Sous Vide or Not Sous Vide?

Yes, you need to start cooking by sous vide at home.

If you're one of the many who have never heard of this process, don't fret, mon ami. Sous Vide has been primarily a device used in restaurants until just a few years ago. It's relatively simple: you put whatever you want to cook in a vacuum-sealed bag, and pop the bag into a pot of water, that is heated and circulated by a precisely controlled heating element. They run about $125 now, so there is no reason you can't jump on the bandwagon.

I use a Sous Vide cooker/circulator by Anova Culinary.

This is the Anova machine, you can use vacuum bags or high-quality zip-seal bags.

So now you're asking, "why"? Check this out: food cooked by this process will never dry out, and it's hard to overcook food this way as well. For example, when you cook a steak, you cook it from the outside in; that is, the outside will be cooked to a different temperature than the center. That leads to over-cooked or under-cooked meat. Instead, you drop a steak (even a frozen one) in the pot, and set the dial to 170°, and walk away. You would be able to bring the entire steak (a defrosted one) to medium-rare in about an hour. That means the entire steak will be medium-rare, from the outside to the center. Check this out:

The steak on the left was cooked in sous vide, the steak on the right was cooked in the traditional manner.

More good news: You can leave the steak in there for a few hours, and it will never cook to anything more than medium rare. So you can start cooking hours before you need it, and then you just finish it by cooking on a grill or in pan for a few minutes. It's like magic!

Well, not really. If you leave meat or anything in there too long, it will eventually break down and turn to mush. But, it would be medium rare mush :)

Tri Tip cooked in in sous vide, and finished on the grill

I love this thing, I actually burned out my first one because I used it too much! There are endless recipes online on how to use a sous vide, but one of the coolest ways is too poach eggs in it. Because it cooks the entire egg to the same temperature, the yolk and the white will be the same texture (the sous vide cooks in 1/2° increments). By using a chart like this one, you can get your eggs cooked perfectly every time, and you don't have to worry about over cooking them when you're trying to make eggs benedict for a group of people!

This chart is from cookingissues.com

I could go on and on for days about what you can do with this, what I'll probably do is devote a whole section just to this type of cooking.