Chefsteps Why Sous Vide?

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Key Idea 1

Sous vide cooking makes cooking easier. It avoids the need for you to time things just right. If you're focused on another task, you can let the food stay in the water bath; there's no risk that it will overcook while your back is turned.

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Key Idea 2

For many kinds of food, cooking sous vide lets you use a simple two-step approach to preparing a meal. First, you cook sous vide to your desired doneness. Second, when you're ready, use a finishing step to quickly, and easily, prepare the food to serve.

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Key Idea 3

Another way that sous vide can simplify the job of preparing a meal is to allow you to cook all, or parts of the meal in advance. Unlike leftovers, however, the combination of vacuum packaging, proper refrigeration, and controlled reheating ensures that there is no compromise to the quality of your meal.

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Key Idea 4

Pork belly is an example of a flavorful, inexpensive cut where the convenience of sous vide cooking shines. The pork belly can be brined and cooked sous vide, then sliced into smaller portions, repackaged, and either refrigerated or frozen until you're craving something out of the ordinary and in a hurry.

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Application Idea 1

Quickly reheated and paired with a simple lentil salad, it makes a great main course in minutes.

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Application Idea 2

Another use for sous vide pork belly is to slice it into lardons and toss them into a frisee salad for a lighter meal. Adding a sous vide poached egg to that salad, by the way, is delicious.

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Bonus Video

Here's a short demonstration of the advantages of poaching eggs sous vide.

Salmon and albumin

My family really only like salmon cooked sous-vide in oil, we also don't really have much access to good seafood in Denver unless you pay an arm and a leg.

I've done quite a bit at 50C as well as much shorter cook time at 57.5C. Is brining the best way to get rid of the albumin, if so is a typical 6.4% brine what should be used? And for how long?
Johan Edstrom

So-called albumin protein is mostly a function of cooking temperature more than anything else. Worth trying 113 °F / 45 °C to see what you think of that temperature, you will certainly see less albumin percolating to the surface of the flesh.

Adding salt via a brine tends to help retain juices in the flesh—for complex reasons that I hope to explore in a future course—and so at any given temperature you'll see less juice percolate to the surface, which means you'll see less albumin.

Have you checked out the salmon 104 °F recipe on our course page?
Chris Young

I love Salmon, Sushi first!! :) I have always Cedar Planked my salmon and have love the results. Now that I have seen the 104F video, I am going to have to give it a try.
Allen Johnson

@Johan, 43C is my favourite temp too, as 40C is barely warm once it gets served. Have the same problem in UK too with fish, salmon is great, but good seafood here costs a bomb!
Grace