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Through my involvement with the Society for Culinary Arts and Letters, I’ve been lucky enough to get access to a review copy of Modernist Cuisine, the 2,400-page, 6-volume tour de force cookbook by Nathan Myhrvold and his team that’s being released next month. For my first foray into cooking from the book, I decided to [...]

It’s an established fact that new owners of temperature-controlled water baths will quickly develop an urge to use them to cook everything in their kitchen. Sure, we all intend them primarily for meat and fish, but before long we start looking for ways to make mashed potatoes, or lentils, or… custard. Ultimately, cooking custard sous [...]

When cooking sous vide, it’s easy to get enchanted by improbably long cooking times, despite the energy expense. Tough cuts of meat cooked for 48, or even up to 72, hours at moderate temperatures have all the textural benefits of a traditional braise, but are supposed to be moist enough to serve as steaks. For [...]

For some time now, I’ve been frustrated by Thomas Keller. See, I’ve tried and tried to make glazed vegetables using the recipe in his Bouchon cookbook, but I can never seem to get it right. There’s just something about the precise combination of cutting the carrots properly, adding the right amount of water, and heating [...]

After my first attempt at ultra-long-time cooking, I decided to go the other direction, cooking for a short time at an ultra-low-temperature. Salmon “mi-cuit” was the order of the day: wild salmon fillets, brined for 10 minutes in a 10% salt solution, dusted with ras-el-hanout from Philippe de Vienne, and vacuum sealed with olive oil. [...]

After posting about my sous vide pork chops last week, I got some great feedback, especially in the eGullet sous vide thread. On the whole, it sounds like other sous vide enthusiasts don’t cook pork chops very often. What they do cook is beef. Lots and lots of beef. I was told that if I [...]

After the 64-degree eggs, the next logical step in my exploration of sous vide was to cook a tender cut of meat. Although the effects of long-time, low-temperature (LTLT) sous vide cooking are most dramatic on cuts with lots of connective tissue, they aren’t a good choice for instant gratification. I happened to have some [...]

When my PolyScience Sous Vide Professional arrived on Friday, I had to decide what to cook in it first. It ended up being an easy decision. Eggs are such a primal food, and so delicious. Also, I had them on hand, which was useful since the immersion circulator arrived more than a week earlier than [...]

I recently decided to order a Sous Vide Professional immersion circulator from Polyscience – or, rather, from their Canadian distributor, Testek Instruments. After a couple of years of debating it, I’m finally diving head-first into the world of sous vide cooking. There’s lots of information on the web about what sous vide is; if you’re [...]