IT’S NOT JUST FOOD IN A BAG
Sous vide is taking kitchens by storm.
If you’ve eaten in a high-end restaurant in recent years, I’m pretty sure parts of your meal were cooked in a plastic bag in a water bath. And we’re not talking Honey Boo Boo Fine Dining. Culinary god Thomas Keller was one of the first chefs to go into high gear with this technique and that means it’s serious. (Keller’s New York restaurant, Per Se, was recently demoted from four to two stars in the New York Times, but his Napa Valley restaurant, The French Laundry, is still a three-Michelin star high achiever.)
Keller has written one of the few cookbooks on sous vide cooking, the gorgeously produced Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide (Artisan). In the early 2000s, he began charting times and temperatures using this cooking method and perfecting it for his restaurants. The main reason, he says in the book, was its precision and being able to cook foods at a low temperature and preserving and even heightening the integrity of the products. Sous vide becomes part of the repertoire of cooking techniques involved in assembling a dish.
“Before sous vide, every time we applied heat to food, we relied on our senses or experience to know when the food had reached the right temperature,” he says in Under Pressure. “That is, to know when to stop the cooking because you almost always cook food at a higher temperature than you want the food to reach. The degree of precision is extraordinary. It takes the guess work out of cooking.”
With conventional methods of cooking a tenderloin, for example, the exterior is cooked beyond well done. “With sous vide, the entire tenderloin is the temperature we want.”
To sous vide means to vacuumpack the food in food-grade plastic and cook it in a water bath at well below simmering temperatures. An immersion circulator moves the water to ensure an even temperature throughout the bath. Not all foods are transformed for the better, like Eliza Doolittle under Henry Higgins — green vegetables, for example, don’t fare well in the sous vide — but it does an amazing job of tenderizing proteins in the most exquisite way and it holds and coaxes out flavours like none other.
Finicky fish, with its small window for doneness, is a perfect candidate. “Salmon,” Keller says, “develops a voluptuous texture.” He’s always loved the magic of braising a tough cut of meat into juicy tenderness. Conventionally, it’s cooked well above the temperature at which muscle fibres contract and squeeze out juices to melt the connective tissues for tenderizing. “Sous vide takes it one step further and cooks it to temperatures below the point at which the muscle doesn’t contract but enough for the connective tissues to melt into gelatin. The result is braised meat of extraordinary tenderness and juiciness,” he says. Often, chefs will throw the meat on the grill to quickly caramelize the exterior.
On average, t he i deal temperature to cook fish is at about 140 F, chicken at 143 F and meats at 160 F. Vegetable plant cells weaken at about 185 to become tender. “Carrots,” Keller says, “become a vivid orange.”
And now, the time has come for home cooks to have a go at it. Sous vide appliances are now available for the home (smaller, cheaper than commercial ones), including a wand that attaches to a big pot; once set, it controls temperature and circulates water so there aren’t hot and cold spots.
I own a portable wand sous vide appliance by Anova. It’s about 16 inches long and at one end, you set the temperature and time; at the other end, there’s an enclosed “propeller” that keeps the water circulating at an even temperature. I’ve cooked salmon, pulled pork and fish recipes using it. (This device can even be controlled remotely via Wi-Fi.)
These days, aspiring chefs should know how to sous vide — Vancouver Community College’s culinary arts program includes it in the curriculum.
When culinary instructor Hamid Salimian first started experimenting about 15 years ago at the Sutton Place Hotel, it was trial and error with temperatures and cooking times, but he quickly started using it for his avant garde cooking. He encourages home cooks to try it too.
At my home, when I started using my Anova (about $200 online), I didn’t want to take up kitchen space with a vacuum sealer. Instead, I put the food in a Ziploc, left just enough room along the ‘zipper’ to insert a straw and suck out the air before zipping it up completely. “You were poaching, not sous voiding,” Salimian informs me. “You need the vacuum and the atmosphere needs to change inside the bag.”
So next, I turned to the Vacuumclicka, a manual sealer with a hand pump, with separate sealing tools. The whole thing is small enough to store in a small Ziploc. No need for a space hogging vacuum sealing machine.
I set the temperature and timer on the Anova wand (140 to 185 F, depending on the food), clamp and immerse it in a stock pot filled with water. The Anova heats the water to the set temperature and I drop the food (in the vacuum bag) into the water. The Anova website has recipes and cooking times for various foods and I use it as a guide. Times vary depending on what you’re trying to achieve but scallops with meyer lemon glaze, for instance, cook for 30 minutes at 122 F; a molasses-glazed pork loin cooks for four hours at 142 F, but if you’re cooking ribs, they can sit in the bath from 12 to 36 hours, depending on the temperature (145 to 165 F) — the long, slow cook allows the connective tissue to turn to gelatin for the tenderest of ribs. A recipe for the perfect soft-boiled egg requires 45 minutes at 145 F as the eggs stop cooking beyond that temperature and don’t go to the hard-boiled stage. They aren’t packed into a vacuum bag in this case and cook directly in the controlled water bath.
When I have the food ready to cook, I cover the stock pot top with heavy gauge aluminum foil and that’s it. “Sous vide is a cost-saving way to cook,” says Salimian. “There’s little shrinkage of meats because the lower temperature breaks down connective tissue and the muscle is relaxed. Traditionally you can lose up to 15 to 20 per cent of a meat product. You can lose up to 200 grams to shrinkage in a kilogram of roast but if you sous vide it properly, you lose two to five per cent. And secondary cuts end up very, very tender.”
He’s cooked a short rib over two days in a sous vide (the temperature never rises above what it is set at). “The meat stays extremely pink and I finish it on a charcoal grill so it’s moist but grilled. You cannot beat that. It maximizes the flavour profile of a product,” he says. “Carrots end up with more flavour and you keep the nutrition in. You’re not leaching out flavour.”
Chefs also use the sous vide for quick marination before cooking — they make pickles in minutes — and they use the vacuum sealer to compress delicate foods before cooking to concentrate flavour and give them a meatier texture.
I’ve often come across compressed watermelon on a plate. “Traditionally you’d marinate cucumbers for 24 hours. With sous vide, it takes two minutes,” says Salimian.
He finds some foods are better cooked in conventional ways. Like squab. “I wouldn’t sous vide it. It’s better roasted and naturally caramelized.”
Ben Kiely, an instructor at the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts agrees sous vide has become an important technique that he teaches his students. “In most high-end restaurants, at least one dish or a component is one sous vide,” he says.
“Progress has been slow — the technique has been around since the 70s, but it will become more popular for home cooking. Foodies have been waiting for something like the Anova style wand. But then it could be just another kitchen gadget left on the top shelf.”
Salimian points out a disadvantage. “If cooks get careless with timing and temperature, they could kill a guest.” They would have to be very careless, though, and leave food sitting for hours in the danger zone temperature (40 F to 140 F) where bacteria can multiply. Cool foods down quickly and set the sous vide to at least 140 F, in other words.
“Use tested recipes. Get yourself a thermometer. Have ice to cool food down. Clean your surfaces,” he cautions. “But I’m super-excited to see people going this route. We’ve got some really talented foodies out there. Honestly, our home cooks in Vancouver are hardcore. They’ll love it. Just read the manual and don’t kill anybody.”