here are two datapoints on sous vide. we’re friends with someone who was a sous chef at a top nyc restaurant, he claims the best chicken salad comes from sous vide chicken breasts.
the other datapoint is from me, i sous vide a thick chuck roast for 48 hours and sear on a jgrill at 900f. it’s delicious, not sure how i’d reproduce the dish without sous vide.
having said that, we’ve moved away from sous vide for everything else.
on the topic of instant pots, i love them for indian food, so many recipes on twosleevers we like. yes, we can make better without the ip but it takes 2-4x longer.
SV has been a godsend for our family meals and work from home parents. The downtime waiting for the sous vide can be used to prep other dishes and everything is immediately ready whenever dinner time happens to be that day (sometimes there are really crazy schedules).
Sous vide makes cooking meat fool proof and as other mentions you can prep other stuff while the meat is in the sous vide.
But it’s still trying to cut corners, and with the right technique a skilled home chef and most certainly a trained professional chef should be able to make 99% of all meat recipes better without sous vide than when using sous vide.
So you show us a link to a website dedicated to sous vide and sous vide only to show examples of top level restaurants that use sous vide ?!?
Of course Michelin restaurants use sous vide, but even the top restaurants in the world cut corners.
If they had the time and would spend the money they would have a TOP SKILLED dedicated meat chef prepping and cooking the meat without using sous vide, but as it is sous vide is a safe secure fool proof way of pre-cooking meat to a constant temperature.
Even top level Michelin restaurants need to cut corners.
Unfortunately many 3-star Michelin restaurants these days are more and more about fancy presentation and gizmo widget thingy dots of flower oils, weird foam dots and small purée and not so much about the real deep tasty old school kitchen craft.
The thing is, we enter this debate from different angles. Your view seems more rooted in looking at cookware in and of itself, whereas I’m more interested in cooking food and see cookware only as a means to an end.
Your presumption is that cookware can always be improved upon. That I agree with. Sure, one can always make a pan more even heating, or whatever.
My presumption is: at some point, marginal improvements to a pan will not meaningfully contribute anything to the success of a final dish anymore.
A cook can correct for lesser evenness.
And as I had said before, a perfectly cooked steak using a suboptimal - from a theoretical point of view - pan, is still a perfectly cooked steak.
We’re both right, we just speak of different things.
Well the one thing I don’t agree with is that “non-sous vide” meat is necessarily better than sous vide given a high skill set. We grew up eating foods cooked a certain way (non-sous vide) so that is what we are use to. I’d argue that the decreased fluid loss makes the meat more juicy, the “slow and low” method retains more vitamins, and the vacuum bags concentrate marinade flavors, all positive things. That being said, I do prefer fish and root vegetables cooked “non-sous vide” as fish cooks quickly so it’s easier to just cook once and root vegetables you typically do want to lose some fluid.
They don’t. Sure wish they did. Still wouldn’t bother with sous vide though.
I’m stuck at Escoffier.
It’s obvious, however, by its name that it’s no stranger to French cooking. Just doesn’t do much for me personally. I like heat, sweat, cuts and burns.
Sorry. I do not time anything. I really like bottom round. Kept rare and sliced thin it is every bit as good as lean sirloin at a better price point. I will, however, pay more for nicely marbled Wagyu sirloin. No idea if it is really Wagyu, but it is delicious.
Escoffier holds up pretty well. My well thumbed copy from the sixties is still an inspiration. He takes a basic notion, such as a poached egg, and comes up with fifty riffs. It is very worthwhile to go back and browse his ideas.
You realize that you’re saying apex, no-compromise chefs and establishments aren’t doing it right? And yet, you are?
I don’t care much for SV. But I raised it as an example of relatively recent cookware innovation that has changed the way we (collectively, not universally) cook.
There’s plenty of room for more innovation, too. Some emerging instances of it are already in haute restaurant kitchens.
The reason I asked about it was the crust appears thinner and a bit blacker than my usual. Nothing wrong with that. The relative absence of a grey band would indicate to me a very high, very fast sear, and a long finish.
I’ve seen these used, but never treid one. I recall one person said if you’re not careful, it makes the meat taste like propane. But maybe they just didn’t know what they were doing…
No “torch taste” is one of the selling points of the Searz-All. If there is any, I can’t taste it, and I use mine a lot. They claim the palladium-coated wire screens are to thank. Years ago, I wrote a detailed review of Searz-All, posted on eGullet.
We have a fireplace in the kitchen of our cabin. I’ve heated one to almost pink-hot in it for the sake of nostalgia, history, or whatever. They work. I obviously don’t make a habit out of it. It usually takes a glass of wine or two too many. Those propane thingies make food smell like a fart in a wet swimsuit.
