Sous Vide Cooking: The Intro

While we haven’t spoken about sous-vide cooking on this blog before, it has been on my mind for years. If you’ve never heard of it, Sous Vide is a method of cooking sealed food in a temperature controlled water bath, letting it slowly rise up to its desired serving temperature. It is one of the main weapons of the precision cooking movement where instead of asking if you want that steak medium rare or medium, they might ask if you’d like it at 125 or 130 degrees. Furthermore this method allows for cooking that is much more even, such that the food is not only perfectly cooked in the center and well done on the edges but consistent throughout. The last and most important feature of sous vide is that it completely removes the stress/guessing involved in cooking food to desired temperatures.

One of the main reasons that I had never tried using this wonderful method myself was the cost of a new appliance that may only be used rarely. Even the Anova Precision Cooker (which is supposed to be cheaper than competitors) is $179. While I may want it really badly, it seems silly to spend that much money to use a cooking technique I’ve never tried. Luckily, there are some ways to cook sous vide without buying any new equipment. I am familiar with both the Beer Cooler Method and the Stove Top Method, but David has tried the Sink Method. All of these methods require having a decent food thermometer, but that is good to have anyway (See my recommended one in this recipe). Buying a sous vide circulator is really more important if you are being super precise with the temperature (less than a 5 degree swing) and don’t want to be checking the temperature every 15 minutes, but for my sous vide trial period I am perfectly fine with that trade-off.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be using the aforementioned Stove Top Method and blogging about the results. Stay tuned for a delicious journey!