The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
These recipes are immersed in flavor
Sous vide circulators are smaller, more affordable for home cooks.
Can 2019 be the year you finally step away from dried-out slowcooker meals and tough, overdone chicken breasts? Yes, if you add a sous vide circulator (also called an immersion circulator) to your cooking arsenal. This long, simple cylinder will store tidily on a pantry shelf, but when you put it to work there’ll be no more excuses for undercooked carrots or overcooked broccoli, or for tough shrimp in that pretty shrimp cocktail.
Sous vide cooking has been around for decades in restaurant kitchens making precision cooking possible on a large scale and rapidly.
Now small, affordable sous vide circulators are available for home cooks. The appliance goes into a container of water, and its heating coil and circulating fan produce a continuously circulating temperaturecontrolled water bath. Whatever you’re cooking goes into an airtight cooking bag and then into the water.
Because the water will never get hotter than the temperature you set, assuming you program the correct cooking temperature it’s simply not possible to overcook your food.
And your food can sit at the perfect temperature for quite some time. Your chicken breast will be done in an hour, but it can sit in that water bath for four hours and not overcook.
Chef Nealey Thompson of The Cook’s Warehouse teaches the shop’s quarterly “Sous Vide 101” cooking classes. In working with her students, she’s found that steaks get people excited about sous vide cooking but once they understand the process, the sky’s the limit. “I love using my sous vide to prepare thick, bone-in pork chops, fried chicken, whole beef tenderloin, and even my Thanksgiving turkey,” she says.
She says many of Atlanta’s best restaurants have been using sous vide for years. “It is only since the invention of the portable immersion circulator that the technology has become accessible to home cooks. As demand has increased, the size of these units has decreased, along with the price!”
And although there are a lot of sous vide accessories available these days, she says a large stock pot and freezer-safe sealable food-storage bags are all you need to get started.