Sous Vide Cookery - Doing It Under Pressure and In A Bag.

Anyone growing up in the early sixties should be familiar with the boil-in-a-bag dinner. Before the widespread advent of microwaves, a short-form re-heating method was to drop your entire meal (carefully sealed in plastic) into a pot of boiling water. Of course, vacuum sealing has been recognized as a valid preservation technique from even farther back. But the combination of the two, their subsequent adoption by your higher-end professional kitchen, and the consequent coining of the term molecular gastronomy, has been sliding around the edges of the culinary scene for only two decades or so. These days more casual restaurants, and even some home cooks, are experimenting with what we’re now calling cooking sous vide. Sam Gundy, co-owner of Olliffe, a high-quality meat shop in Toronto, wrote a list of the top 10 carnivorous trends to watch in 2010. Right at the top? Sous Vide.

But will it be more than just a fad? A curriculum advisor from the Culinary Institute of America once told me that culinary schools have to be incredibly careful when choosing new courses; as respected institutions, they really can’t afford to chase a trend that might disappear tomorrow. So I think it speaks of the enduring nature of this particular cooking method that I’d like you to check out The French Culinary Institute’s primer on sous-vide cooking. Great temperature guides, thorough explanations and it’s well written to boot.

Now, unquestionably, as a technique, sous vide cookery has certain problems; it's much more reliable when applied to vegetables than to certain proteins, it creates a unique product but doesn’t necessarily always taste better than more traditional methods, and the professional-grade tools are quite expensive (my favorite is Polyscience). On the other hand, when used appropriately, sous vide can definitely create the sublime. So why not make up your own mind? Follow these instructions for making an immersion circulator out of a beer cooler, stage a competition, and see which technique will have it in the bag.