Books
Sous Vide for the Home Cook. Is It Worth It?
Sous-Vide Made Simple: 60 Everyday Recipes for Perfectly Cooked Meals by Lisa Q. Fetterman, 185 pages, Ten Speed Press, hardcover, $30 (2018).
Sous Vide for Everybody: The Easy, Foolproof Cooking Technique That’s Sweeping the World by America’s Test Kitchen, 220 pages, America’s Test Kitchen, paperback, $26.99 (2018).
Modernist Cooking Made Easy: Sous Vide: The Authoritative Guide to Low Temperature Precision Cooking by Jason Logsdon, 269 pages, Primolicious, e-book, $9.95 (2014).
When I first learned of sous-vide cooking, in which food is cooked in a water bath held at a precise temperature, it was restricted to high-end restaurants with expensive machines or used by adventuresome home cooks who added dribs of hot water to an insulated cooler over the course of many hours. A dozen years on, it’s easy to buy sous-vide devices that connect to your smartphone; a co-worker of mine has four.
But while the method has become more accessible, cookbook titles such as Sous-Vide Made Simple and Sous Vide for Everybody suggest that it’s still a daunting topic. Books about braising, for example, don’t have titles designed to soothe an anxious cook. But it’s worth asking not just whether sous-vide can be made easier but whether it’s worth doing at all.
The science is straightforward. Proteins and other molecules in food change chemically at specific temperatures. Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking notes, for example, that egg white “begins to thicken at 145°F/63°C and becomes a tender solid at 150°F/65°C.” Egg yolks, on the other hand, start thickening at 150 degrees F. Poach an egg at, say, 145.4 degrees F for one hour, as recommended by Sous-Vide Made Simple, and you will get thick whites and a perfectly runny yolk. Adjust upward a couple of degrees and you firm up the whites while staying clear of a set yolk. Perfect for topping a simple French salad or eggs Benedict. A custard base for vanilla ice cream is cooked to 185 degrees F, which is fiddly if not onerous on a stovetop, easy in a water bath.
Sous-vide cooking uses food in airless envelopes immersed in water because water conducts heat better than air ― compare reaching bare hands into a 350 degree F (175 degree C) oven to doing the same with a pot of water boiling at 212 degrees F (100 degrees C). When you cook eggs, the technique is fairly simple and readily scales up to accommodate many eggs at once. Other foods require advance preparation as well as post-cooking steps, and here is where sous-vide might make you raise your eyebrows.
Take a steak. A medium-rare ribeye, according to Modernist Cooking Made Easy: Sous Vide, which emphasizes technique more than the other books mentioned here, will take two to eight hours at 131 degrees F (55 degrees C) before you serve it topped with herb butter as the author suggests. But first you have to remove as much air from its package as possible. Then the cooking begins. Once the steak is cooked, you have to sear it on a scorching pan to add the well-browned crust we expect.
And what about cooking that steak rare, as many people, including me, prefer? It’s doable, but every sous-vide cookbook has a section on food safety that will strike fear into your heart: Food kept below 130 degrees F for long periods is a playground for toxic bacteria.
So to cook our perfect medium-rare piece of steak, we need to season it, seal it up in plastic, get the large amount of water up to temperature, cook it for hours, then remove it from the bag, and finally sear it.Why not just throw your steak on a grill? Or, going back to eggs, why not soft-boil them with a six-and-a-half-minute swim in boiling water?
Sous Vide for Everybody, a book of diverse, well-tested recipes from the staff of America’s Test Kitchen, offers more history than the other two and suggests a few answers.
First is consistency, which is echoed in every sous-vide cookbook I’ve seen. Steak cooked sous-vide to 131 degrees F will always come out the same way; steak cooked on a stove or grill is subject to many more variables.
Second is flexibility. Many foods can be kept at their target temperature for an hour or more, making it easier to plan dinners. I can have dinner ready to go for my wife regardless of when our daughter finally falls asleep.
Third is the ability to keep fat inside food rather than have it emerge as an oily stream. The Test Kitchen cooks credit high-end chef Georges Pralus with first keeping fat in foie gras by cooking it in plastic. The same principle applies to sausage and other fatty meats; sausage cooked sous-vide at 132 degrees F and then seared is juicier, if less richly brown, than its stovetop counterpart, which loses fat to the pan. You can reduce the fat of your homemade sausage to compensate if that’s an option, but not the sausage you buy.
Finally, and perhaps surprisingly, the book argues for its convenience.
That is the main thrust of Sous-Vide Made Simple, which emphasizes using sous-vide on the weekend to precook food that can be finished on weeknights. Instead of searing the steak right away, you drop it in an ice bath and then reheat and sear later. This, says Fetterman, makes dinner more convenient and less wasteful — cooked fish can be ready to go and kept for a week, while fresh fish goes south after a few days. I used this technique while evaluating her cookbook, and it’s effective. I made her cauliflower steaks on a Sunday; reheating them and dressing with a Kalamata-olive yogurt sauce took just 20 minutes a few nights later. But given how long sous-vide can take to cook food, and how different the temperatures can be for different foods, her idea presumes either a willingness to eat the same type of food throughout the week, a lot of available time on the weekends, or a number of sous-vide devices. (Fetterman founded a company that makes a sous-vide device; she may very well own several.)
But after reading all these books and experimenting, I’m still not sure I would recommend that everyone pick up a sous-vide device. I’ve been using mine once a week or so, generally for sausages I buy at our farmers’ market. Mostly, however, I cook other types of food that don’t benefit from sous-vide. Sous-Vide Made Simple offers guides to translating other recipes into sous-vide dishes, and Modernist Cuisine at Home has an extensive set of tables you can use for cooking food outside the recipes. But a pot of aromatic beans, a thick risotto, or a rich sauce built from pan drippings isn’t going to be done sous-vide, and nor are many other delicious dishes. While all the books here include vegetarian recipes, almost always cooking the vegetables at 185 degrees F (85 degrees C) for an hour, the focus of the books and the technique is on meat and its greater sensitivity to temperature changes. In the end, these books don’t fully convince that the occasional sous-vide dish is worth the extra effort. ●
