Bringing Sous Vide to the Home Cook
NOV. 19, 2014
If there’s a cooking trend, chances are, there’s a product for the home cook. The technology columnists Molly Wood and Farhad Manjoo review their favorite new kitchen gadgets.
Farhad Manjoo
Appliance manufacturers have lately 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, or an oven that can be turned off from afar? My guess is you’d be fine skipping many of these doodads.
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 computerized 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 just as prices come down for gadgets each year, the cost of sous vide technology began to change. In 2009, the first home sous vide machine, the Sous Vide Supreme, went on sale for $449. And in the last year, a number of more reasonably priced sous vide machines have hit the market, some selling for less than $200.
Manufacturers say prices may come down even further, too, which means that sous vide is poised to go mainstream. That’s great news. 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. The best thing is that in many cases, it is just about the easiest cooking technique you can find.
The rise of sous vide — along with some of the latest programmable, precisely controlled electric pressure cookers, or app-connected kitchen scales that guide you as you prepare a recipe — suggests the ways that technology might truly transform how people cook.
Sous vide demands 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.
“Sous vide is one of those things that can totally help people who want to cook,” said Michelle Tam, the food writer who runs the blog Nom Nom Paleo and who was an early adherent of sous vide cooking. “It’s an initial investment, but it can save you a lot in terms of time and money and sanity.”
I’ve been cooking with sous vide for years, and I’ve tried most of the home machines on the market. My favorite of the new crop is the Anova Precision Cooker, which I’ve been using for a couple of months. I’ve prepared dozens of meals with it, from meats to vegetables to even homemade yogurt. Of the nearly half-dozen sous vide machines I’ve tried over the years, there are a few reasons I like the Precision Cooker best.
First, at $179, it’s one of the cheapest sous vide machines available. Second, it has a drop-dead-simple interface; anybody can figure out how to use it. And third, it has an unusual capability that promises important innovations down the line — a wireless connection to a smartphone that will allow people to control the device and share recipes with one another. The app, which will be released in December, should make it easy for people who are new to sous vide to get up to speed.
The Precision Cooker 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, which 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 — cooked food can be stored in the freezer for months if it is vacuum sealed — 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.
Both vacuum bags and freezer bags are free of bisphenol A, or BPA, but if you still don’t like the idea of cooking in plastic, you can also use reusable silicone bags for sous vide.
Finally, you need some recipes. The first-time sous vide cook can find himself at sea. You open the box, set up the device, and then what? If you consult Google or YouTube, you will find a flood of information and how-tos. Most of what you need to remember involves the temperature of the water bath, and how long, at a minimum, the food must be kept in it before it is cooked.
Anova’s smartphone app add-on helps with this. Need to know how to make the perfect chicken thighs? Just consult the app, and press Start.
My favorite 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?
