The Royal Chef At Home: Easy Seasonal Entertaining

TECHNIQUE SPOTLIGHT Sous Vide Cooking at Home

C hefs like to say that there are no new recipes, just tweaks to old ones. Well that is not completely true. In fact, we create new recipes when we find new ingredients that were either overlooked or unknown. Consider the tomato in the fifteenth century and the acai berry ten years ago: new ingredients that created entirely new dishes. The same is true for new cooking techniques. Every chef learns early in their training that it is technique, not recipes, which are the cornerstone blocks of cuisine. How to boil properly, sauté properly, braise, grill, fry, steam, smoke, etc… You learn the technique and then you apply that technique across all sorts of ingredients.

One of the most recent technique to be embraced by chefs is sous vide. It’s French for “under vacuum” and it originated in France in the mid-1970’s when two chefs, Georges Pralus and Bruno Goussault, used water baths to cook food. It was Goussault who eventually developed the method on an industrial scale and introduced sous vide as a technique for professional chefs. Now, this idea is only slightly new. Preserving and cooking food in sealed packages is an ancient technique. Food can be cooked and covered in fat (confit), cooked in sealed jars, salted, dried, or, my

favorite, cooked inside an animal bladder— hats off to you, Scotland! People have long known that protecting fresh food from the air can slow down its decay or stop it from drying out. Sous vide cooking is easier than its fancy name might suggest. You simply place the ingredients into a plastic bag, remove the air using a vacuum sealer machine that also seals the bag. Then the bag is placed into a water bath set exactly at a target temperature. When the food reaches your target temperature you remove the bag from the water, take out the

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