Thread: Sous vide
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Old Sun, Feb-08-09, 15:30
bike2work bike2work is offline
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I agree. And the steak sounds so perfectly cooked. There's just no way to do it right with conventional cooking: you invariably end up with 1/3 of each side overcooked, so 2/3 of the whole steak is overcooked. With sous vide, it's evenly medium-rare all the way through and then they give it 30 seconds over a wood fire for flavor and grill marks.

There are some pseudo sous vide methods out there. Chef Michel Richard cooks chicken breast for chicken salad by wrapping it in safe plastic wrap, submerging it in warm water, and keeping it at the exactly right temp for hours by adjusting the heat with ice cubes and the stoves flame. But you have to really watch it closely because it can't go off by more than a degree. It's in his book Happy in the Kitchen.

Grant Achatz (of Alinea fame) has some psuedo sous vide recipes too -- and demos on youtube. I can find them if you'd like. He puts food in ziplock bags and does it very slowly on the stovetop as well. But at one point he's says that this is really more like using a crock pot than like sous vide.

And didn't the maker of ziplock bags warn strongly against this? There was a ziplock omelette recipe flying around the web that the ziplock people denounced for emissions from the plastic, as I remember it anyway.
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