Sous Vide

Cooking with Sous Vide.

I was sharing this one so I went to 130F, but it was glorious!

I originally got into sous vide in order to make a medium rare steak with a charred exterior without that line of well done meat surrounding the perfect core.  I had previously tried cooking frozen steaks, searing the outside and finishing in a 200F oven, and just buying really thick-ass steaks.  Sous vide promised a solution.

Cooking with a water bath is a great way to do a few things, but it is not for everything.  Case in point is prime rib.  One of the first things I did SV was a 5 pound boneless prime rib.  I had to cut it in half in order to vacuum seal it with any confidence.  I added a number of herbs to the bags and the flavor permeated the meat.  In addition the long, slow cook meant that the seasoning rub made itself known.  Finishing with a torch was fun.  Overall the meat was perfectly cooked with a minimum of overcooked areas and was consumed with great haste by everyone present.  However, it was way more work than slow roasting in a 250F oven.

Sous vide actually refers to the vacuum packing and I am very glad that I bought a Food Saver brand sealer.  However, the key here is really the water bath.  To that end, one doesn't need to invest in a vacuum sealer.  Just use heavy duty ziplock bags (maybe do a little research on their composition and behavior under mild heating), the displacement sealing method, and keep the temperatures low.

The water bath slowly brings your food (proteins in my case) up to thermal equilibrium with the water. This way you cannot temperature overcook your food.  You could however leave it in the water bath either too long or too short a time.  Let's take these one at a time.

Too long in the bath.  In addition to killing bacteria, the temperature is making chemical changes in the meat.  Collagen is breaking down into gelatin, fat is moving around, etc.  With some cuts and some meats prolonged holding at even medium rare temps (like 48 hours) can render the texture seven kinds of wrong.  At the same time, 48 hours for a brisket may be just enough to tenderize it.

Too short in the bath has another consequence.  Let's take chicken for example.  The dominant wisdom is to cook chicken to 165F in the breast and a little more in the thigh.  The reason is that at 165F salmonella is killed almost instantly.  A 165F breast is mostly dried out.  Salmonella will die at much lower temperatures if the temperature is held for a longer time.  You can cook a chicken breast to 140F if you hold it at 140F for 45 minutes.  Try that with an oven. 

The meat will need to be seared for that exterior crust.  Do this either before or after the water bath. Do both if you are from Seattle and make cooking videos set to music using metric units.

So as long as you do some reading about long term texture destruction and short term bacteria elimination you should feel confident to SV.  I never wanted to cook duck because I had been warned that a duck breast goes from raw to overcooked in the blink of an eye. On the other hand a perfectly cooked duck breast is a wonderful thing.  SV gave me the confidence to do it.  Rack of Lamb too.

Another thing, SV cooked proteins can be frozen and reheated in the SV rig.   This is the one way that reheating something doesn't cook it again.  In fact, many restaurants use SV to quickly serve things that have a huge lead time if created from raw materials.  Is it cheating?  Do I want to wait 3 hours for a fresh cooked slice of prime rib or do I wanna let them cook it earlier in the day and just slice my bit when I order.  Same concept in my mind.  

So if you still wanna dabble in SV here's my advice.  Try it on a small scale and see if you want to continue.  Here are the 4 ways to do SV (ranked in increasing cost);

1. Cooler method. This works well for steaks on a small scale and there are tons of videos on youtube.  Basically you  heat water to 5 degrees above your desired temp, pour it into a small cooler, introduce your zip-locked steaks and  wait for the hour or two that it takes to ensure that you are at temp.  Take out the steaks, pat dry, and finish them in a skillet, BBQ or with a torch.
2. Stove-top method.  Bag your meat.  Bring a pot of water to the correct temperature and plop in your bag.  Now monitor that pot for the next hour or two.  If you are lucky there will be some magic combination of burner setting and lid crackedness that allows you to relax your vigilance.  But if you let the temp get away from you it can ruin the intended effect.
3. External thermostat method.  Get yourself an analog crock pot/rice cooker/electric roaster and an external thermostat.  You'll have to test your rig to make sure that it can hold a variety of temps.  My original crock pot was both too small and too low in power to serve as a SV rig.  Hence the Nesco roaster.  The external 'stat reads the water temperature and turns the electricity on and off to control the process.  This is why you cannot use a fancy digital rice cooker.  When the power cycles on/off to the unit it must pick up where it left off -- full heating, Cap'n.
4. All-in-one method.  This means either the Sous Vide Supreme (or that cheaper slow cooker/SV rig sold in Australia) or an expensive immersion circulator and a collection of plastic tubs. 

Overall, do some reading.  Try some low tech experiments.  Make eggs poached in the shells (an egg is already vacuum packed).  SV is not for everyone or everything, but it has its niche.