To Master Sous Vide, You Just Need a Good Cookbook

Sous vide, the technique where food sealed in a plastic bag is cooked in a temperature-controlled water bath, delivers stunning and consistent results. Fish goes from hard to nail to hard to fail. Pork chops can be a perfect medium-rare from top to bottom, with no gray bands. Cheap cuts can be turned into meltinglytender steaks. Chicken breasts are worth eating again. Soft-boiled eggs can emerge with just-set whites coddling velvety yolks.

Despite a growth in popularity in the past decade or so, sous vide remains a bit of a fringe kitchen activity, a little too nerdy for the general population. Perhaps the best-known cookbooks out there are Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure and Joan Roca’s La Cocina al Vacio (both way too nerdy for the general population), but nearly all the other books out there feel like they’ve been bankrolled by sous vide equipment manufacturers. There’s been a peculiar need for a reference book with basic recipes that set the foundation and help you grow. Instead, we’ve mostly been left to the wilds of the internet.

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This isn’t a wholly bad thing. There are some excellent websites and recipes out there, but there is a ton of dross to sift through, and especially in the early days, it’s hard to know what’s what. (Full disclosure: I wrote about food on a four-month contract in 2015 for ChefSteps, which later went on to become a sous-vide manufacturer.) A well-written sous vide cookbook could make a significant impact, and while Acheson’s isn’t for beginners, it’s earned a spot in the “technique” section of my cookbook collection.

I immediately appreciated the depth of the bench in the fruit and vegetable section, the largest in the book with almost 40 recipes. Testing began with the long-cook broccoli, mostly because I was getting hungry and had the ingredients on hand. It’s essentially a long poach, cooking the crucifer in a mix of chicken broth, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, and red pepper flakes. After two hours at 176 degrees Fahrenheit, the florets are then seared in a skillet and served under a shower of grated parmesan. There are faster ways to cook broccoli, but not many that are this good. It looks like nothing fancy and tastes like a million bucks.

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I also made a purée of shelled edamame, which gets a similar treatment, cooking in stock with lemon juice, garlic, and a few fistfuls of spinach. After 30 minutes it all goes into the food processor, and it out comes looking like a green hummus cousin. Acheson suggests serving it as a hot side dish or as a cool dip, and I did both, then devoured half of it in one late-night go, alternately spreading it onto crackers and just spooning it directly into my mouth.

Later, I made eggplant in a mix of mirin, soy, and ginger. After that, I tried leeks barigoule, an Acheson riff on a classic Provençal dish usually made by braising artichokes. I also tried an acorn squash dish with pumpkin seeds, chocolate, and queso fresco, something that Acheson classifies as “wackier than it is.” I tried the latter on family dinner night, getting my niece and nephew to grate the chocolate over the squash, and it got thumbs up from everyone at the table.

Source: https://gardencourte.com
Categories: Recipe