About Sous Vide
To help cooks find delicious, easy to use sous vide recipes, we've collected our best recipes and favorite equipment in one place.
Sous vide is an innovative cooking technique that is growing in popularity among chefs and home cooks that provides them with a simple way to transform the taste, texture, and cooking process for a plethora of ingredients and dishes.
Sous vide is the process of cooking food at a low temperature for a long time in a heated water bath. Before cooking, the food is usually vacuum-sealed under pressure in a bag or pouch. The advantage of sealing the food under pressure is it allows it to cook in its' juices developing the perfect texture while infusing the dish with flavor.
A common variation to vacuum sealing is to use freezer bags where the air is removed using the water displacement method. Reusable silicone sous vide pouches are also becoming more common.
If you're interested in learning more about the ins and outs of sous vide, read What is Sous Vide Cooking and Why It Works.
What Makes the Best Sous Vide Recipes
The best sous vide recipes utilize the low temperature, long cook time, and vacuum pressure to transform ingredients in ways that are difficult to do using traditional methods.This can be to develop a soft, supple texture in cuts that are notorious for turning out tough and dry, like Beef Brisket or Flank Steak.
It can also infuse flavors into a dish in ways that would be difficult using an oven or grill. The long cook time in this Sous Vide Leg of Lamb recipe infuses the flavor from fresh herbs and lemon slices into the lamb, so each bite bursts with bright Medeterrian flavors.
One of the reasons sous vide has become ubiquitous in professional kitchens is its ability to consistently cook ingredients the same way, time after time. This consistency allows professional chefs to cook flavorful dishes by setting specific cooking times and cooking temperatures. There's also very little waste, making it ideal for restaurants.
The technique is popular with home cooks because of its relative ease for meal prep and flexible cooking times.
The Best Foods to Cook Sous Vide
As a cooking method, sous vide works best with whole cuts, such as steaks, chops, or roasts. The flexible cook times and lack of waste make it especially good with more expensive ingredients like beef tenderloin or rack of lamb.What makes the cooking method so excellent with whole cuts of meat, such as roast beef, is that it cooks the entire piece of meat evenly all the way through to a set internal temperature.
This precise level of temperature control makes it easy to cook pork chops to the perfect level of doneness each and every time.
Using a vacuum to seal the food into the bag helps to infuse the flavors of the main ingredient and whatever herbs and spices are added to the bag before they're sealed together. Since the food is cooked in its juices, sous vide is an easy way to concentrate the flavors of vegetables and proteins.
Sous vide is a forgiving style of cooking that works for a wide range of ingredients and techniques. There aren't any other cooking methods that make it easy to cook a juicy steak a perfect medium-rare from edge to edge.
A few popular foods to cook sous vide include chicken breasts, chicken thighs, pork roasts, turkey breasts, salmon, scallops, and shrimp.
Essential Sous Vide Equipment
Getting started cooking sous vide takes a few pieces of special equipment. We've added a few of our favorites to this page. If you're new to sous vide, read Getting Started Cooking Sous Vide for a step-by-step guide along with lots of tips and tricks.Immersion Circulator - An essential piece of equipment for cooking sous vide is an immersion circulator, sometimes called an immersion cooker or sous vide cooker. Circulators heat the water to a specific cooking temperature and circulate it around the water bath.
A good circulator is important because it allows the cook to keep the water bath at the desired temperature for hours on end without allowing hot or cool spots to develop.
Vacuum Sealer - A good vacuum sealer is a useful kitchen appliance that seals the food in plastic pouches before it is cooked. Having the ability to vacuum seal food in bags improves the quality of sous vide cooking and helps food last longer in the freezer while making it less likely to suffer from freezer burn.
Water Bath Container - An important choice for cooking sous vide is the type of container used to hold the water. A lot of cooks use an old cooler or a large stockpot. We prefer to use a large plastic tub with a lid designed to reduce evaporation, which improves the circulator's energy efficiency.
Skillet - The final piece of equipment is a good skillet to finish dishes when they come out of their warm bath. We recommend using a cast-iron skillet for dishes like duck breast and pork tenderloin that call for a quick sear in a hot pan to brown the outside of the meat before serving.
