If you’re like me, I thought sous vide cooking was a little too “chef-y”. Although I am a chef, I mistook it for an ultra-modern cooking technique that, on one hand, wasn’t practical for the average cook and, on the other hand, didn’t really have practical use in our catering kitchen that specialized in large-batch cooking. It simply wasn’t allowed into my lexicon of practical culinary terms.
But first things first – let’s get the technical jargon out of the way:
…sous vide (pronounced sue-veed) is a cooking technique that utilizes precise temperature control to deliver consistent, restaurant-quality results.
… refers to the process of vacuum-sealing food in a bag, then cooking it to a very precise temperature in a water bath. This technique produces results that are impossible to achieve through any other cooking method.
Anova Culinary
In October of 2017, I flew to Seattle to spend time with my brother, to watch college football, talk about cooking, and just hang out. I suspected it might be my last time to see him as he was battling cancer on several different fronts, a battle that many are ill-equipped to wage. So, too, was he.
A friend had given him an Anova sous vide contraption but he had given up on it, probably for lack of time, and simply disregarded it for the same reason I had. More likely, it was the griller and smoker in him that preferred char and smoke to the precision sous vide cookery offers. Sous vide cooking can be used in tandem with grilling, but it prolongs the process and often isn’t practical, and probably wasn’t for him.
That weekend, when it was time to leave for lunch and my return trip to the airport, he offered it up to me to see if I could make use of it. I gladly accepted but wondered whether it was worth the effort as I bobbled it going through security and the boarding process.
Once home, it was carefully tucked away in a cabinet for the day, that one day that I was ready to figure out what to do with it. It stayed there for several months. You see, my brother passed away in January, just three months after my last trip to see him and it was going to take a while before I was ready to pull it out. I needed time.
In April, again another three months later, I sold my catering business of 22 years and took some much-needed time off to clear my head and recover from what was bone-crushing work at times. The sale was not a retirement-type sale so I knew I would need to eventually start job hunting, In the meantime, there was a healing process that I needed to embrace, both physically and mentally. And heal I did.
In the middle of July, we began to frequent the weekly farmer’s market closeby and my creativity began to reemerge after several months of hibernation. The sous vide also emerged from hibernation – it was time to figure this thing out.
There have been more successes than failures in the kitchen, all of which would have been discussed at length with my brother were he still around. My daughter often said that the only things we ever talked about were sports, food, and cooking. She was probably right. Collaboration was at the heart of many conversations.
On Monday, I will begin a project for a hospitality company in need of a chef who can analyze recipes, weights and measures, and then upload that data into a cloud-based culinary platform that will streamline their inventory management, pricing, ordering, and calculate food and labor costs. How ironic it is; my brother’s career before retirement was in computer science. This, too, would’ve been right up his alley and the source of further collaboration.
Sous vide works beautifully with a crockpot sort of mentality – set it and forget it. Cooking cuts of beef and pork that typically take 12-24 hours are now perfectly suited for this new season in life. At a time in the afternoon when I typically would have been thinking about “what’s for dinner,” I will now be second-guessing my seasoning, marinade, cooking temp and time, and anything else that I would have put in motion before leaving for work or perhaps the night before. While I still miss the collaboration, I am looking forward to a new season, this new project. and new experiences with my sous vide.
MOJO to Table 