Sous vide cooking uses the understanding that by cooking meat (and other foods) at the exact desired finished internal temperature, there will be significant benefits in both taste and texture. While the main purpose of “boil in a bag” is convenience, the main reason most people use sous vide is because of the incredible improvement in taste. At the same time, sous vide does also make life in the kitchen easier and there are some serious bonus advantages to using this method.

Uncovering the History of Sous Vide

There are two chefs who played a significant role in the early stages of sous vide cooking. These pioneers each contributed to the development of this new and refined way of cooking. Vacuum sealing food had been used for decades, but these chefs took this knowledge and practice to the next culinary level.

In the early 1970s, Chef Bruno Goussault was seeking a way to cook tougher cuts of beef. He discovered that if beef was vacuum sealed and then cooked in a water bath, set at a lower cooking temperature, it resulted in a finished product that had an enhanced taste and texture. On top of that, Chef Goussault also discovered that there is reduced shrinkage when beef is cooked this way.

Around the same time Chef Georges Pralus, at the request of the restaurant Troisgros in France, was seeking to cook foie gras in such a way that it would retain its shape and texture as well as maximize its flavor. Chef Pralus discovered that if the foie gras is wrapped in multiple layers of plastic wrap and then cooked in a water bath it has an improved taste and texture.

From these early pioneers, sous vide quickly became a common cooking method in restaurants and commercial kitchens. Over time, others like Chef Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, England, and Chef Thomas Keller of the French Laundry in the Napa Valley of California, further raised the profile of sous vide cooking. Books like
Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide
, by Thomas Keller, and
Modernist Cuisine: The Art of Science and Cooking
, by Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet, were published, which provided lots of information and recipes regarding sous vide.

Eventually, foodies began to try and use the sous vide cooking technique at home. Since the machines available were primarily for commercial kitchens, the prices tended to be out of reach for most home cooks. Getting creative, some do-it-yourself instructions began to pop up on the Internet, showing ways for home cooks to modify rice cookers or slow cookers into sous vide machines using PID (proportional-integral-derivative) controllers. While complicated, it was a way for culinary enthusiasts to take a crack at sous vide cooking.

In recent years, companies like PolyScience and SousVide Supreme have made sous vide cooking appliances specifically targeted for home kitchens. These are smaller in size and lower in cost than the commercial models. After that, other companies began to release other sous vide machines. Some of these companies, like Nomiku, Anova, and Sansaire, used Kickstarter to successfully crowdfund their project. These products made sous vide realistic and affordable for the home cook.

Today, while sous vide is still considered a new culinary trend, it does have a solid history and is really establishing itself in home kitchens all over the world. Many people regard sous vide as the best way to cook tender meat like steaks, chicken breasts, salmon, and more. In addition, sous vide has revolutionized the process of cooking tougher cuts of meat so that they are tender and succulent.

The Benefits of Cooking Sous Vide

In any home kitchen, there are multiple ways to cook meat or vegetables. They can be roasted in the oven or cooked on the stovetop using methods like pan-searing, boiling, or steaming. Along with these methods, there are microwaves, deep fryers, grills, and smokers. With so many different cooking processes, it is understandable that you might look at sous vide with apprehension and a feeling of “do I really need another appliance?”

To fully understand sous vide, it is important to grasp the benefits that come with using this cooking process. While many different types of food can be cooked sous vide including vegetables, fruit, dessert, and even eggs, the most popular thing to cook in a sous vide water bath is meat. Sous vide just shines when it comes to cooking meat.