We’ve seen Top Chefs make judges drool with their perfectly-cooked sous vide short ribs and heard Thomas Keller declare the wonders of sous vide cooking as evidenced in his French Laundry kitchen. But we’ve never really considered sous vide cooking at home. Until one of these machines was sitting on our counter, that is.
What Is Sous Vide Cooking?
At its most basic, sous vide cooking is all about temperature control. You vacuum-seal your food in plastic and submerge it in water. The sous vide machine keeps the water at a very specific and constant temperature, gradually raising the temperature of your food to the desired doneness.
For instance, if you love your steak cooked to a perfect medium-rare, you can seal it in plastic and set the sous vide machine to 130°. The steak will be slowly cooked to exactly 130° and not a degree more. It is, in effect, nearly impossible to over cook. The texture will gradually change over time, but the flavor and internal temperature stays the same.
This kind of cooking can be a little hard to wrap your head around! Safety is an issue, so along with exact temperature control, following time guidelines is important to make sure the food is cooked through before taking it out of the sous vide machine. In many ways, cooking food sous vide is not unlike cooking it in a slow-cooker.
The SousVide Supreme: Features and Performance
The SousVide Supreme is a counter-top water bath with heating coils embedded in the body to keep the water at a constant temperature. It’s about the size of a large bread machine or slow cooker.
The push-button controls are intuitive and easy to use - you set the temperature and let it go! A built-in timer is also very handy, especially for long cooking times. An adjustable rack inside the machine keeps vacuum-sealed foods separated so cooking is even on all sides.
The machine heated the entire water bath, nearly three gallons of water, at a rate of about four degrees Fahrenheit per minute. For our 140° short ribs below, the water went from tap-water warm to full temperature in about 15 minutes. During cooking, the water temperature only fluctuated by a degree. The outside of the machine also stayed surprisingly cool and there was very little water loss due to evaporation.
All in all, the machine was very easy to use and performed its job well.
Food Trials: Short Ribs and Eggs
For our first test, we cooked a batch of short ribs at 140° F for 48 hours. The low-heat and long-cooking help all the collagen in the short ribs melt away, leaving them (hopefully!) tender and rich. We rubbed the ribs in a little seasoning, sealed them up, and tucked them into the machine. Over the 48 hours, our ribs went from raw-pink to deep, rich brown.
The flavor on the finished ribs was incredible. The seasoning we’d rubbed on the outside was completely infused throughout the meat. The texture, on the other hand, was disappointing. We really expected it to knock our socks off, but instead it was just...good. Aside from the great flavor, these short ribs were really no better than oven-braised short ribs we’ve made in the past.
In the second test, we wanted to try soft boiled eggs. Eggs are one thing that come up again and again in discussions about sous vide, usually with the statement “best eggs ever” thrown in there somewhere. We followed Thomas Keller’s instructions in Under Pressure and cooked our eggs in the shell at 144.5°F for an hour.
Cracked over our plate, the soft boiled eggs literally slithered out of the shell. It was a little hard to convince our brains that these soft and runny whites were actually cooked, but once we got over that, the experience was amazing. The whites melted on the tongue while the yolks had the incredible consistency of lemon curd. So good. These really were some of the best eggs ever.
Final Review: Good, Bad, and Decent
While the sous vide machine itself is easy to use, learning how to cook with it takes some time. It’s not really the kind of machine that you can plug in, follow a recipe, and make something incredible the first time. But we can definitely see its potential, and over time, we can see producing some really superb dishes.
The machine takes up a lot of counterspace. In a small kitchen and for some of these recipes that take several days, this can get a little annoying. Filled with water, the machine is also very difficult to move. Unless you have a faucet hose that’s long enough to reach wherever you’ve decided to park your machine, you’re left carrying sloshing pitchers of water to and fro to fill it up.
And call us old-fashioned, but we really missed the smell of food cooking, which is something you get even with a slow-cooker. Without smell, there’s no anticipation, no build-up, no final reveal of a glorious dish. Maybe this is part of why our short ribs felt anti-climatic.
In the end, it was a fun toy to play with for a few weeks, but we felt ok sending it back to the manufacturer when our turn was over. If you’re the type of home cook that gets excited by molecular gastronomy and the kind of high-level cooking going on in top restaurants, then you’ll absolutely love this machine. But if you’re a regular home cook who just likes a good roast in the oven, a sous vide machine can go a little lower on your priority list.
• Buy It! SousVide Supreme, $449 at Sur la Table
Have you ever cooked with a sous vide machine? What do you think?
Related: Product Review: Breville Smart Oven
Apartment Therapy Media makes every effort to test and review products fairly and transparently. The views expressed in this review are the personal views of the reviewer and this particular product review was not sponsored or paid for in any way by the manufacturer or an agent working on their behalf. However, the manufacturer did give us the product for testing and review purposes.
(Images: Emma Christensen)
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I'm convinced it's a great way to cook, but for the average cook, is it worth the price tag?
Yeah, I'll leave it to the restaurants. And after BPA articles you all have been posting, is the plastic that comes with this thing even safe to cook in?
somewhiteguy, no it isn't. I honestly have never gotten the point of sous vide cooking. We sear, grill simmer and all those other fun terms to give extra flavor. The best thing about a good steak is often the delicious sear to it from the pan or grill. When I see fish or meat cooked sous vide, I got to wonder why you'd sacrifice the extra layers of tasty in the name of a perfectly cooked piece of fish/meat.
I would love love love to have one to play with for a few weeks, but right now I just can't justify spending that kind of money without testing it out for myself first. I do love the idea of cooking eggs this way, especially having the ability to hold perfectly cooked eggs to serve as part of a dish for a dinner party.
Right now it's still on the list for things I'd like in my dream kitchen that I don't realistically think I'll ever own (like a wood fired oven, a vitamix, and falk culinaire cookware....).
mmm...a wood fire oven....THAT is something I could justify spending this much on!
jmorri26....you still sear the meat after you cook it in the cooker
You can still get a sear (and the delicious caramelization it provides) it provides by either searing the meat before bagging it or, more commonly, by using a torch when the meat comes out of the cooker.
I've been playing with sous vide in my crock pot at home using this controller ( http://www.auberins.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=13&products_id=44 ) ... which works well enough for play. The controller is small enough that I store it inside the crock pot, so it doesn't take up extra space like this dedicated device might. If you want to experiment and have a crock pot/slow cooker or cheap rice cooker already, the controller approach is cheaper and less space-taxing.
So far I've done brisket (which came out AMAZING though it did take a couple days) and maple glazed carrots & turnips (which took a few hours and were came out perfectly cooked and tasty).
And, for your convenience, a working link for the controller.
did you sear the meat after you cooked it? that will help with the texture and flavor (maillard reaction). i've had the svs for almost a year now and use it at least once a week. in fact i have some short ribs in there right now. it's especially good for cheaper cuts of meat that are harder to cook using conventional methods.
Um, I am not going to pretend to be an expert on this... but I do believe that all that collagen in your short ribs melts away at 200 degrees, not 140. I don't know where I hear this, or what the science behind it is based on, but I believe the 200 degree mark is why normally you aim to cook short ribs at "barely a simmer" for 2 hours. Perhaps you should give them another shot?
lotusmoss, regarding the plastic, the bags are safe and BPA-free.
Yep, I did sear the meat after I cooked it. But like I said, I still didn't really find them all that different than when I braise them in the oven. Definitely delicious, but just not a stand-out for me.
And ditto on the wood-fired oven. Wish list!
http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/04/cook-your-meat-in-a-beer-cooler-the-worlds-best-sous-vide-hack.html?ref=serelated
We have a svs and I love it. Particularly for cheap cuts of meat. I'm able to buy typically tough cuts of meat and after a while in the svs they come out like a filet. I made apples the other day. They were fantastic. Chop them up put them in a bag with some spices and a bit of butter and in the svs they go. Half an hour later I had the best baked apples of my life.
It depends what setup you have and how you use it, I get a lot of value from mine (Auber PID and a rice cooker).
SV is better for fish and poultry (things that will be cooked through at a low temp) or for long cooking (connective tissue). Things that are normally cooked to a gradient (like thick steak) are imho generally less impressive cooked SV.
The storage potential is the other big area of win. Food that has been pasteurized in a plastic bag will stay good for ages.
I brine and cook huge amounts of meat (say 2.5 Kg chicken breast for one person). Because it's pasteurized it can be left in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks and used when required for quick pasta, sandwiches etc while providing a chicken quality you can't get at most restaurants.
It will take time and energy, however if you are prepared to put it in, this is one tool that will give it back in spades.
Emma - no comment whatsoever about the fact that it's ever so slightly disgustingly wasteful for a home cook to use a single-use plastic pouch for every serve with this thing?
@Scott: Do you mean it took a couple of days to actually COOK the brisket? Or a couple of days trying?
Rosie- you can re-use the pouches, if you have one of those vacuum sealer thingees. Or you can use zip bags.
If you're interested in this cooking method but don't want to shell out $450, you can re-create it with a cooler and some hot water. It's not as exact, and requires some fiddling to make sure the water temp stays where you want it to be, but it's interesting to play around with and if you're really industrious you can rig up your own SousVide cooker with a cooler and a heating element.
You can also just do this with a pot of water and a digital thermometer. I started doing this ages ago and while it's not as technically perfect as the machine or the various inserts for a slow cooker or rice cooker, it's cheap and easy and I think the results are just as good.
It's really just a matter of practice and understanding your burners. It can take a bit (especially the first few times you try) to get your water to the exact temp you're looking for, but once you find the balance on your burner, you just set your digital thermometer to beep when it hits a degree or two above your ideal, and then you add some cold water to bring it back down. After doing it a couple times I knew where to keep my burner to the point that once it had stabilized at the temp, it only wavered within a degree once or twice max.
And yes, you still sear the meat after to get caramelization and other flavors. The things this method brings to the table are texture (chicken and tough cuts of meat come out amazing because those are typically things that easily get dry, tough, etc), the ability to take guesswork and effort out of making an awesome cut of meat, and the fact that when prepping for a dinner party, the meat which is often the most important part, can be put literally and figuratively on the back burner and it can sit in the bath for hours while staying perfectly cooked, and you just sear at the end when your guests are there. No fussing, no prodding to determine how well the meat is cooked, no standing over the grill or stove or whatever. And I use ziploc so I can wash and reuse all my bags. It's not a necessity for anyone, but I think it's an interesting way of cooking and anyone can try it out with a pot of water on a stove for free...it doesn't HAVE to be expensive or require a single-use appliance that takes up counter and cabinet space unless you want that element of perfection and true no-fuss.
I don't understand the point of this. It removes all of the sensuality of cooking--which is the entire point of cooking, if you ask me--to cook food in a little plastic baggie? Atrocious!
Maybe this thing would be useful on the starship Enterprise, but keep it away from me.
Very yummy!
Food cooked in a plastic bag....
we just needed that little extra in chemicals in our food....
repressed, I totally agree with you!