Appliance manufacturers have been building a surge of high-tech, high-end gadgets for our kitchens, but a lot of them are pretty useless. Who needs a refrigerator with a built-in tablet computer? Then there is the computer you use for sous vide, a cooking technique beloved by restaurant chefs - and a truly groundbreaking way of making better meals. In this method, you begin by packing food, usually meat, into a plastic bag. Then you place the bag in a water bath whose temperature is precisely controlled by a computerised thermostat. Then you wait.
After an hour, two hours, or in some cases 72 hours, you will have an exquisitely textured cut of meat - a steak with a uniform pinkness from edge to edge, or chicken so tender it tastes like no chicken you have ever experienced. If you have ever wondered how high-end restaurants get every steak right, every time, it is most likely because they cook sous vide.
Until recently sous vide was fairly inaccessible for home cooks. To keep the water bath at a precise temperature, restaurants often used scientific immersion circulators that sold for over $1,000 each. But in 2009, the first home sous vide machine, the Sous Vide Supreme, went on sale for $449. And in the last year, several reasonably priced sous vide machines have hit the market, some selling for less than $200.
Because sous vide began as an expensive restaurant technique, it has been shrouded in a mystique that has obscured a larger truth: The best thing about sous vide is not that it lets you cook restaurant-quality food at home, but that it is probably the easiest cooking technique you can find.
Sous vide needs no special expertise, it has a minimal learning curve, and it is wondrously forgiving of error. In sous vide, there is little risk of overcooking. Because you are cooking at a relatively low temperature, you can keep a steak in a water bath for an hour or two longer than you intended and it will still taste fantastic. This makes sous vide an especially useful technique for busy cooks - people who work long hours and whose schedules are unpredictable.
I've been cooking with sous vide for years, and I've tried most of the home machines on the market. My favourite of the new crop is the Anova Precision Cooker, which I've been using for a couple of months. It is an immersion circulator, which means that you have to stick it in a large vessel of water to get it working. You can use a big pot or bowl or, if you want to get serious about it, you can buy a large polycarbonate box that allows you to cook more food at a time.
One of the myths of sous vide is that you need to seal your food with a vacuum sealer for it to work best. ("Sous vide" means "under vacuum" in French.) Vacuum-sealing has some advantages but lots of daily sous-viders, myself included, find that disposable Ziploc-type freezer bags work just as well. Just make sure to get all the air out of the bag, and you'll be fine.
My favourite thing about sous vide is batch cooking. Because cooking two or more pieces of meat sous vide isn't much more work than cooking enough for one dinner, I often find myself buying extra cuts. Instead of making one chicken breast, why not four? I'll cook them all at the same time. Then my family and I will eat two for dinner, save one for turning into a quick fried chicken later in the week, and another for adding to salad.
Three meals in a single night. Why should restaurants have the coolest stuff?
©2015 The New York Times
