Sous-vide

All the TV chefs love to sous-vide. What is sous-vide? It's an amazingly simple process and the science behind it just makes sense. Actually the science behind it excites me more than the cooking itself, but to keep this post from becoming an essay, I'll just tell you to go look it up on the internet. Heston Blumenthal's shiny, bald head explains super slow cooking, which this is, best.

The problem is how to get this at home without breaking into the chemistry lab at uni and stealing a water bath. Only after reading this amazing article on doing it at home, did I realise how easy it was. All you need is an eski... and hot water.


The towel around the side, and another one on top of the lid, supposedly help keep the heat in a bit more. A thermometer is always good so you know exactly what temperature you're at. Now I've got a bit of a cheap eski and I've found with water starting at 135F, it can go down to 128F after an hour. However most recipes require only a forty five minute cooking tops so it should be fine. You can top up with hot water if you ever need, as long as you don't overshoot the temperature by too much. In my house, the hot water tap can pour out 135F water so that's pretty convenient, but it's good to have a kettle going too.


So it was time to give it a run. As luck would have it, my mum brought home an entire salmon, sadly it was already filleted and everything so I didn't get a chance to test my filleting skills. After pinboning and skinning the fish (because I didn't want to fry and crisp it up after), I brined it for about 10 minutes in 10% solution (in hindsight, it needed a longer brine, up to an hour). Without something to vacuum pack things for me, I did the zip-lock bag technique which worked a treat.


It would have been cooked after about 20 minutes but I left it in there for over 80 just because the rest of the meal wasn't ready yet. As the water temperature never exceeded 135F, there was no worry about overcooking, truly the best thing about sous-vide. The result was a salmon which was uniform in colour, quite firm and easily handled, cooked medium-rare to medium but still very juicy and flaked beautifully. It was amazing to know that it had worked. I also pan fried some other pieces and although I managed to cook them perfectly too, that was down to dumb luck and "yeah that looks about right" thinking rather than precise timing. However a smaller piece was overcooked and this was something which would have been avoided using sous-vide.

So key points about sous-vide:

• Measure the water temperature, know how quickly your eski loses temperature over time
• Cracking open the eski mid-way through cooking causes a lot of heat loss and should be avoided unless you know for certain the temperature needs a top up
• When preparing the meat, do not put butter (or any other fats/oils) into the bag with the meat and aromatics because the fat-soluble flavour molecules go into the butter/oil rather than the meat
• Anything under 120F or 48C is a dangerous temperature to cook at because bacteria only gets killed at 130F/54C and above
• It's easy, don't be afraid to achieve perfectly cooked, stress free meats