If you think you have tried every new gadget and cooking technique for making your life easier, from the Insta-Pot to a Vita Mix to air-fryers, there is another tool and technique that you should try—because it is not new at all. It is a time-tested restaurant technique that has been adapted for home cooks. Most important, it makes delicious food with very little effort.
Sous vide (which means “under vacuum” in French because of the way food is prepared) is a cooking technique that used to require expensive professional equipment and is the secret to many restaurant recipes. An immersion bath that cooks and holds sealed food at a low temperature so it can then be finished off quickly per order is a professional secret most people have never encountered.
The home version trades the large bath-heater-circulator tank for a wand the size of a paper towel tube with the water circulator-heater on the bottom and the controls on top. You attach the wand with a clamp to any large pot or plastic bin filled with water. I have even made multiple rib roasts in a single plastic storage container.
Food doesn’t cook in the water. The heated water cooks what’s sealed in plastic through thermal transfer and never touches the food. A vacuum sealer like those made by Foodsaver sucks air out of the bag of food and then seals it to maximize transfer.
There are three advantages to this technique. First, food can be prepped, seasoned, and sealed tightly—then cooked later. It can even be frozen, and the vacuum-sealing makes the food inside virtually immune from freezer-burn and extends its shelf life. Then, the package can be taken directly from the freezer and put right into the immersion bath to cook.
The second advantage is control. If you cook food only to the desired end temperature, you can never overcook it. While it does take longer to cook (there are even recipes for short ribs that take 72 hours); prolonged cooking at low temperatures has a delicious effect on the quality of the food. It often makes it silkier, more tender, or brings out subtle flavors. Third, the cooked food will keep for long periods of time at the finished temperature without degrading in quality.
Delicate foods like fish or foods that often dry out when roasted are well-suited for a sous vide bath. Chicken can be a revelation. Chicken breasts are reliably tender and juicy, and thighs can reach a sublime level of moistness and flavor without being braised. And there is nothing fidgety about the cooking. Since it is low and slow and sealed, you can continue cooking for another hour, and usually, it’s no problem at all.
The drawback in all of this is what sous vide can’t do—it won’t sear, crust, brown or otherwise perform the Maillard reaction. Many recipes need to be finished in a hot pan or under a broiler. Still, some foods benefit greatly from the control and low temperature of sous vide—and they are not what you might expect.
Steaks and roasts benefit from sous vide because you only cook it at the finished temperature—if you like medium-rare you set it for 130°F and cook it for anywhere from 60 minutes to 4 hours and it is always going to be perfectly medium-rare. When you are ready to eat, you cut it out of the bag, pat it dry, season it with salt and pepper, and quickly sear it in a hot pan or over a grill. That last step is for finishing the meat; not cooking it. The meat has a rosy pink interior from edge-to-edge and a tasty crust.
Those rib roasts cooked for 5 hours at 130°F and they all came out superb. I cooked two 10-pound rib roasts by cutting them in half and sealing them in 4 packages of 5 pounds each. There was one that wasn’t opened so we just stuck it in the freezer. Six months later we had another party (remember them?) and thawed the roast in the sous vide at 120°F for three hours. It tasted as good as the ones that were served at the original party.
Another perennial finicky meat is duck breast. The delicious skin needs to be seared to render the copious amount of fat and can become over browned or soggy, and the meat is often chewy. Adding sous vide to the cooking process solves both problems. First, hatch-mark the skin and render over medium heat until the skin is lightly browned. Then, seal the breasts and cook in the sous vide bath for up to two hours at 128°F. (See the recipe for Sous Vide Duck Breast.) It ends up with crispy skin on a tender, medium-rare breast that cuts into perfect medallions. Plus, you can use the rendered duck fat from the searing to toss into roasted new potatoes.
The duck is placed in the immersion bath and the stick is circulating the water and heating it up to the desired temperature.
Imagine never overcooking a steak again or cooking the perfect piece of fried chicken. Sous vide changes the way you think about prepping, storing, and cooking foods you make every day. Its value isn’t in creating some fantastical new cuisine; it is in the way it improves the consistency, convenience, and quality of the food you love.
