SousVide Supreme: First Impressions

The SousVide Supreme isn't much to look at. It is a big silver box, a bit larger than a bread machine. The controls on the front are simple. It has little more than a temperature readout, controls to set the temperature, at timer, and a power switch. You can set it to within 1 degree Fahrenheit or .5 degrees Celsius. Inside, it is mostly a big, empty chamber that you fill with water. The reservoir has a false bottom so that things you are cooking are kept from directly touching any hot spots. There is an odd little rack that goes inside to hold your food packets. When I was sent the demo unit, I also received a Reynolds Handi Vac Starter Kit- this is far from the best vacuum sealer that you can get, but at $10, it is undoubtedly the least expensive. Since I don't have a Foodsaver, I appreciated it. Vacuum sealing is important to sous vide cooking for a few reasons. First, you want to make sure your food is sealed and separated from the water, otherwise the water will wash away flavor and nutrients. Second, you want your food to be fully submerged while cooking. If air gets trapped in the bag with the food, it can cause the bag to float to the surface. If this happens, your food will likely cook unevenly... defeating the purpose of cooking it sous vide. Third, even if you hold the bags under water while cooking, air pockets can cause uneven cooking. Why? Water is a much better conductor of heat than air is. Consider the following: Which of these is going to heat the food more efficiently? Clearly the first. In the second, you have to heat up the air before you can heat the food. If you are cooking food in a bag in a water bath and there are air pockets, you are likely to have both of those situations going on at different points: at some points, the plastic will touch the food, while there will be air cushions between them at others. Your food won't cook evenly. Still, when I first tried the SousVide Supreme, I didn't want to mess around with the vacuum sealer. Fortunately, I had some frozen, vacuum-sealed tilapia filets. Moreover, I thought fish would be a good test of the machine. I cooked it to 136 degrees Fahrenheit (57.8 degrees Celsius) for about 1 hour. Watching the machine, the readout fluctuated about 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit in either direction. Assuming the temperature throughout the machine didn't vary by more than this, I was satisfied in terms of temperature control. The result? Awesome. The fish was soft and tender without being undercooked at all. I served it alongside some corn pudding left over from Thanksgiving (this was last week, remember). The corn pudding was in a ziplock bag. On a whim, I added some ricotta cheese to the bag, sealed it, and (while the fish was finishing) tossed it into the SousVide Supreme to reheat. Later that night, still avoiding the vacuum sealer for no rational reason, I tossed some eggs into the machine and cooked them to 148 degrees Fahrenheit. Eggs, being naturally sealed, are one of those things you can drop right into a water bath without worrying. Normally, when cooking an egg, you cook the white to a much higher temperature than you do the yolk. When cooking using sous vide techniques, you can cook an egg to a constant temperature throughout. At 148 degrees, an egg's white and yolk are nearly the same semisolid consistency. Want a bit of background on sous vide cooking? Check out my post on Under Pressure... or come back tomorrow!