

Sous vide Supreme Review: How To Cook From The Inside Out - tptacek
http://gizmodo.com/5461100/

======
tptacek
I've been cooking SV for about a year now, not with the super-expensive SVS
appliance, but with a PID controller from Auber Instruments (~$120) and a $50
rice cooker.

Want to see something funny? Check out Amazon's recommendations on the bottom-
of-the-line Black and Decker rice cooker:

[http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-RC880-Steamer-
Stainless/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-RC880-Steamer-
Stainless/dp/B000MVQE66/ref=sr_1_19?ie=UTF8&s=home-
garden&qid=1265057639&sr=8-19)

I'm not going to waste much time talking about this stuff if nobody cares (I
have a LOT to say about it), except to sum it up as: this is _at least_ as
important as the microwave oven. Every house in the world will have this
capability in 50 years.

~~~
icey
I think SV is pretty interesting; but it seems like most people care about
saving time more than they care about food cooked well.

I constantly fret about how done things are whenever I cook, to the point of
obsession. I inspect every steak after it's been cut open... Did I evenly heat
each side? Is one side more cooked than the other? Is it overdone? So on and
so forth. It seems like SV would be nice just to get over that sort of cooking
anxiety.

What sort of additional time does it take to cook? I mean, it's pretty quick
to heat my cast iron to where I want it, and then just 16 or 17 minutes later
I can have a nicely rested steak ready to go... I'm sure this takes longer,
but no idea how much longer.

~~~
tptacek
I'm really unhappy with this Gizmodo review, but they've got the steak part
nailed. It's exactly like they say: you take a steak, bag it (I season it and
throw some butter in), and then set the temperature for 130. Wait one hour or
48 hours or any time in between: you will get a uniformly perfect steak.

Do this two or three times and you'll stop poking or probing the final
product. It simply _is_ 130f, inside and out, when you remove it from the bag.
Checking the temperature is essentially second-guessing a very very accurate
electronic thermometer.

The quality of that finished product will be higher than anything you can
accompish on cast iron, because cast iron doesn't heat meat uniformly. To get
a rare center on cast iron, you have to accept a medium-well band of meat on
the outside of the steak. Skill and technique dictate how wide that band is,
but it's there regardless.

What you lose in SV is the seared crust. So, of course, after you cook your
steak SV, you sear the outside --- for seconds, not minutes, on each side ---
and then plate.

There are three major benefits of SV for steaks.

First, no matter who you are, SV is the one way you can set up a couple steaks
in the morning before you leave for work and come home with a perfectly cooked
steak waiting. It's this benefit that makes me think SV is the future for the
American kitchen.

Second, if you're a typical home cook, SV kills the margin of error. Unless
you type the wrong temperature in, you're getting a perfectly cooked steak no
matter what you do.

Third, if you're a pro chef, SV frees you from having to be an extremely
expensive meat thermometer. Electronics are better at watching temperatures
than people are. Chefs are freed from the drudgework of monitoring cooking,
and can spend that time innovating or refining actual dishes.

~~~
icey
Ahhhh _unattended_ cooking really would be a huge difference. For some reason
I was thinking you'd start it up, sit around for awhile waiting for the water
to heat, throw in your vacuum bag and then wait for it to cook. The idea of
starting dinner before you leave for work is pretty compelling (on top of
having it uniformly cooked to a specific temperature).

~~~
tptacek
There's three sub-wins to unattended SV cooking (warning: I am unlikely to
ever shut up about this).

First, you can cook a meal for your family in 5 minutes before you leave for
work. You can already do that with a crock pot (you don't know how amazing
crock pots are until you have kids and a working spouse), but only for braise
cuts, and only for braised applications.

Second, you can cook a meal, cool it rapidly, and store it in the fridge for
later. In other words, you can cook a week's meals on Sunday night, and bust
them out night after night.

Third, you can prep a meal, seal it, stick it in the fridge, and throw it in
the SV when you're ready to cook it.

Unlike microwave, "boil-in-the-bag", or crock-pot meals, SV will do these
things _and_ produce a restaurant-caliber protein for you more reliably than
if you cooked it conventionally with your full attention.

~~~
icey
Regarding your second point, I assume you store in the vacuum bag; but how do
you reheat? Back in the SV?

I've seen these on a few of the Food Network reality shows (The Next Food
Network Star, The Next Iron Chef), and they always talked about them as though
it was some sort of rocket science. It's nice to know that it's just a
temperature controlled water bath.

It seems like it's right up my alley. I have a fondness for cooking food
slowly - barbecue by way of smoking and dutch oven / crock pot cooking. Of
course, those modes of cooking are left for the weekends so I'm sure my wife
would be happy if I found a way to cook more during the week.

~~~
tptacek
You can do it in the SV, which is I guess what you're supposed to do, but I
just unbag it and heat it through on the stove.

I do cook things SV and hold them in the fridge, but honestly most of the time
I do that I do it for lunch. For instance, I've got a rice cooker full of
cheap chicken breasts going for my next several lunches right now.

------
tptacek
For the impulse purchasers here, let me screw you out of a couple bucks:

[http://www.auberins.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&...](http://www.auberins.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=44)

[http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-RC880-Steamer-
Stainless/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-RC880-Steamer-
Stainless/dp/B000MVQE66/ref=sr_1_19?ie=UTF8&s=home-
garden&qid=1265057639&sr=8-19)

[http://www.amazon.com/Seal-A-Meal-VS107-Vacuum-Food-
Sealer/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Seal-A-Meal-VS107-Vacuum-Food-
Sealer/dp/B000KL5IJM/ref=pd_ts_k_9?ie=UTF8&s=kitchen)

The rice cooker plugs into the Auber PID controller, the PID controller plugs
into the wall. You set the temperature on the controller (say, to 130f for
perfect steak), and it turns the rice cooker on and off to maintain that
temperature. You bag steaks with the seal-a-meal, put 'em in the bath, and
walk away for a day or two. Done.

Side benefit that my partner Dave noted: your kitchen now looks a little bit
more like a meth lab. Sexy!

~~~
logicalmind
Why stop there. You can get a high precision scale and pick up some sodium
alginate (make caviar out of anything), some transglutaminase (meat glue),
Tapioca maltodextrin to turn any fat into powder (bacon fat powder anyone?).
The molecular gastronomy rabbit hole.

~~~
tptacek
I highly recommend the maltodextrin, if only for peanut butter powder and
brown butter butter powder.

------
tptacek
Oh the problems I have with this review:

* He got "inedibly flaky" chicken after holding chicken in the bath overnight. In other words, he probably set the temperature too high. You don't need to hold chicken at 160f if you're cooking it for 24 hours.

* He cooked duck _in the prepackaged Duck L'Orange bag_ he got at Costco.

* He declared SV "not worth it" for lamb and rib roasts because he doesn't cook them often enough to care, and the conventional oven techniques are "tried and true". The conventional techniques for _everything_ are tried and true, and error prone and inconvenient.

* Short ribs are a draw? You can "fool-proof" braise short ribs for most of a day and wind up with stew meat --- which is great --- or you can "fool-proof" SV short ribs and end up with medium rare short ribs, which is something you can't get out of any other cooking technique. And if you want a "caramelized sauce" when you're done, you reduce the bag goo. How hard is that?

* Anybody buying a SV setup will have no problem doing perfect fish under a broiler? What?

------
logicalmind
Another benefit of sous vide that I didn't see in the article is that the
cooking of items in sealed bags causes them to retain their volatile
compounds. You might say, what's that? Every item releases volatile compounds
that give it smell/taste. When food is heated the molecules vibrate and
volatile compounds are released into the air, gone forever. In sous vide,
these compounds are retained. This leads to increased flavor. The side effect
of this is that you need to be very careful about adding spices and herbs to
your food. In sous vide, a little bit goes a long way.

Have you ever wondered why foods go together. Like tomatoes and basil. The
trick is that they share some of the same volatile compounds. That is how many
high-end restaurants know to put seemingly strange combination's of food
together and it works. There are volatile compound databases available for
many food items.

~~~
tptacek
This is supposedly one of the wins from cooking in a pouch (here's the old
Good Eats transcript on that: <http://j.mp/4EN80H>), which is something I've
never had any success with.

The flip side of this --- I think --- is the reason you can't put whole garlic
in SV.

