I was just going to point out what you said in your last sentence. Isn’t Sous vide used at many restaurants?

I think part of it is that people will push low temperature “because they can.” A 135 degree chicken breast may simply not be appealing to everyone. I’ve sous vided lobster and do not like low temperature results. I will still Sous Vide lobster, but at higher temperatures which give more traditional results.

As for red meat, all I can say is when I first started playing with SV I tried many different temps and times, and even with a short cook at 135, done out of sight in the basement, I could not sneak one over on my wife. She’d always complain about texture.

All that said, it’s got it’s place, and I’d have to think a lot of the aversion is psychological.

Yes, it is, Rockypointdog. It's a great way to pre-cook without losing quality. At places that turn tables quickly, often by demand of the clientele, I believe many do use sous vide. There are tradeoffs, including equipment costs, kitchen space, labor hours, etc. For some it might be a boon and for others a boondoggle. Even without sous vide, many restaurant par cook everything from risotto to steaks, and then finish them to order quite quickly. With sous vide, the food is held at serving temperature and just needs a quick sear or flip with the sauce, or whatever. If it comes out fast and perfectly cooked, it may well be sous vide.

FOAS, I bet your wife would have liked the bison chuck. :)

That could be! Somewhere on the Internet is a story about a SV/braise challenge with beef ribs I believe. Recipes were provided and I recreated at home and SV won. I’d think the chuck meat would have similar qualities.

Sounds good to me! I think this was the recipe I started with, but didn't follow exactly. Besides using bison, which tastes more like beef used to. I did a test run, oven version, and the bark was too hard. Brushing it all over with barbecue sauce (I think it was the one I invented for you--low sugar, because the sugar turns to char) made a huge difference. Still a nice thick bark, but chewable. Meat nigh to falling apart, but sliceable. Totally tender and tasty.

I think I was going to try beef ribs sous vide but I couldn't figure out how to get the rack into my wide bag roll. Not wide enough. And I wasn't going to start dismembering them raw to cook longways. :)

See, the great thing about sous vide of tougher cuts, which really is similar to why people like it for premium cuts, is that the whole thing gets cooked right without the outer parts getting overdone or dried out. If handled correctly, taking into account what people like, as opposed to new tricks foodiewooodies want to show off, one can make really good things with it.

It's also a PITA at times. I can do a single rack of bison or beef ribs with a beer braise in the combi-steam oven and much less prep. :) Different tools for different purposes, but they're all good!

I’ve never knowingly eaten anything cooked via sous vide, but my one thought is a loss of texture? Can anything be cooked and achieve a crispy exterior or browned via sv? Or do you mainly par-cook via sv and then finish it elsewhere? I assume you can pack in the flavor and evenly cook items, but I like brown food, crispy skins/exteriors, sauses from fond, etc...

Yes, crispy brown comes from dry heat. There are a few ways of doing it, but as you surmise, it happens outside of the actual sous vide cook. The advantage is that it's cooked 100% through and through to the temperature of your choice while sous vide. There's no perfect sear with blue raw meat happening. For a steak, it's often sous vide cooked, all the way through, then removed from the pouch, juices dried off, then seared in a screaming hot pan. You don't have to hold back the searing temperature, because the meat is thoroughly cooked.

This is how the famous "edge to edge" is achieved. There's the dark caramelized sear edge, but no ring of brown, dryer interior and pink center. Just the desired doneness, color and texture all the way. You can make red meat "well done" this way, as in killing pathogens, while still having the soft texture of medium rare. You can also cook it at a higher temperature if you want a firmer texture. It's the temperature setting you're cooking to, not the time, though, of course, higher temperatures still take a bit longer.

For other uses you can also do "reverse", where you sear first and then seal sous vide and cook with the circulator. I forget when that is done. That wouldn't be for crisp, of course.

You can use sous vide ("under vacuum") to hurry marinades. That's just sealing it in the bag with the vacuum machine, not cooking it.

One of the catering joys of sous vide is that on Wednesday, when you receive your poultry order, you can prep Friday's skinless chicken breasts, including the flavorings and herbs, vacuum seal and refrigerate them, then put them in the circulator to cook a few hours before service. When you're approaching time to plate, you can remove them to a sheet pan and put them in the oven for five minutes to brown, or just plate them with a sauce. You're never going to get crisp skin sous vide. All the moisture is held inside, which is great for the flesh, but doesn't dry the skin, which is what makes it crisp.

You're not going to get fond, either. There's no Maillard reaction. But you can also just roast off some trimmings and make a pan full of fond.

This is where cooking sous vide at home parts with catering. There isn't enough fond in catering to do the job so you're making it anyway. At home, it's a side benefit. Other than to try recipes before serving to company, I don't bother with sous vide for just us. There's no point when I have so many other tools. If you go to the Anova website, you can find all kinds of recipes using their circulators that seem a bit ridiculous, like making cakes in mason jars. As experiments in what you can do, however, they're interesting, and could inform a decision later. The great thing about an immersion circulator that you use with your own vessel, like I have, is that you have an instant spare oven.

But what if one kid has football practice, another has show choir, and the third has cub scouts. Besides screaming, you need to chauffeur them and feed them after the boys get home and before the girl leaves. There's drive thru. Ugh. Or crockpot. Or, if like me you have two circulators, you can set your chicken and potatoes to cook sous vide before the scout meeting and have your salad ready, and by the time coats are off and backpacks stowed, everybody's eating a wholesome, perfect temperature, dinner together, whenever you got home, and all your time going to eating it and talking to the kids, rather than fixing the meal up (even microwaving or other reheating takes time) and being late to choir.

It's just a tool. There are other ways to achieve what you need to achieve, and people have been cooking for thousands of years without it. I think it was invented a bit over 200 years ago.

How does sous vide work?

Normal cooking - It does not matter how good a cook you are, and how good your thermometer is, or how accurate your expensive oven's thermostat is, there is no way you can be precise with cooking time and temperature, everything is "more or less", there are just way too many variables and unknowns.

Sous vide cooker - By using digital electronics and programming magic (PID controller), a sous vide cooker can make all kinds of adjustments, initiate predictive actions, to account for all variables, including ambient temperature of your kitchen, changes of room temperature while cooking, thickness of your cooking vessel, type, intensity, and latency of your heat source, thickness of your meat, starting temperature of your meat, ----- all to within one degree of accuracy.

A sous vide cooker is a cooker, with excellent temperature control, nothing fancy, nothing sophisticated, nothing more. Why there are so many people who get so emotional about it is very interesting. As far as issues are concerned, it's hundreds times fewer than a microwave oven or a pressure cooker.

dcarch

I don't yet have kids, so it's just me and my wife and neither of us are in a rush to eat. We regularly eat at 8:00 so for every day use, this doesn't really appeal to me. And even for dinner parties, I know how my grill works and am pretty darn close at timing. But, I'm sure it would be nice for holidays or dinner parties where you want to be more precise.

Steve, we don't sell sous vide equipment. :) You absolutely do not need it. No one does. Thousands of years of non-sous vide cooking, I say. The important thing is that you do cook, which gives you access to many more wholesome food choices than those who don't have. How you choose to cook is completely up to you. Not trying to sell you here. Promise!