Sold On Sous Vide

Darn Close To Foolproof

I've often said that my home kitchen is ridiculously over-equipped. I've got stuff at home a lot of restaurants don't have. But I am definitely not a “gadget guru.” I'm not prone to the useless geegaws you see on TV commercials. You won't find a stick butter cutter or a banana slicer or a twirling spaghetti fork taking up valuable space in my kitchen. For one thing, even if I wanted such things, my wife wouldn't let me have them. You know how some guys tell their wives if they want a new pair of shoes, they have to get rid of an old pair? That's kind of the way my wife is with me in the kitchen.

So my wife was rather dubious when I told her I wanted an immersion circulator. I had been hearing wonderful things about the sous vide method of cooking for a long time, but the necessary equipment was prohibitively expensive. However, in the last couple of years the prices have come down to the point where you can buy such stuff at Walmart. As a matter of fact, that's where I got mine.

“Wait a minute,” I hear you say. “Immersion which? Sous what? What language are you speaking? French?” Actually, yes. “Sous vide” is French for “under vacuum,” and a vacuum sealer one of the pieces of equipment it's handy to have in order to cook something sous vide. The other more essential piece of hardware is an immersion circulator. And whereas once such arcane and esoteric things were only available at specialty suppliers at costs approaching the ridiculous, nowadays you can buy them, as I said, at places like Walmart for a couple hundred bucks or less, thus moving a fancy French technique once reserved for expensive high-end kitchens into the home kitchen for an affordable price.

In a nutshell, “sous vide” refers to the process of vacuum-sealing food and cooking it in a temperature controlled water bath. Or a bain-marie, if you want to be painfully French about the whole thing. This allows food to be cooked to a very precise temperature while retaining maximum moisture and flavor and with almost no chance of over or under cooking. And no shrinkage either: if you start out with a 10 ounce steak, you'll wind up with a 10 ounce steak.

There are three characteristics of sous vide cooking: containerized cooking that separates the food from its heating environment, pressurized enclosure using full or partial vacuum, and low temperature slow cooking. Each of these techniques developed separately at different points in time. They were all brought together as a distinct cooking method by a combination of engineers and chefs in the late 1960s and early '70s.

Now, you need to understand that this is a low and slow method of cooking. If you've only got ten minutes to bust out a steak for dinner, forget sous vide and break out the old frying pan. A sous vide steak is going to take at least an hour. BUT, that said, it's going to be a perfect steak when it's done. The way the fancy restaurants work around this time issue is that they cook up a bunch of steaks via sous vide in advance and stick them in a refrigerator. Then when an order comes in, they take out a pre-cooked steak, slap the steak in a hot pan, sear it off for a couple of minutes, and viola!, they can deliver a perfect steak in no time. And you can do that at home, too.

And it's not just for steak. So far, besides steaks, I've sous vide cooked ribs, chicken breasts, potatoes, and asparagus. And they all turned out perfectly with no more effort than it took me to prep them. And cleanup was a breeze: I emptied the water out of the pot and threw away the plastic bags.

Here's how it works. You take a big pot, something tall like a stock pot, and you attached the immersion circulator to the side of the pot. My circulator has a big clamp for that purpose. Then you fill the pot with water to the appropriate level. There's a “MIN” and “MAX” line etched on mine. Using hot or warm tap water will speed up the process because the machine will take less time to bring the water to temperature.

Next, you bring your vacuum sealer out. Prep and season whatever you're cooking and place it in a bag you can seal up with the sealer. You can buy premade bags or make them yourself from specially designed rolls of plastic material. You can even bypass the vacuum sealer altogether and use heavy-duty zip-top plastic bags. Since you're never going to heat anything to anywhere close to the boiling point, regular heavy-duty bags will work. Just make sure you get all the air out of them. There are a couple of ways to do this: you can leave a small opening at one corner, stick a straw in there, and suck out the air. Or you can use the water immersion method wherein you slowly submerge the bag in water until the outside water pressure forces all the inside air up and out the top of the bag. Either way works – but a vacuum sealer works better.

Once you've got your food seasoned and sealed, immerse the bag in the pot to which you have attached the circulator and turn the device on, setting the time and temperature required for whatever you're cooking. It's a good idea to secure the bag to the side of the pot so it doesn't go floating around as the water circulates. I use a binder clip. I've heard clothespins work, too. Or a small clamp. Anything that holds the bag in place. The circulator will heat the water until it reaches the desired temperature. Then the circulating motor will kick in and start moving the water. The combination of the heat and the circulation will cook your food in the preset time. Like I said, a steak takes about an hour at 135 degrees Farenheit and asparagus cooks in about twelve minutes at 175 degrees.

You simply cannot under or overcook your food because the machine keeps the water at a precise temperature for a precise length of time. You couldn't “burn” something if you tried. The temperature of the food cannot exceed the temperature of the water in which it's being cooked. And because it's vacuum sealed, there's no loss of moisture, flavor, color, texture, or aroma.

When the process is complete, you just take the bag out of the water, open the bag, remove the cooked contents, and do whatever you need to do to finish the dish. In the case of a steak, that might include tossing the steak in a hot pan for a couple of minutes to give it a nice sear. I have one of those “George Foreman” type electric grill things and it did a perfect job finishing the last steak I cooked sous vide, right down to giving it beautiful grill marks in about a minute. And no smoky kitchen full of dirty pans afterward. I emptied the water out of the stock pot and wiped down the grill surface and I was done. And there was a tender, moist, flavorful mid-rare steak with a gorgeous crust and grill marks sitting there on a plate looking delicious.

In case you couldn't tell, I'm sold on sous vide. I've always thought it was a great if somewhat expensive concept in theory, but now that it's economical enough to be practical......well, I may just go out and buy another one of the things.

There's an old aphorism that says “anything said to be 'foolproof' fails to account for the ingenuity of fools.” And I have found this to be generally true. Somebody could probably screw up a sous vide if they tried hard enough. But so far I haven't been ingenious – or foolish – enough to figure out how.

Vacuum sealers are everywhere these days and you can get a good one for a hundred dollars or less. However, even though they've become vastly more affordable, immersion circulators aren't falling out of trees. You'll have to hunt for one. Mine came from Walmart, but my local store had them on clearance. Largely because, I suspect, the average Walmart shopper didn't know what the hell the thing was and hence they didn't sell many. You can still get one at Walmart.com. Target has them, too. And you can find them at higher end stores like Williams-Sonoma, but expect to pay higher end prices: the same unit I bought at Wallyworld for sixty bucks sells for $160 at Williams-Sonoma. Bed, Bath & Beyond has one similar to mine for a hundred dollars. And, of course, there's always Amazon.

Have I piqued your interest? I hope so. Sous vide is a really great idea for both professional and home cooks. So go out and acquire the equipment and start cooking. Who knows? Your significant other may be so impressed by your new gadget that she or he will even let you keep your banana slicer or your twirling spaghetti fork.