Over the last couple of years, I have become very enamoured with cooking by sous vide. As a cooking technique, it is just starting to catch on in home kitchens and rightfully so. I am a strong proponent of technique over gadgets, but this is one device that transcends Gatgetdome and goes straight to essential cooking apparatus.
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.
Anova Precision Cooker
Here are a few pictures of some of the results I have achieved with the sous vide.