NEW YORK, Oct 12 — Increasingly affordable and easy to do, sous-vide immersion cooking has become trendy among food nerds who want precise control over the doneness of their meats.
Sous vide, which means “under vacuum” in French, involves sealing food in an airtight bag and giving it a hot-water bath. A cylindrical gadget gently circulates and heats the water to a precise, consistent temperature, allowing the food to reach the exact temperature the cook desires without the risk of overcooking. Its advocates say the method is the key to attaining a piece of meat that is uniformly tender and juicy inside.
But gosh, it can take forever.
Enthusiasts who sing the praises of sous vide often try to indoctrinate home cooks with the holy grail of recipes: The perfect rib-eye steak. Set the device to heat up the water to around 129 degrees, immerse the bagged steak in the water and, like magic, you have a steak that is perfectly medium-rare all the way through, not just in the centre. Give it a sear to brown the crust, and it’s close to something you would get at a steakhouse.
Glossed over in that sales pitch is the part where sous vide takes at least an hour to cook the steak, or up to 10 times longer than it would using conventional methods, like a stove or grill.
Herein lies the problem. Yes, cooking sous vide is more affordable than ever, with water-circulating devices ranging from US$100 to US$300 (RM419 to RM1,256), but the technique may feel impractical and inaccessible to the average home cook, particularly one with a demanding schedule. The plethora of sous-vide recipes published online are largely aimed at perfectionist cooks who have time on their hands.
But what if sous vide actually made life easier for the home cook, even on weeknights?
J. Kenji López-Alt, the managing culinary director of the website Serious Eats and the author of The Food Lab, a cookbook about the science of cooking, said that the sous-vide machine could leave the realm of specialty cooking and enter the world of convenience if people just planned ahead weekly or monthly.
“Most people, when they think about dinner, say, ‘What can I get at the grocery store now and get going tonight?'” he said. “It requires a lot more forethought.”
It also requires bigger thinking — as in bigger than a single steak.
To fit sous vide into his schedule, Grant Crilly, a founder of ChefSteps, a recipe website and technology company in Seattle that is devoted to the cooking method, turns to two economical cuts of meat, the pork shoulder or beef chuck roast, which cost roughly US$4 to US$10 a pound at a grocery store and are far less expensive than buying a comparable number of steaks.
Crilly, a chef who was part of the team that produced Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine cookbook, cooks the meat sous vide for 24 hours, and then divides it into 8-ounce steaks. Each steak gets sealed in a plastic sandwich bag and moved to the freezer, creating a protein stockpile that can be easily transformed into delectable meals. When Crilly is ready to cook, he transfers the meat straight from the freezer into heated water and waits about 75 minutes for it to thaw. It’s kind of like gourmet astronaut food.
From there, it’s up to the home cook’s imagination how to use the beef or pork. There’s the obvious, like a juicy boneless pork chop or beef steak: Add seasoning and give it a sear on the stove. Instant ramen can be upgraded into a chashu pork ramen. For taco night, grab the tortillas, slice the meat and fry it with some salt, pepper and onion.
Pork shoulder and beef chuck are very tough cuts that are typically slow-cooked until they collapse into fork-tenderness: think pulled pork or pot roast. But cooking them sous vide does something special. The muscles in the shoulders are among the most actively used, which means the cut contains more collagen and flavour than the more tender options in the butcher case. A long sous-vide bath breaks down the collagens while keeping the texture of the meat intact.
The softened collagens act like a lubricant in your mouth. The result is a beef or pork steak that tastes even juicier and more flavourful than a rib-eye or pork chop — as tender as you can imagine, but not falling apart until it hits your tongue, Crilly said.
“Cook it slow, unlock all that really beautiful flavour, and you’ve got a really nice piece of meat,” he said.
And starting dinner prep with a versatile piece of meat that’s already cooked through, tender and flavourful is a boon to any home cook.
“You end up with this instant upgrade to any dish,” Crilly said. He added that one night, when he and his wife returned exhausted from a long day of work, he reheated a frozen pork chop using sous vide, diced the meat into cubes and quickly stir-fried it with vegetables for a satisfying dinner.
The caveat is that 24 hours to cook a large slab of meat is a long time. Also, thawing frozen meat in a sous-vide bath, as Crilly does, takes at least an hour.
But to him, the trade-off is worth it. One day of prep work yields a few months’ worth of protein that can be quickly paired with items already in his refrigerator or pantry. The actual cooking is unattended and extraordinarily forgiving. It’s all but impossible to overcook meat sous vide, because the water bath stays at the temperature that you want the food to reach. And during that hour it takes a frozen steak to thaw, Crilly bakes potatoes or throws together a salad.
With some forethought, you can even save yourself a little time before dinner. In the morning, you could heat a pot of water with the sous-vide machine, throw in a frozen beef or pork steak and let it cook all day. By the time you get home, the meat is ready to be seared and devoured.
Or you could do as López-Alt does. In the morning, he moves some of the raw salmon or halibut pieces he keeps in the freezer to the refrigerator to let them thaw throughout the day. When his wife gets home from work, he turns on his sous-vide device and throws the fish in the pot for 30 minutes to cook it.
“It probably takes you about the same amount of effort to turn on the sous-vide device and put the food in there as it does to place a delivery order with your phone,” he said.
Sous-vide Pork or Beef Roast
Time: 24 hours, plus 1 hour for reheating frozen steaks
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
1 (4- to 5-pound) boneless pork shoulder or beef chuck roast
2 rounded tablespoons kosher salt
2 sprigs rosemary
1/4 cup vegetable or olive oil
1. Rub 2 rounded tablespoons kosher salt all over a 3- to 5-pound beef chuck roast or boneless pork shoulder. Truss the meat by tying twine around its width in 1-inch intervals.
2. If desired, pre-sear the beef or pork shoulder for more flavour: In a Dutch oven, heat 1/4 cup vegetable oil on medium-high heat until slightly smoking, then sear the meat for about two minutes each side until brown.
3. Place the meat and 2 sprigs of rosemary inside a 1-gallon plastic freezer bag. If you skipped the pre-sear, add 1/4 cup of vegetable or olive oil into the bag.
4. Fill up a large pot about halfway with water. Attach the sous-vide cooker to the pot and set to 140 degrees for cooking the pork shoulder (medium doneness), or 131 degrees for cooking the beef chuck (medium-rare). When water reaches the set temperature, submerge the bag halfway into the water and seal it as airtight as possible, pushing out any excess air and preventing any water from getting into the bag. Once the bag is fully submerged, cook for 24 hours. If water reduces throughout the day, add more water to the pot.
5. Remove the meat from the bag and transfer to a cutting board. Discard juices from bag or use as a base for a sauce. Cool meat for about 20 minutes.
6. Divide the meat into steaks: Remove twine and slice into 1-inch-thick steaks. If your roast is larger, in the 5-pound range, cut it in half first, then lay the halves on their flat side to slice into steaks. You should get 6 to 10 portions total, depending on the size of your roast.
7. If you’re not searing and eating steaks immediately, place each steak in a small plastic freezer bag. Seal as airtight as possible, pushing out any excess air. Transfer bags to freezer for up to 2 months. When you are ready to defrost steaks, heat up a pot of water with the sous vide to 140 degrees for the pork or 131 degrees for the beef. Transfer a steak bag (multiple, if you are serving a group) from the freezer and submerge in water for 60 to 90 minutes. (Alternatively, remove from freezer the day before and defrost overnight in the refrigerator.)
8. Season each steak on both sides with salt and pepper. (For the pork, you can also rub 1 teaspoon brown sugar onto each steak for a little sweetness.) Heat a cast-iron pan over medium-high heat, add 1/4 cup vegetable oil, and let it warm for a few minutes until oil shimmers and begins to smoke. Sear steaks for about a minute on each side until evenly brown. When you flip the steaks to the second side, add 1 tablespoon butter to the pan for each steak along with a fresh herb (such as bay leaf or rosemary) and a crushed garlic clove.
9. Baste steaks with butter as they finish searing, then serve. You can sear up to 4 steaks at a time in a large skillet. — The New York Times
