More chefs are including sous vide in their kitchen-equipment arsenals as a way to yield consistent results, save cooking time during service, and free up oven space. For one fervent convert, it’s “the best thing since fire.”
Frank Mirabile, Executive Chef and Director of Food and Beverage at Monroe Golf Club in Pittsford, N.Y., calls sous vide “the best thing since fire.”
“Chefs need to have it in their kitchens,” Mirabile says of the cooking method that places food sealed in airtight plastic bags into a water bath or temperature-controlled steam environment for extended periods of time. “Once you learn how to use it, the products it yields can’t be surpassed, and the service speed is phenomenal.”
Mirabile has been cooking sous vide at his club for more than 10 years. He was introduced to the method while working in France in the late 1990s.
For daily a la carte service, he uses an immersion circulator to cook with the process. For large-batch, banquet cooking, he places the Cryovac bags in his combi oven, which he sets on moist heat at a very low temperature setting. “It creates the same ‘low and slow’ cooking conditions as the immersion circulator,” he explains.
Summing It Up • Chefs are embracing sous vide as a way to cook foods more consistently and eliminate guesswork. • Sous vide reduces a la carte ticket times, and the process can also increase banquet-cooking efficiency. • Sous vide is an easy technique to teach—and many younger chefs are learning it in culinary schools and now expect to find it in the kitchens where they most want to work. |
For Mirabile, the beauty of sous vide is the overall “pristine” product it yields, even when cooking something as delicate as halibut. Seafood comes out moist and fish comes out flaky, without being overcooked, he says.
“You just set the immersion circulator or combi [oven] to your desired degree of doneness, and you get a phenomenal product every time,” he notes. “It keeps the integrity of the product intact throughout the cooking process, and produces perfect individual portions.”
Gathering Steam
While Mirabile is much farther along the sous vide curve than most club chefs, a text poll conducted during C&RB’s 2016 Chef to Chef Conference in San Diego showed that many aren’t far behind. Nearly 60% of those responding to the poll said they now owned some form of sous vide equipment, and 41% said they had between two and four sous vide items on their menu.
These chefs are learning the value of using sous vide to cook meats such as short ribs, which can be seasoned and pre-braised before they are sealed in the bag. The method, Mirabile notes, allows cooks to pick up braised items during service, simply by re-warming them in a water bath. This results in a consistent product every time, he says.
While Mirabile promotes some of the products that are cooked sous vide as “poached” or “gently cooked” on his menu, members at Monroe GC are becoming increasingly aware of the cooking method and are asking questions about it, he says.
But chefs do need to be prepared to be proactive in describing the process, even before they’re asked. When John Clements, Executive Chef of Birchwood Farms Golf & Country Club in Harbor Springs, Mich., first introduced sous vide-cooked beef at his wine dinners, he found himself having to do a lot of upfront explanation to members.
“When you cook meat such as a filet or short ribs sous vide to medium rare, the eye is edge to edge, instead of having a darker ring of more well-done meat around it,” Clements explains. “Guests were asking if their meat was undercooked, because they had never seen such a consistently cooked medium-rare eye before.”
Try This at Home
Jacob Collins, Executive Chef of Moccasin Creek Country Club in Aberdeen, S.D., has also found that guests don’t initially expect such perfect doneness from tip to tip on their steaks. But after having meat cooked sous vide at the club, some members have even gone out and bought immersion circulators for their own home use, he reports.
“It’s super-easy for the home cook,” Collins says. “Eventually, I think sous vide will become the ‘low and slow’ cooking replacement for crock pots.”
About a year and a half ago, Collins bought two cookers at about $200 apiece to use at the club. “With the size of my club’s kitchen and my budget, they were perfect,” he said. “I didn’t have to spend $1,500 on a commercial immersion circulator.”
More Than Just MeatChefs agree that sous vide cooking yields outstanding results for just about every kind of meat and fish. But some chefs are also using it to prepare vegetables, desserts and other items. For example, Frank Mirabile, Executive Chef and Director of Food and Beverage at Monroe Golf Club in Pittsford, N.Y., uses his sous vide equipment to make yogurt in mason jars. “It’s a new thing I’ve been doing and it produces a yogurt with a very beautiful, silky texture,” he said. “It also speeds up the fermentation process, so the yogurt is ready in a couple of hours, rather than a couple of days.” Carrots also come out “super sweet” when cooked sous vide, he reports. Mirabile adds honey, sugar and fresh herbs into the Cryovac bag before it is vacuum-sealed to add more flavor. For asparagus, Jacob Collins, Executive Chef of Moccasin Creek Country Club in Aberdeen, S.D., has found that adding a little olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic and herbs to the Cryovac bag, and cooking sous vide at 155 degrees for 45 minutes, results in spears that are “really tender and really crisp.” And at Birchwood Farms Golf & Country Club in Harbor Springs, Mich., beets—especially baby beets—come out perfectly every time when cooked sous vide for 90 minutes, notes Executive Chef John Clements. Clements also uses the method to prepare rhubarb, fennel and sunchokes, and he even uses his sous vide equipment to poach fruits for desserts. So far, he has done pears, plums and cherries to serve with ice cream—and “they come out perfect every time,” he reports. |
For a Southwest Steak Salad on his restaurant menu, Collins now cooks the flat-iron steak sous vide.
“While flat iron steak is very flavorful, it’s easy to overcook it, resulting in a tough product that can’t be served,” he says. “We cook it sous vide for a couple of hours, then mark it on the grill, and it comes out perfectly tender.”
For banquets at Moccasin Creek, prime rib undergoes 24-hour sous vide cooking. Just before service, the roast is put into a 500-degree oven, to develop a flavorful crust.
“It comes out fork-tender, always consistent,” says Collins. “Sous vide takes a lot of the guesswork out of cooking all kinds and sizes of cuts of meat.”
For a featured salmon dish, Collins poaches the fish in olive oil in the sous vide equipment, and then does a quick sear in the pan before service. “That’s an old, classic dish you don’t see very much anymore, because it takes so much time and space on the stove,” he says. “But when fish is poached in individual bags in the sous vide, it can come out of the cooler to order and be quickly brought up to temperature, giving us a beautifully cooked piece every time.”
To expand his kitchen’s use of its sous vide equipment, Collins uses recipes he finds on equipment manufacturers’ websites, such as anovaculinary.com and sansaire.com, as well as in the Modernist Cuisine set of books. Training others to use the equipment and method hasn’t been difficult, either; Collins reports that even if he is not doing the cooking, everything comes out perfectly.
Bigger Flavor
At Birchwood Farms, Chef Clements has been using sous vide cooking for about three years, to shorten ticket times for a variety of dishes including three-day short ribs, rabbit, pheasant, bacon-wrapped pork tenderloin or chicken.
“Sous vide cooking infuses more flavor into the product, and you don’t get shrinkage,” he says.
During banquet service, it also frees up oven space. Clements has two water bath/circulators at Birchwood Farms, and for banquet cooking, he will often serve the items directly from the water bath in which they were cooked. (For a la carte service, he usually cooks the items in the sous vide equipment, then chills them for retherming to order.)
But what really revolutionized the Birchwood Farms kitchen operation was Clements learning, at this year’s Chef to Chef Conference, that another Conference attendee was successfully using sous vide to batch-cook chicken for all the ways it was used at the pool shack at that chef’s club.
“Instead of taking 20 minutes to cook the chicken to order, it took [him] two to three minutes to retherm it,” Clements found out. Now that Birchwood Farms follows the same practice, he reports, “we always have properly cooked chicken for sandwiches and salads at the pool shack, ready to go.”
Another advantage of sous vide, Clements reports, is that it is easier to teach new kitchen staff to retherm a steak rather than cook it the traditional way. “‘Medium rare’ is subjective; cooking sous vide to a specific temperature and time is not,” he notes.
Clements views the technology as “another arrow in your quiver,” not only to increase kitchen efficiency, but as a staff recruiting tool. “Young people are learning to use this technology and they will expect to see it in your kitchen,” he says. “If you don’t have it, the highest-quality candidates might pass you up in favor of someone who does.”
Recipes:
Southwest Steak Salad
Chicken Roulade
Seafood Risotto
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