http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/20/technology/personaltech/bringing-sous-vide-to-the-home-cook.html 2014-11-20 00:51:16 Bringing Sous Vide to the Home Cook The cooking-in-a-bag technique that started in restaurants is poised to go mainstream as prices fall for the gadgetry involved. === Appliance manufacturers have lately been building a surge of high-tech, high-end gadgets for our kitchens, but a lot of them are pretty useless. Who needs Then there is the computer you use for sous vide, a cooking technique beloved by restaurant chefs — and a truly groundbreaking way of making better meals. In this method, you begin by packing food, usually meat, into a plastic bag. Then you place the bag in a water bath whose temperature is precisely controlled by a computerized thermostat. Then you wait. After an hour, two hours, Until recently sous vide was fairly inaccessible for home cooks. To keep the water bath at a precise temperature, restaurants often used Manufacturers say prices may come down even further, too, which means that sous vide is poised to go mainstream. That’s great news. Because sous vide began as an expensive restaurant technique, it has been shrouded in a mystique that has obscured a larger truth: The best thing about sous vide is not that it lets you cook restaurant-quality food at home. The best thing is that in many cases, it is just about the easiest cooking technique you can find. The rise of sous vide — along with some of the latest Sous vide demands no special expertise, it has a minimal learning curve, and it is wondrously forgiving of error. In sous vide, there is little risk of overcooking. Because you are cooking at a relatively low temperature, you can keep a steak in a water bath for an hour or two longer than you intended and it will still taste fantastic. This makes sous vide an especially useful technique for busy cooks — people who work long hours and whose schedules are unpredictable. “Sous vide is one of those things that can totally help people who want to cook,” said Michelle Tam, the food writer who runs the blog I’ve been cooking with sous vide for years, and I’ve tried most of the home machines on the market. My favorite of the new crop is the First, at $179, it’s one of the cheapest sous vide machines available. Second, it has a drop-dead-simple interface; anybody can figure out how to use it. And third, it has an unusual capability that promises important innovations down the line — a wireless connection to a smartphone that will allow people to control the device and share recipes with one another. The app, which will be released in December, should make it easy for people who are new to sous vide to get up to speed. The Precision Cooker is an immersion circulator, which means that you have to stick it in a large vessel of water to get it working. You can use a big pot or bowl or, if you want to get serious about it, you can buy One of the myths of sous vide is that you need to seal your food with a vacuum sealer for it to work best. (“Sous vide” means “under vacuum” in French.) Vacuum-sealing has some advantages — cooked food can be stored in the freezer for months if it is vacuum sealed — but lots of daily sous-viders, myself included, find that disposable Ziploc-type freezer bags work just as well. Just make sure to get Both vacuum bags and freezer bags are Finally, you need Anova’s smartphone app add-on helps with this. Need to know how to make the perfect chicken thighs? Just consult the app, and press Start. My favorite thing about sous vide is batch cooking. Because cooking two or more pieces of meat sous vide isn’t much more work than cooking enough for one dinner, I often find myself buying extra cuts. Instead of making one chicken breast, why not four? I’ll cook them all at the same time. Then my family and I will eat two for dinner, save one Four meals in a single night. Why should restaurants have the coolest stuff?