Overview of Sous Vide Cooking

I recently started cooking using sous vide. Sous vide means “under vacuum” in French. With this technique, you ‘vacuum’ seal your food in a bag and then cook it in a water bath at a precisely controlled temperature. The bag protects your food from the water bath while transferring the heat. When your food reaches your desired temperature, you remove it from the water bath, sear or broil it, and then serve it. Gourmet restaurants have used this technique for years but it only recently became affordable for the home chef.1

Sous vide is more forgiving than conventional cooking. Although its name emphasizes packaging and vacuum sealing, the essence of sous vide is accurate temperature control. You cook your food at a lower than usual temperature for a longer time. Because the temperature is precisely controlled, the cook time is certain. Therefore, a major advantage of sous vide cooking is consistent results.2

Sous vide causes the connective tissues in food to break down, resulting in food that is much more tender throughout. Because the meat is sealed in a bag, it marinates in its own juices. By contrast, when you pan fry food such as meat, the extreme difference in temperatures between the surface of the pan and the meat mean that you must overcook the outer bands of the meat to ensure the center of the meat is cooked to the target temperature. Thomas Keller calls this the “bulls eye effect”. Conventional cooking’s high heat also gives cooks a much shorter window for a perfect outcome, increasing the opportunity for error.3

Sous vide cooking is less wasteful than conventional cooking, where meat can lose up to 40 percent of its volume. And, it can be more economical because you can use tougher, cheaper cuts of meat, like a flank steak v a filet mignon. You can cook the meat longer without fear of it drying out.4

However, there are limitations to sous vide cooking. Because the water bath never reaches the boiling point, you cannot cook pasta, grains or breads. Similarly, if you want a crust on your meat or poultry, you must sear your or grill food after removing it from the water bath.

Sous vide cooking requires chefs to approach the craft of cooking differently. Chefs need to trust the science of time and temperature rather than their senses. Sous vide requires considerably more cook time. But the precision cooking inherent in sous vide has changed also how chefs define “doneness“. Previously, the temperature range when to stop cooking might be as wide as 10 degrees Centigrade. Now, chefs recognize that even 1 degree Centigrade makes a big difference in both flavor and texture.

Sous Vide Methods

There are two approaches to sous vide cooking at home.

My friend Jerry the engineer, prefers the first approach: he uses a dumb crockpot plugged into a PID temperature controller. The PID controller reduces temperature variations in the water bath in the crock pot. The crockpot must have an analog on/off switch and be set to high. The PID controller then turns the crockpot’s power on or off, keeping the water bath’s temperature within a degree of the target temperature.5

I prefer the second approach: buying a dedicated immersion circulator, which can be used with any pot or heavy duty plastic container. The rest of this article is based on this method.

Necessary Devices

Immersion Circulator

An immersion circulator is an electrical device that consists of a thermometer, heater, and pump. A good immersion circulator will heat water to within one degree of the target temperature. I recommend the Anova Precision Cooker and describe my experiences with it here. Chefsteps and Nomiku make similar immersion circulators for home chefs, though I haven’t used their products.

Pot or Container

Any large pot will work for sous vide if your heat source is an immersion circulator. The advantages of using a immersion circulator over a dedicated water bath are (1) you need less shelf space for storage and (2) you can size the pot to the quantity of food that you wish to cook. I use my All-Clad spaghetti or stock pots. However, some sites recommend a Cambro container because plastic is a better insulator. Nathan Myhrvold even describes using a picnic cooler for large backyard barbecues. If you use a plastic container, just be sure that it can be heated to 100°C.

You shouldn’t put your food in the pot until the water bath has risen to the proper temperature. I suggest starting with hot water from your faucet to speed the time required to preheat your water bath.

It’s in the Bag

You should only purchase polyethylene bags, not polyvinyl chloride (PVC) bags. ZipLoc bags, Saran Wrap, oven bags, and bags made for sous vide should all be safe.

For short periods of cook time, you can use a zip top freezer bag. You don’t need to actually vacuum seal the food in the bag. But you should remove as much air as possible from the bag by immersing it in water and squeezing out the air (the water displacement method). Alternatively, you can use the edge of your table to push air out of your bag.

For longer periods of cook time (e.g. over 12 hours), I strongly recommend vacuum sealing. This removes more oxygen from the bag, resulting in better heat transfer while minimizing food oxidization and discoloring. It also reduces both existing bacterial activity and potential air-borne recontamination. Because vacuum sealing exerts pressure on the food itself, chefs can use it to modify the final form, texture, color, and translucency of the food. You can use a home vacuum machine to seal your food. Certain foods sold at our Wegmans, our local grocery store, are vacuum sealed in an oven ready bag. I drop these entrees directly in the water bath.

Weights and Clamps

Some sources recommend affixing your bag to the pot with binder clips and weighting it down with  golf balls. I found that a plastic C-clamp from my workbench also does a great job. Also, you may wish to cover your pot with aluminum foil to create a temporary lid. This will reduce evaporation of the water in the stockpot.

The Finishing Touches

A blow torch, grill, grill pan or cast iron skillet can be used to quickly sear the outside of your food. This will induce the Maillard reaction, creating a nice crust and adding texture.

Food Safety with Sous Vide

Assume that everything that you put in your plastic bag contains harmful bacteria. Potential bacteria contamination may include salmonella, botulism, E. coli, and listeria. If you aren’t careful, sous vide cooking temperatures are ideal for the growth of these bacteria. Thomas Keller’s guidance is mandatory for food safety:

Food to be cooked sous vide must be cold when it’s sealed and then either cooked immediately or stored in the refrigerator until ready to cook. After food is cooked sous vide, it must either be served immediately or quickly and thoroughly chilled in an ice bath within 4 hours of entering danger-zone temperatures, then held very cold.

You always should ensure that the bag is fully immersed in the water. And, if you are cooking your food for many hours, you should check the water level every few hours for evaporation. My WiFi-enabled Anova automatically sends me notifications on my iPhone when the water falls too low.

If you need to refrigerate food cooked sous vide, then you should place it in a water bath at or below 0°C. A good ratio for your water bath is 1 part salt, 4 parts water, 8 parts ice.6

Sous Vide Recipes

For some great sous vide test recipes, I recommend reading:

• Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine At Home (chapter on Steak)
• Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine (vols 2 and 3)
• Lisa Fetterman’s Sous Vide At Home
• Anova Culinary’s recipes
• ChefSteps
• Eattender
• Serious Eat’s recipes
• Reddit sous vide forum
• Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide
• Lifehacker’s Will It Sous Vide series

For a sous vide recommended cook time chart, Chef Steps has a great quick reference, here.

Please read Part II, Anova Sous Vide Precision Cooker with WiFi Review, here.

Updated on January 21st, 2018