Which foods are suitable for cooking with a Sous Vide machine?

The fact that you are on the Burton website suggests that you have heard that Sous Vide is a fantastic way to cook wonderfully tasty food, to the extent that friends and guests will begin to wonder what your culinery secret is. There’s a reason such top chefs as Heston Blumenthal, Michael Carlson and Thomas Keller have all embraced Sous Vide in their high-end gourmet restaurants.

That does beg the question, though… which foods are suitable for cooking with a Sous Vide cooker for the home? The answer is pretty much every conceivable type of food, with the exception of chips and similar foods for which other cooking methods are necessary. You see, Sous Vide cooking is all about avoiding overcooking via the most precise temperature control. It’s about having food cooked in sealed airtight plastic bags at temperatures much lower than is customary for cooking, so that the item is cooked evenly.

The exact temperature does differ slightly depending on the exact kind of food, with vegetables requiring higher temperatures than meats, for example. Nonetheless, the advantages of Sous Vide cooking machines are clear for different types of food. One man who adopted the method in 1974 for the Restaurant Troisgros in Rosanne in France, Georges Pralus, discovered that cooking foie gras in this manner resulted in it retaining its original appearance while having better texture and not losing excess amounts of fat.

The lower temperatures used in Sous Vide cooking compared to conventional cooking are vital to its success, ensuring that the cell walls in the foods do not burst, which results in a much more succulent dish. Those cooking meat, for example, love the effectiveness of this technique in hydrolysing the tough collagen in connective tissue into gelatin, while avoiding the meat’s proteins being heated so much that they significantly denature. Sous Vide cooking is therefore a great way of preventing your meat becoming overly dry and gaining too tough a texture.

But of course, those cooking vegetables love their Sous Vide cooking machine as well, given that its temperatures below the boiling point of water allow for the thorough cooking and possible pasteurisation of vegetables while keeping their texture crisp or firm. After all, you wouldn’t want your vegetables to exhibit the extreme flaccidness of overcooking.

Meats that are especially well suited to domestic Sous Vide cooking machines include those with a higher fat content, and for which longer cooking times assist in the breakdown of the collagen, resulting in tastier and juicier cuisine. But even lean filet steaks and other meats with a much reduced fat content can be cooked wonderfully ‘Sous Vide’, and it is a cooking method that gives you a great deal of freedom. Investigate the recipes section of the Burton website at http://burtonsousvide.co.uk/recipes/1/ to get a sense of its endless possibilities.

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.