ChefSteps is a team of chefs, writers, and food lovers who develop recipes, techniques, and guides to help people cook better at home.

ChefSteps

With sous vide cooking, you can customize the texture and doneness of different foods to your exact specifications. To illustrate that fact, we set up a little experiment with beef chuck, a cut of meat that comes from a cow’s shoulder. As you’ve learned, big, active muscles like shoulder have a lot of connective tissue, making them <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/classes/cooking-sous-vide-beyond-the-basics#/decoding-tough-and-tender-cuts">tougher than less-used muscles</a>, but we can <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/classes/cooking-sous-vide-beyond-the-basics#/meats-doneness-and-texture">transform the tough collagen into succulent gelatin</a> with enough heat and time. Let’s experiment: What happens if we leave temperature constant and just mess with time? Or adjust temperature and leave time constant? Can we get the same succulent braise at 167 °F / 75 °C for 24 hours as at 149 °F / 65 °C for 48 hours? The results illuminate some important points about sous vide cooking: in general, temperature dictates color, juiciness, and succulence, while time dictates texture. Because you can create your own time-and-temperature combinations, color, juiciness, succulence, and texture are almost infinitely customizable for just about any food. When you consider the possibilities, it’s almost overwhelming. So let’s wrap our heads around the concept by focusing on chuck, and you can let your imagination take over from there.