Why should you start cooking ‘Sous Vide’?

Here at Burton (http://www.burtonsousvide.co.uk/), we know just about all there is to know about ‘Sous Vide’ cooking, but perhaps you don’t. First, lets start with the meaning. Sous Vide means in French, quite literally, ‘under vacuum’. It refers to a process of cooking food sealed in airtight plastic bags in a water bath for extended periods of time – in some cases, for 72 hours – at a temperature that is accurately regulated and significantly lower than that ordinarily used for cooking.

Cooking with Sous Vide cookers is essentially like cooking in a water bath – you put the meat, fish, eggs or vegetables in a bag in the machine, with the bag being submerged in water between 60 and 75 degrees centigrade or whatever temperature is appropriate, not boiling, over a long period of time. Meats tend to be cooked at the lower end of that scale, with vegetables being exposed to higher temperatures. The idea of Sous Vide is that the item is cooked evenly. It means that you can avoid the outside being overcooked, while the inside is still kept at the same level of ‘doneness’, preserving the food’s ‘juiciness’.

Thus overcooking is avoided, as Sous Vide recipes involve the food being placed in a water bath at a temperature that is no higher than the desired final cooking temperature of the food. After all, it isn’t possible for the food’s temperature to exceed that of the bath it is in. This compares favourably to conventional high-heat cooking, such as oven cooking or grilling, in which the food is exposed to levels of heat far exceeding the desired internal cooking temperature. With this type of cooking, there is the need to remove the food from the heat before it surpasses the desired cooking temperature.

Those who are familiar with conventional high-heat cooking are all too familiar with the problems of getting this balance right – if they remove the food too early from the heat, the food is left undercooked. However, if the food is not removed until too late a stage, overshoot happens. Those using Sous Vide cooking machines, meanwhile, enjoy very precise control of their cooking, as the temperature of the bath is precisely controlled in addition to being equal to the target cooking temperature. Even when the food items are irregularly shaped and/or very thick, as long as enough time is given, Sous Vide cooking allows for the temperature, and therefore cooking, to be kept very even throughout the food.

These are the basics behind how a domestic Sous Vide cooker from a manufacturer like Burton (http://www.burtonsousvide.co.uk/) allows you to cook with ease, and with high-end gourmet restaurants run by some of the world’s leading chefs having long made use of this cooking method, its high reputation is clear when you want to prepare wonderfully tasty meals.

Editor’s Note: Burton (http://www.burtonsousvide.co.uk/) are represented by the search engine advertising and digital marketing specialists Jumping Spider Media. Email: info@jumpingspidermedia.co.uk or call: +44 (0)20 3070 1959 / +34 952 783 637.