Guest post: Better living through chemistry - sous vide
From my son, mathematician and Renaissance man:
Sous vide was an industrial process (and later a restaurant process)
developed to more efficiently cook foods while keeping their juices in the food. It allows you to cook at a temperature which more finely tunes what parts of the food are being broken down. In the example above, the steak is cooked at a temperature too low to coagulate the muscle proteins, but at a temperature high enough to break down the collagen into gelatin. Rare steak’s toughness is usually caused by collagen, and well-done steaks are tough because of the coagulation of muscle proteins. Check out the pictures on the page
“Perfect steak with DIY “sous vide” cookingThe result is (allegedly) an incredibly tender steak that tastes quite rare. You can also use this technique to make “boiled” eggs (cooked in 65C water) which have a firm yolk, and soft whites. Apparently you can also create vegetables that taste fresh, but have a cooked texture (the temperature varies with the egetable). In this case, the temp is too low to break down flavoring chemicals, but high enough to partially dissolve down the cellulose in the cell walls. Some vegetables (like carrots, onions and sweet potatoes) also have enzymes which turn starch into sugar at an accelerated rate at high temperature, but is deactivated by high temperatures. So, cooked in this way, you can end up with very sweet vegetables, with better nutrition than traditionally cooked vegetables.
Needless to say, after I did some reading about it, I bought a probe thermometer on amazon. I will be experimenting with this!
And later…
I got my probe thermometer in the mail today. First I “boiled” some eggs at 64-66C for 75 minutes. The results were then served on toast.
A creamy, perfectly semisoft yolk, together with light, mildly runny whites. Delicious. Milly described them as her “dream boiled eggs”. Then I went to Schnucks, got a 12oz sirloin, and cooked it at 60C for 45 minutes inside of an oven bag with a little soy sauce, balsamic vinegar and some pepper. (The vinegar was chosen to reduce the growth of bacteria, just in case. Also because it’s good.) Then I took the steak out, melted some butter in a very hot skillet, and grilled the outside until it was a crispy brown. Just below the surface of the steak, I found a gorgeous tender pink meat. It was incredibly
tender—never once did I find myself with an unpleasant piece of gristle in my mouth, it all just melted. I feel like my whole life, I
wanted to eat this steak, and now I have.Man that steak was good. I wish I was eating it right now…