Sous Vide Week

Last week, I got an exciting package in the mail. It was a SousVide Supreme that I was loaned as a demo unit for a couple of weeks.

The SousVide Supreme is a countertop unit for sous vide cooking. It holds water at a constant temperature. Food is vacuum-sealed in plastic and placed into the water bath. The food gradually heats up until its temperature equalizes with that of the water. Using traditional cooking methods, it is very difficult to maintain precise temperature control at anything other than the boiling point of water. Sous vide cooking allows you to maintain lower temperatures precisely. This allows you to do things like cook beef so that it is perfectly medium rare from the edge of a steak to its center. Such precise temperature control allows you to accomplish neat tricks with other foods, too. One of the first things I tried was making a soft-boiled egg in which the yolk was slightly firmer than the albumen (cooked to 148°F). It was pretty awesome.

So far, I've tried a fairly wide variety of things in it, from lamb to squid. This week, I'll be trying some more experiments, and I'll be writing about sous vide every day.