Sous vide cooking was pioneered in the 1970’s in San Francisco. It is a fairly simple concept – vacuum pack the item being cooked in a waterproof bag and place it in a container of water that is set to the temperature that the finished product is desired to be. The Immersion Cooker circulates the water and maintains a constant temperature to provide perfect results every time. There is a particularly good chance that at some point you have had food done by sous vide, they are fairly common in restaurant kitchens around the world.
When cooking a meat such as steak, you select the temperature you want the meat to finish at, and then leave it be. I vacuum pack the steak (usually after a trip thru the smoker) with a pat of butter and a bit of thyme and cook it at 128.5 degrees for 1-2 hours. The result is a perfectly rare / medium rare steak from edge to edge, and after a quick sear on the grill or cast iron skillet to it is a thing of perfection.
The other great advantage of sous vide is your window for the meat being perfectly done is up to an hour or more… not 2-3 min before it is past the point desired. It takes much of the stress out of cooking meats when entertaining, the meat will be ready for 1-2 min a side on the grill, with no ‘rest’ required when the rest of the meal is done. It works excellent for proteins, as well as eggs, custard, cheesecake… anything where a precise control of temperature and gentle cooking will be of benefit.
A vacuum bagger is a nice accompaniment, but perfectly adequate results can be achieved with Zip Lock Freezer bags in most cases. The immersion circulator work in any pot or container, I have a cooler bucket that I use for smaller cooks, and a regular travel cooler for bigger cooks. I cannot impress upon you my intrepid reader on how much I believe in this cooking technique. I have turned a few friends on to it as well, and they are equally enthralled.
There are now several different brands on the market, I prefer the Anova brand, particularly the wifi model which is a bit higher power than its smaller sibling. They seem to go on sale with some regularity, and the discounts can be rather good. I will put a link below for the version that has replaced the model I have.
Here are a few pictures of some of the results I have achieved with the sous vide.
