The ins and outs of sous-vide cooking
Tearing into the box containing a shiny, new SousVide Supreme water oven, I felt as charged with anticipation as when I was 10 and found a set of Hot Wheels hidden away as a Christmas surprise.
Both discoveries resulted in some disappointment.
I'd figured that learning how to use a sous-vide machine designed for home use would be entertaining and that the implications for this column were obvious. Picture it: a living room full of guests. Your smart dinner, neatly packaged in individual portions, rests comfortably in a water bath for however long you need it to be there. With the prep done well in advance, all you have to do is snip open pouches and pour contents onto dinner plates.
Well, it doesn't quite work that way.
Educating myself about sous vide also played to a midlife chef's crisis of sorts. It seemed lately that no visit to a with-it restaurant could go by without servers crowing about sous-vide this and sous-vide that. So I started to wonder: Was my cooking becoming … irrelevant?
Sous vide, from the French term meaning under vacuum, is a cooking method whereby foods are vacuum-sealed in plastic bags and then immersed in heated water baths that generally range between 125 and 195 degrees. The water's temperature equals that of the desired final internal temperature of the food item being prepared; a steak cooked to 134 degrees for medium-rare is submerged in a 134-degree water bath.
Because the bag's contents are sealed, they will cook only to the temperature of the water and no higher. The food's texture might change over longer periods of time, but its internal temperature will remain the same.
This form of cooking took off in France in the '80s and '90s but didn't began to gain traction in this country until a little more than 10 years ago, with chef Thomas Keller receiving most of the credit for popularizing the technique at his Napa Valley, Calif., restaurant, The French Laundry.
The basic premise is that conventional cooking methods such as roasting, grilling, pan-frying and boiling assault food with high heat; by the time a medium-rare steak is grilled to 134 degrees in the center, it is overcooked on the outside. Braising is faulted because in the time it takes tough meat to become tender, all its moisture has leached out. Sous vide, with its low temperatures, is a kinder, gentler (and much longer) approach, where food cooks in natural juices that, thanks to its vacuum-sealed packaging, cannot escape or evaporate.
For my experiment, I decided to test two machines marketed for home use: the SousVide Supreme countertop water oven ($450; available at Sur la Table) and the Polyscience Sous Vide Professional Thermal Circulator ($800; at Williams-Sonoma). Both require a vacuum-sealing food storage system ($120 and $200, respectively) and bisphenol-A-free, freezer-safe plastic food storage bags (sold separately; about 50 cents each).
The SousVide Supreme, about the size of a bread machine, is basically a deep, rectangular stainless-steel box that heats water and holds it at specific temperatures. The Polyscience circulator, about the size of a blender, is similar to what restaurant chefs use. It's like a mini-outboard motor that clamps to the side of any pot or bin. It, too, maintains water temperatures, and it also circulates the water.
I tested both machines with pork chops and ribs, rib-eye steaks, chuck roast, brisket, short ribs, cod and salmon fillets, chicken breasts and thighs, various vegetables and eggs. The major difference between the machines is size; the SVS is a lidded unit with an 11.5-liter capacity; the Polyscience can clip onto vessels that hold up to 30 liters of water. When several pouches are cooking at once, there is a greater possibility for uneven cooking to occur in the SVS, especially because the water does not actively move around the pouches as it does with the Polyscience. The Polyscience circulator, though, whirs with a medium-level drone that is particularly annoying.
Both units take up valuable countertop real estate, which is significant given the long cooking times of most food items. Unless the vessel is near a water source, you have to either make several trips to the sink (starting with hot water means it takes less time for the units to come to temp) or heave heavy bins of sloshing water around your kitchen.
One thing became evident during my experimentation: There is not yet a clear consensus even among experts concerning cooking times, which depend more on the thickness of food items than their weight. The user's guides that accompany the units recommend different times and temperatures for the same foods. Expect a lot of trial and error.
Here's a recap of my results: chicken breast (two hours), pork chops (three hours) and rib-eye steak (four hours) were beautifully cooked. The chicken was intensely flavorful, juicy and lightly pink. The steak was medium-rare from edge to edge. The chops were “the best I ever tasted, according to my partner. Chuck roast cooked for 15 hours at 134 degrees had the texture and appearance of a marbled, medium-rare primal cut. But large deposits of fat did not melt away as they do in braising or roasting. Plus, I'm not exactly convinced that I want a pot roast to be medium-rare.
Salmon and cod (10 minutes at 140 degrees) were too mushy and undercooked for my taste, but at closer to 20 minutes they were perfectly flaked and moist.
Short ribs, the darlings of the sous-vide set, were lusciously soft in the middle yet tough on the outside not a happy result after waiting 66 hours to eat them.
Vegetables, most cooked at 185 degrees, yielded mixed results. A ragout of trimmed artichokes, baby carrots, shiitake and button mushrooms and fennel was exquisite, but cauliflower was overcooked and Brussels sprouts brown and mushy.
If my feelings about sous vide were utterly ambivalent at that point, an egg swayed me in a positive direction. I had heard a lot about how eggs cooked in a 147-degree water bath for an hour come out perfectly cooked, with the white just set and the yolk creamy. As I cracked open the first one, out came a perfect specimen, a quivering oval suspended somewhere between coddled and poached.
Instant inspiration.
I placed a chiffonade of spinach in a small bowl (I would add lumps of crabmeat in the future) and placed atop it a nest formed from puffed rice vermicelli noodles. I cracked a 147-degree egg onto the nest and ladled ginger-infused crab broth into the bowl, garnishing with scallions and cilantro.
And so a menu was born, well suited to an upcoming dinner party for food aficionados. Egg-in-a-nest crab soup, followed by sous-vide olive oil-poached salmon with orange glaze and Provencal vegetable ragout. (For dessert, a fruit cocktail cake with cream cheese frosting, toasted pecans and coconut cake that has more to do with superb than sous vide.)
A few things worth noting: A good vacuum-sealer is essential to the success of sous-vide cooking, especially to create a somewhat anaerobic environment. (These are not perfect vacuums.)
There is some controversy over food safety issues with sous-vide cooking because of bacteria that can proliferate at low temperatures and cause food-borne illness. Suffice it to say that precautions must be taken during handling, preparation and storage of foods prepared this way.
If there is a way to test vegetables, or any of these foods for that matter, I haven't figured it out, short of using the fancy, expensive probe that scientists do. If you pierce the bag, the vacuum is breached. I like to taste my food while it's cooking, and to smell it, for that matter, which leads me to a major flaw (or selling point for some) of sous vide: no enticing cooking aromas wafting through the house when guests arrive.
Another issue: The food just does not seem to retain heat enough for my liking, either when served immediately or reheated. (Don't unplug those microwaves just yet.)
All in all, I'm not completely convinced that we're ready to have water baths as standard equipment in home kitchens. But that's what people said about microwave ovens 40 years ago.
I'm sad that, like the Hot Wheels, my new toy didn't live up to expectations, but glad to know that my way of cooking is still relevant. C'est le vide, I guess.