Daily dispatches on the Washington, DC area's food, restaurant and dining scene.
|
Fine Dining at Home
The new SousVide Supreme machine offers home cooks a way to use a technique that's popular with even the most famous chefs.
By
Kate Nerenberg
Will this $449 appliance make your home-cooked meals taste like they came from a good restaurant kitchen? Photograph of SousVide Supreme © 2009 Eades Appliance Technology.
A good chef is known for consistency. That’s why so many—including Citronelle’s Michel Richard—are using sous-vide, a method of cooking that involves poaching vacuum-sealed ingredients in heated water. (See “Hi, I’ll Be Your Server Tonight” in the March Washingtonian.) Beef cooked sous-vide at 134 degrees—the temperature at the center of a medium-rare steak—will emerge from its water bath a rosy pink from edge to edge. Until recently, there was no way for the home cook to use the technique. Then SousVide Supreme hit the market. Is the appliance worth the $449 price? We tested it on a variety of foods.
The boxy machine—available at sousvidesupreme.com—is clunky but easy to use: Program the machine to the desired temperature, seal ingredients with seasonings in Ziploc bags, and wait a few hours. With a quick post-bath pan sear, steak and chicken were juicy and flavorful. Pearl onions, sealed with balsamic vinegar and rosemary, were just as good. An inch-thick salmon filet was perfectly flaky after the suggested 50 minutes. If you like to clip 30-minute recipes, the set-it-and-forget-it machine is as useful as a crockpot—and dinner doesn’t have to mean stew. But if you’re inclined toward cooking from scratch, you might miss the fun of tasting, seasoning, and improvising. This article appeared in the April 2010 issue of The Washingtonian. Subscribe to Washingtonian
Follow Washingtonian on Twitter
Follow the Best Bites Bloggers on Twitter at twitter.com/bestbitesblog
More>> Best Bites Blog | Food & Dining | Restaurant Finder
|
Comments
I disagree completely with the cooking from scratch remark. My wife and I love to cook and think the Sous Vide Supreme is fantastic. While it is a little bit of a different approach, you can create some really astounding food that just can’t be prepared any other way. Tough cuts of meat can be meltingly tender, juicy, and medium rare. The super fine temperature control lets you precisely control how the proteins of an egg set, allowing you to play with the consistency for different dishes. You can cook fish to lower temperatures, getting some unique textures and much subtler flavors than otherwise possible. That’s just not possible anywhere else.
Posted by: Tim, Apr 14, 2010 02:12:41 PM
|
Post a comment
Feel free to leave a comment or ask a question. Because of the prevalence of spam, we ask that you fill out the code in the image below to help us eliminate spam comments. By posting here, you affirm that you are 13 years of age or older. Washingtonian.com reserves the right to remove or edit content once posted.
|
|
|
