The Wonders of Sous Vide! My new love...

The Wonders of Sous Vide! My new love...

My wonderful twin bought me the most amazing machine for my birthday in December - the Anova sous vide cooker (pot not included).

Sous vide - "under vacuum" in French - is a method of cooking that cooks the food in a bag with all/most of the air removed, in a water bath maintained at the chosen temperature.

I was unsure when I first tried it, but now I am in love.

The most important bit is the water bath, which is what the Anova does. Some people buy a vacuum pack machine to go with it, but that's unnecessary - I use the water immersion method to force the majority of the air out of the bags before cooking. Below is a lovely vid from Anova explaining the water immersion method:

Now the sous vide method takes time, the whole idea is to cook the food longer at a lower temperature to produce the best results. Think of it like pasteurising the food. Sorry to my vegetarian friends, but I have only used it for meat so far, although I am assured you can use it for veggies and eggs etc.

The Anova comes with a great app that not only allows us to control the machine from afar, but also has many guides and recipes to get us started. The app is not fool proof in that it works wonderfully on my Sony phone, but has a bit of a mare on Rob's Samsung in that the app keeps losing connection with the phone. However, what I do to be safe is put on a backup timer so I know when things are done.

Just to be clear, the Anova itself has never forgotten how long it is supposed to be on or anything like that, it has always pootled on beautifully, but the app on Rob's phone did fail and didn't seem to want to reconnect so it didn't alert us about cooking time etc. On my phone, before I enabled the wifi, the bluetooth did drop out once the first time I tried it, but it reconnected with no probs and continued from where the Anova told it, it had got to.

What is really great is we can pick a guide or a recipe from the app and it will program the Anova for us. This has never failed to work.

Chicken

Photo by Mark DeYoung on Unsplash

I tried chicken first and, wow, I never want to cook chicken breast any other way again. The results were so soft and tender and juicy. Not going to lie, when I usually eat chicken I require mayonnaise or gravy because of the texture. However, don't need a thing when it comes out of the water bath.

The usual technique with chicken breast is:

• load up the bag with the flavourings and the chicken,
• use the water immersion method to force out the air from the bag and seal it,
• pop it in the water bath at around 60C /140F for about 1h 15m, 
• pour out the juices into a saucepan to reduce to make a sauce,
• pat the chicken dry
• heat a frying pan/skillet until very hot and show the chicken breast to it on either side for 15s or so to colour

and it's ready.

Perfect chicken every time.

So far I have tried the recipe on the app for Sous Vide Honey Mustard Chicken Breast by Christina Wylie, which is my fav (I just use English mustard instead of whole grain) and I used the techniques in the Sous Vide 5-Spice Chicken Breast by Barbara Freda, but with my own ingredients for Honey Sesame Chicken.

Steak

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Then there is the steak. My father's birthday is 24th Dec and for his lunch he asked for steak. So we decided to try it sous vide. Now I don't like steak, but my husband, my sister and my father do, and, frankly, they were blown away.

With this one we didn't even use a recipe, we just went with the guides in the app. We has 3 rib eye steaks, all of which had quite hard lumps of fat in the them that would have been worrying cooking in just a pan.

The usual basic procedure with streak is:

• season the streak with salt and pepper,
• place in the bag and use the water immersion method to force out the air from the bag and seal it,
• pop in the water bath at 53.9C/129F for 1h (this is for medium rare - the guide has exact temps and times for however we might like it)
• take out and pat dry
• in a very hot skillet/frying pan sear the meat on each side in 15s bursts until the desired colour is reached (no more than 2 min total).

Perfect, juicy, tender steaks every time in a totally predictable manner - no more guessing.

Other Requirements

To go with our Anova we need:

1. a large heat proof pot of some kind as in the pic at the top - my large crock pot which used to be used only for the potatoes at Christmas is now getting much more of a workout :)
2. sturdy zip-lock bags that will completely seal - if they are too flimsy they could split during cooking and some versions do not seal well enough, they have to be able to maintain a semi-vacuum - I use the medium bags I can get from Home Bargains, which work perfectly well.
3. some sort of pegs or clips - these are to clip the bags to the side of the pot so they don't float around, I bought some soft grip pegs from Home Bargains :)

This is a scientific, easy way of cooking that produced perfect results every time. I love it and I look forward to experimenting some more.

Does anyone already use a sous vide machine? Any recipe recommendations? Any tips or tricks? Anyone thinking of getting one?