Sous vide bath
Sous vide cookery is not hard or only for the realm of the professional cook. With a little reading everyone can enjoy the benifits of sous vide cookery. Below I have started a page devoted to giving everyone the right tools to begin the sous vide journey with the confidence to succeed.
For recipes please refer to the recipes and blog page
Sous-vide cooking
Sous-vide (pronounced /su??vi?d/),[1] French for “under vacuum”,[1] is a method of cooking that is intended to maintain the integrity of ingredients by heating them for an extended period at relatively low temperatures. Food is cooked for a long time, sometimes well over 24 hours. Unlike cooking in a slow cooker, sous-vide cooking uses airtight plastic bags placed in hot water well below boiling point (usually around 60°C or 140°F).
The method, first described by Sir Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) in 1799, was re-discovered by American and French engineers in the mid-1960s as an industrial food preservation method.[2] The method was adopted by Georges Pralus in 1974 for the Restaurant Troisgros (of Pierre and Michel Troigros) in Roanne, France. He discovered that when foie gras was cooked in this manner it kept its original appearance, did not lose excess amounts of fat and had better texture.[2] Another pioneer in the science of sous-vide is Bruno Goussault, who further researched the effects of temperature on various foods and became well-known for training top chefs in the method. As Chief Scientist of Cuisine Solutions, Goussault thoroughly developed the parameters of cooking times and temperatures for different foods.[2]
The sous-vide method is used in several gourmet restaurants under Heston Blumenthal,[3] Paul Bocuse, Michael Carlson,[4] Thomas Keller, Ferran Adrià, Joël Robuchon, Alessandro Stratta, Charlie Trotter, and other chefs.
Non-professional cooks are also beginning to use sous-vide cooking. Initially, enthusiasts used laboratory-grade immersion circulators, often bought used on eBay and requiring a very careful cleaning to ensure adequate safety. Beginning in 2008, Auber Instruments and Fresh Meals Solutions made available comparatively inexpensive, yet highly accurate PID controllers with an attached thermocouple probe that could be used to control a commercial rice cooker, slow cooker, electric stock pot, or similar apparatus. In late 2009 the first integrated unit intended for home use was released by Sous Vide Supreme and marketed in high-end stores catering to the relatively affluent amateur chef.
Enthusiasts have found that the use of an insulated container for the water (for example, in a beer cooler – a method developed by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt of Serious Eats), ziploc bags with the air sucked out and an accurate thermometer can produce much the same effect for a fraction of the price.[5] They recommend adding additional insulation in the lid of the cooler to reduce the time spent monitoring and adjusting temperature.
Clostridium botulinum bacteria can grow in food in the absence of oxygen and produce the deadly botulinum toxin, so sous-vide cooking must be performed under carefully controlled conditions to avoid botulism poisoning.[6] Douglas Baldwin’s, “A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking”[7], is considered a cornerstone guide to sous-vide safety and technique. In it, he delineates the minimum temperatures and times required to safely process food of various types. Generally speaking, food that is heated and served within four hours is considered safe, while meat that is cooked for a longer period of time to tenderize it must reach a temperature of at least 131F within four hours, and then kept there, in order to pasteurize the meat. Once pasteurized, the botulism bacteria is killed, but the possibility of botulism spores remains a concern, as with any meat that is to be preserved, whether processed sous vide or more conventionally. For that reason, Baldwin’s treatise specifies precise chilling requirements for “cook-chill”, so that the botulism spores do not have the opportunity to grow or propagate.
Some cuts of meat, notably brisket and short ribs, do benefit greatly from very long (48 to 72 hours) sous vide cooking at medium rare temperatures (131F), but chicken and particularly fish require a much shorter time before the enzymes in the meat begin to turn the meat into mush.
Links
A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking by Douglas Baldwin.
Douglas Baldwin provides charts and scientific theory for safe sous vide cookery. This is very well layed out and easy to follow.
The French Culinary Institute
Low-Temperature and Sous-Vide Primer by Dave Arnold and Nils Norén.