Sous-Vide Like a Pro - an in-depth guide (Sous-vide series, Ep. 1)

let's talk about

sous

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most sweet

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s don't like to overwhelm the poor home cook with all the details thinking that even the worst attempt at

sous

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will probably result in better proteins than what most people cook today at home and me. I guess for the average cook they're absolutely right, but if you're watching this channel you're probably not the type of cook to settle for something pretty good. You are the type of person who will only settle for excellent and with that even the Soviet method requires good technique, so today I will share with you my bag of tricks that will take your Soviet game to a whole new level in case you are new in this.

Here is sous-vide, simply put in French, the term means in a vacuum. but the most important aspect of this technique is not the vacuum but the precise temperature, if you want the center of your meat to be at 130 Fahrenheit, you cook it at one hundred and thirty Fahrenheit, what a broth, this completely eliminates the need to capture the moment perfect when His meat is ready. To do this, place an immersion circulator in a pot of water and it will maintain the temperature you want for as long as you want. Place the meat in a plastic bag.

Put it in the water. Wait one to two hours, depending. in the thickness, then brown and serve Why is this so revolutionary? Because cooking is the biggest problem cooks have with proteins and the Soviet method solves it, but it is not without its challenges. Sous-vide food can look and taste anemic. Here's an example of a The Nova website this year you get after the water bath can be weak. Here's a video from America's Test Kitchen. Sure the dark is perfect, but I like my meat better. Brown meat can taste dry even when cooked to a perfect temperature.

It's possible? that you can overcook meat even with sous-vide long cooking times are fatal on weekday nights, today we'll address a lot of other issues and help you save it like a pro, but first a little background. I heard about sous-vide about 15 years ago, when immersion circulators sold for over $1,000 and were completely out of the reach of most home cooks, of course, it didn't stop some people from going where no home cook I had been there before I heard of graduate students bringing home the old immersion devices. circulators that their university laboratories were going to remove and cook them.

I've heard of electrical engineers reconfiguring their crock pots into temperature-controlled water baths, since I had no electrical engineering skills and was too chicken to cook on old lab equipment. The preferred method was to tend a large pot of water on the stove with a thermometer. I finally switched to Ken G's brilliant huge beer cooler method. I insulated the beer coolers, so if you fill them with hot water you'll keep them for a while of course. I didn't have to cook or chill beer for very long about 10 years ago the first suede tool marketed for home cooks hit the market, it was this very large, heavy, cumbersome and expensive box called sous-vide Supreme, obviously there was a lot of room of improvement and the race to create the best sous vide tool for the masses began thanks to the competition, immersion circulators became small, cheap and accessible to everyone.

I use one from Nova, but there are many brands to choose from, another one sells for around a hundred and fifty. The link is below the video. If you use your immersion circulator occasionally, you can certainly clip it to the side of any large pot, but if you plan on using it regularly, I highly suggest getting a plastic one. box specially designed for this purpose. I bought a size that fits nicely in my sink, so there is no need to move it anywhere. Filling and emptying this box is very simple. I can fit at least eight servings in it at a time, so if I want to cook some proteins for the week or if I have a party it's very convenient these boxes come in many sizes and are very economical.

I'll link them below this video. I fill my container with hot water so I can I'm ready to cook almost instantly here is the current temperature of my water here is the temperature that I want it to be and I can change this temperature with this wheel going up and down when I press the play button, the circulator starts heating and moving the water once the machine reaches the desired temperature it will be and allow the food now that we cover the temperature let's talk about packaging the food restaurants use vacuum sewer chambers which are incredibly expensive sealers al Vacuum are sold for home use as food savers. sold for around 100 they are pretty useless for this purpose, they will warp your food and won't let you add the oil, which is very useful for some proteins.

My bag of choice is the ziplock, not the flimsy sandwich bags, but the sturdy freezer bags that fold back the zipper to keep the protein clean, season the protein with salt and add it to the bag when cooking fish and shrimp. I find that adding a lot of oil to the bag prevents the pieces from sticking and makes the shape and surface of the finished dish very visible. I prefer a neutral oil so that it does not interfere with the flavor of the fish that you will throw on land, so it is not necessary to use anything expensive if you are going to put more than one piece of meat in a bag, put them vertically this way they will not fall one on top of the other when you submerge the bag in the water when you submerge the bag, open it completely, this allows the water to expel the air much more effectively than if you close the zipper leaving a small hole keep pushing the bag under the water until you reach the zipper if the water is too hard for you use a utensil to help you close the zipper if the bag sinks you did it correctly if the bag floats you still have too much air open it and try again, turn the bag over to the side of the container so that the water circulates around it.

Having a bag in the bottom of the pot will not result in very even cooking. Under this video, I will give you the times I like to use for many common proteins, but just to give you an idea, most steaks, pork chops , chicken breasts, duck breasts and other meats I mentioned cook in an hour and most fish and shrimp fillets cook in 20 minutes, that's right. It's true that you can't overcook with sous-vide, not at all, as longer times mean more tenderness but less juiciness. The myth that you can't cook with severe cooking arose due to a clever marketing strategy used by sous-vide appliance manufacturers.

To market a new appliance, you have to combine the exotic with the familiar, so the exotic sales pitch was the promise of restaurant-quality food at home without effort or skill. The familiar sales pitch was to compare the immersion circulator to an appliance that most home cooks already had at home, cooking something sous vide will inevitably take longer than any other method and that wasn't going to work in our fast food nation, so the club's marketing people told him he could use the slow cooker model he could take. You put your meat in the water bath in the morning go to work come home brown it for two minutes and the nurse surfed very badly, they didn't tell you that this type of steak would be very soft and dry, but the chicken method didn't.

It is but very flexible when it comes to meats and poultry if you keep them in a water bath for another hour; there will be no difference for the fish and eggs, which is not the case if you need to keep them in the water bath after they are ready, try to limit that time also ten minutes after that, the texture will gradually start to suffer, the Shrimp will become mushy, fish will dry out, and egg yolks will harden. Now let's talk about browning problems, the common solutions you will find. I see people using a very hot frying pan and blowtorches.

Oh, personally, I don't really like the taste of blowtorch and pans well, no matter how long you bang on them and overheat them instead of your smoke alarms, nothing seems to be enough. because sous vide meat tends to waste juice no matter how much you dry it, but there is a solution to this life's persistent problem and that is the cooling limit when the meat comes out of the water bath it is at a perfect temperature so that every minute If you spend it on the hot pan, you're ruining the perfection of sous-vide, but unfortunately one minute per side is not enough to brown the meat that's still being used, but all you have to do is take out the steak or pork chop from the bag and dry it with a Lay out a couple of layers of paper towels and place it in the refrigerator for about 10 minutes.

If you find it is thick enough, lift it up so that both sides dry evenly. Cooling the outside of the meat will allow you to keep it in the pan for about two minutes. per side instead of one, resulting in a much better crust. You can speed up the cooling process by placing the bag of meat in an ice water bath for about two minutes. The water bath will not leave your refrigerator surfaces as dry, but on a weekday. At night, when every minute counts, that might be fine with chicken and duck skin. I take the cooling one step further and cool them completely before browning them.

You see, getting a really crispy skin takes time and even two minutes isn't enough. You probably will. You need 7-10 minutes and if you start with warm chicken or duck you will get either great meat or great skin, but not both, but cool them completely and you will get wonderfully crispy skin as the meat gently warms through. I'm not going to suffer with another cook it's because most of the time at least 95% is spent on the skin and the skin is an insulator that protects the meat from overcooking. I realized that waiting more than an hour for dinner on a weekday night maybe doesn't work for everyone, so here are some tips to avoid that: Choose steaks, pork chops, chicken breasts, duck breasts which I add at most an inch and a half thick, cook them sous vide for an hour over the weekend when you are ready to cook during the week.

Place them back in the immersion circulator for 30 minutes. How come the second time is shorter? This is because there are two reasons why we omit. The first reason is to change its texture and the second reason is to make it a nice warm temperature to eat now. texture, you'll take care of that over the weekend when you sous-vide it for a full hour, so it's done and making it pleasantly hot to eat isn't as precise in particular as the texture, so if you comply it only reaches 115 instead of 130 You won't notice that chicken and duck breasts are great meal companion options since they are cooked sous vide ahead of time, anyway, they go straight from the refrigerator to the pan, so we're basically talking about a dinner in 10 minutes, shrimp and fish. cooking only 20 minutes.

I don't recommend cooking them over the weekend because that will ruin their texture. It's best to cook all seafood just once, but what you can do to speed things up is to season it and bag it over the weekend. So that when you get home on a weekday you can grab the bag and place it in your immersion circulator, a reverse sealing method is very similar to sous-vide, but instead of using a temperature-controlled water bath, you use the oven. I have covered this. method and great detail on my channels if you are not familiar with it check out the link below this video.

Both sous-vide and reverse searing have their advantages and disadvantages. The sous-vide method is much more flexible if you got stuck doing homework with your kids your guests an hour late your side dishes and that's it don't worry just keep the meat in the water bath until it's ready the sous-vide method is also less error-prone doesn't require you to insert the thermometer perfectly and find the center of your meat to determine what the minimum temperature is and to say one of your steaks is a little bigger than another if you're cooking six shots, that could be a nightmare using the normal methods you have to determine when each fillet is. done versus soviet if one steak is an inch and another is an inch and a quarter no problem, you can cook them all together and sear them all together.

The disadvantage of the Soviet method is that it takes longer and requires special equipment if you watch my reverse video which is from about a year ago you will probably notice that I complain that this year after sous vide it is almost as good as after sous vide reverse sealing, but I have found a solution to this problem since then, so it is no longer an issue in the next few weeks we will applyall this theory to chicken, duck, pork chops, shrimp and fish, so stay tuned, don't forget to subscribe, hit that little bell button to get notifications and if you're ever in the Boston area, maybe I'll see you . you in one of my classes