Cooking is incredible when the outcome is impressive and irresistible. You love cooking, trying new recipes and techniques; it’s exciting. The truth is sometimes various things can go wrong in the kitchen; a significant proportion of them is caused by overcooking.
What if there were a cooking technique that guaranteed you would never overcook your meals even without worrying about timing. Regardless of whether you forget about it and let it cook excessively long, it would, in any case, be impeccably cooked.
Sounds untrue? But it isn’t. It’s called sous vide cooking. The truth is, you’ve never cooked sous vide before, a unique kind of cooking that you most likely haven’t done before. What is sous vide cooking? Where do you start? How should you start?
What is sous vide?
Sous vide (pronounced sue-veed), which means “under vacuum,” is a cooking technique that utilizes a precisely temperature-controlled water bath to deliver consistent, high-quality results. Although used by high-end restaurants, sous vide is a technique that has become famous for home cooks with the accessibility of excellent and straightforward-to-utilize sous vide accuracy cooking equipment.
Sous vide cooking offers excellent control over whatever you want to cook, whether it’s vegetables, large cuts of meat, shrimps, steaks, pork shoulders, and lobsters. It is important to note that in cooking food like steaks and chicken breasts, sous vide eliminates all the guesswork involved in traditional methods. There is no cutting and peeking, no jabbing with your fingers, no poking with thermometers – just perfect results every single time.
Undoubtedly, sous vide is remarkable and allows you to get results and textures that are impossible to achieve using traditional cooking methods. Sous vide cooking is a lot more straightforward than you may think and include three basic steps:
- Connect an accuracy cooker to a pot of water, put down the point in time and temperature as per your ideal degree of doneness.
- Put your food in an airtight bag and clasp it to the side of the pot.
- Wrap up via barbecuing or searing the food to add a fresh, brilliant outside layer.
What you need for sous vide cooking
There isn’t any special gear needed to start sous vide cooking. You can design your preferred recipe with appropriate cooking time. But some equipment is essential if you want to make your cooking easier and seamless. They are:
An Immersion Circulator: A circulator is the heart of the system. You insert it into a tub or pot of water. It draws water from the tub, heats it to a precise temperature, then spits it back out, simultaneously heating and circulating the water. A durable one will have single-degree precision and accuracy.
Sous Vide Machine: To achieve success using this cooking technique, you’re going to need a device to regulate the temperature precisely. The sous vide machine is the best option for you. There are several brands to choose from, but the Anova Precision Cooker and Chefsteps Joule are the top brands that give you the best results. The difference between these two products is that with Anova, you can control the device manually and with a mobile device, while with the Joule, you can only control the device using your mobile device.
A Sealable bag or zip-top freezer bag: A sealable bag is preferable since it prevents evaporation and allows for the most efficient transfer of energy from the water to the food. It is recommended that you buy heavy-duty, BPA-free bags, like Ziplock’s freezer bags.
Can you sear after cooking?
Although this cooking technique is safe, reduces stress, and is cool, it will never produce a brown crust outside your meat, nor will it make your chicken crispy.
The solution is to sear after cooking. You wouldn’t want to miss this step because while your steak might be perfectly cooked on the inside, there is nothing incredible about a limp, grey-colored steak or chicken. Therefore, sear it for a couple of minutes on each side in a hot skillet before serving.
As long as the skillet is super-hot, it would help if you didn’t worry about the extra cooking time raising the temperature of the interior. Remember, you can set your immersion circulator to 125 or 130° F instead of 135° F if you’re concerned about maintaining medium-rare.
Chicken breast or thigh that you want crispy may need a slightly higher temperature. While chicken breast may need to be cooked at 155°F in an immersion cooker, chicken thigh requires 175 F. Ultimately, keep in mind that foods with different target temperatures can’t be cooked together when planning your meal.
Benefits of Sous Vide cooking
Sous vide cooking uses precise temperature control with dissemination to deliver results that you can’t accomplish through other cooking methods. The reason – with traditional cooking methods, you don’t have control over heat and temperature. It isn’t easy and time-consuming to consistently cook great meals. Sadly, food ends up overcooked outwardly, with just a tiny part in the middle cooked to the temperature you need. The food loses flavor, overcooks easily, and ends up with a dry, chewy texture.
With precise temperature control in the kitchen, this cooking method provides the following benefits:
Consistency – You can expect very consistent results because you cook your food to a precise temperature for an exact amount of time.
Taste – Food prepared in its juices, guarantees dampness, deliciousness, and delicacy.
Reduce Waste – Traditionally prepared food dries out and results in waste. For instance, traditionally cooked steak loses up to 40% of its volume due to drying out but steak cooked via precision cooking loses none.
Flexibility – Traditional cooking requires your constant attention. Precision cooking carries food to a precise temperature and holds it. There is no stress over overcooking.
