Food, Home & Lifestyle

Sous Vide Cooking: Getting Started

Lesson time 16:29 min

In this introductory lesson on sous vide cooking, Chef Keller provides an overview of sous vide packaging and preparation as well as how the technique is used.

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Topics include: Bagging and Compression Techniques • Exploring Sous Vide Deeper

Thomas Keller

Teaches Cooking Techniques III: Seafood, Sous Vide, and Desserts

Chef Thomas Keller’s third MasterClass is devoted to preparing seafood, sous vide cooking, and making classic desserts.

Preview

- Welcome to sous vide. This is something maybe you maybe have many questions about. Hopefully I'll be able to answer them and give you some confidence to be able to cook some things at home in sous vide, but also understand when you're in a restaurant and they tell you it's cooked sous vide you understand how it's prepared. There's a misconception for most people that sous vide cooking is convenient. It's not convenient from a time point of view within this environment at this specific temperature. But the flavors are going to be much more intense cooking sous vide. What is sous vide? Sous vide is about a machine that is vacuum packing. It's removing all of the oxygen from a bag. It's not a new technique. This is a technique that's over 70 years old-- one that was developed for preservation of food. Coffee was a good example. Turkey was another one. Maybe you've heard of it as cryo vac, and that's something that we're kind of all familiar with. We see in our grocery stores products that are sous vide all the time-- from deli meat to boil in a bag vegetables. Let me just go through some things, because the word sous vide cooking in and of itself is a misnomer. We think about cooking, sous vide cooking is really related to the immersion circulator here, or what I've always said all cooking regardless is about time and temperature. The great thing about sous vide cooking, or this type of cooking with an immersion circulator, is precision. You see here there is a temperature on here that says Celsius. It'll maintain this water bath at that temperature indefinitely-- until the electricity either runs out or the machine breaks down. The water is circulating, and certainly we know that water conducts heat more evenly than anything else. So being able to cook something in a water bath at a specific temperature gives us that precision cooking. But it's still about time and temperature. We want to have to make sure that the interior-- the middle of whatever we're cooking-- reaches the 57 degrees Celsius. And then we can take it out. We know that it is exactly at 57 degrees Celsius, which is about medium rare if we're cooking lamb or beef or another red meat. Now, we have to be very, very careful, because remember, I talked about safety. And safety is key. Safety is key here. We want to make sure that our food is really cold that we're going to put in our sous vide machine if we're going to sous vide it-- it's really cold. That our hands are really clean-- using gloves, I would suggest, in this case. That we're not touching the interior of the bag with anything that could create bacteria, and that the edge of the bag when we seal it is perfectly sealed. We have two vacuum packing machines here. One is for the retail market for the consumer at home. It's relatively inexpensive. It does a decent job in removing oxygen. This is some potatoes that I've run through this machine. And you still see there's air in there, which is the ba...

About the Instructor

In his third MasterClass, Chef Thomas Keller focuses on preparing fresh seafood like lobster and salmon, making classic desserts such as apple pie and lemon tart, and showing how sous vide cooking can be done at home to enhance flavor and texture. Whether you’re a beginning or advanced cook, you’ll learn the techniques and principles that will give you the understanding and skills to get the most delicious results.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

Thomas Keller

Chef Thomas Keller’s third MasterClass is devoted to preparing seafood, sous vide cooking, and making classic desserts.

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