Sous Vide Makes Its Way To The Home Kitchen

hide captionA salmon fillet cooked sous vide, with miso-ginger glaze, gets a crisp finish under a broiler or torch flame.

A salmon fillet cooked sous vide, with miso-ginger glaze, gets a crisp finish under a broiler or torch flame.

Sous vide. Not that long ago, it sounded so exotic or, at least, so French. It was a phrase that belonged in restaurants, amid white tablecloths and flower arrangements and hushed conversations. Alternatively, it was a word that belonged to the modernist kitchens just beyond the swinging doors kitchens filled with gleaming dehydrators and transglutaminase "meat glues" and spherification siphons and more.

I first heard it in the kitchen of now-famous Wylie Dufresne's first restaurant, 71 Clinton Fresh Food, where I was a clueless intern in the spring of 2000. There in New York City's still-scruffy Lower East Side, early hipsters with interesting facial hair waited the tables, while in back we fashioned fish crusts out of edamame. It was a forward-thinking place, yet no one even there imagined that the mysterious vacuum-and-water-bath technique chefs were whispering about would be part of many home cooks' arsenal in just 15 years.

What is sous vide anyway? Briefly, it's cooking "under vacuum" i.e., in a vacuum-sealed bag at a specific temperature. Usually, that means in a temperature-controlled water bath. Why would you want to do this? Because careful temperature control results in a kind of protein sorcery. You can get perfectly cooked delicate fish because it can't dry out or overflake. You can coax meats into meltingly soft braises because the protein never gets hot enough for the fibers to turn to string. You can get eggs that are never rubbery. You can melt the layers in pork belly without liquefying them in the process. You can even keep chocolate from losing its glossy temper when melted.

The exactness of the temperature allows you to be loosey-goosey with the time. No matter how long you hold a water bath at 155 degrees, it will never boil and toughen your chicken tenders. And you cannot accidentally toughen a filet mignon if it's just sitting there, relaxing, at 145 degrees. All in all, sous vide is a strange mix of the precise and the forgiving. It's the forgiving part that makes it a natural for home cooking.

But it's the precise part that scares people. At the dawn of home sous vide a mere five or six years ago you could buy an industrial thermal circulator to submerge in your water bath. It cost, oh, a mere $1,000. Then came the Sous Vide Supreme, an all-in-one unit that cut the cost in half. Or you could rig your own, using a rice cooker or slow cooker, a thermocouple and a temperature controller. There are wiring diagrams on the Web, and in books such as Jeff Potter's Cooking for Geeks.

Last December, having the urge but not the funds to sous vide, I brought one such diagram to my technically proficient spouse, with a pleading expression. He cocked an eyebrow and went back to shopping on Amazon. On Christmas Day, I found a Dorkfood Sous Vide Temperature Controller under the tree. All you had to do was plug it into your slow cooker, and it only cost $100. (Yes, you could buy a set of at least three cast iron skillets for that, but none of them will hold a water bath within 1 degree Fahrenheit ... forever.)

And the fact is, you don't even need to do that much. I have friends who cook steaks sous vide in foam beer coolers, keeping track of the temperature with an oven thermometer probe and adding some hot water from time to time. You don't even need a vacuum sealer you can make do with heavy-duty Ziploc bags, as long as you've displaced the water out. (You do that by slowly lowering the bag into your water bath, so the pressure of the water squeezes the air out, and then you seal it the usual way).

There is, of course, the question of food safety. Maybe you've heard the stories about city health department officials forcing chefs to pour bleach on their sous vide meats. It's a story that always makes me want to cry, but for years public health has relied on a firm food safety rule: dangerous germs live at between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Even the pink interior of a medium-rare burger falls above this range, and most cooking techniques take place around or well above the boiling point of water (212 degrees F).

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Sous Vide Makes Its Way To The Home Kitchen