Kitchen Happenings: Faux Sous-Vide

So, sous-vide cooking is basically vacuum sealing food, and then cooking it in a controlled, relatively low-temperature water bath. What this lets you do is to get food to exactly the right temperature, no matter how long it cooks. You can also seal in other ingredients to add flavor to the cooking process.

I buy a decent amount of frozen fish, and a lot of is is packaged in individually sealed, packages. Normally, I take it out, and then steam, bake, sautee, or do whatever to the fish, and it turns out alright. But, the other day, I took a look at the packaging and just thought, "boy, this is like they're taking the work out of sous-vide cooking."

This ended up being the easiest thing in the world. I filled a 2 qt. sauce pot halfway with water. Put it on my burner at high for a couple minutes, covered. Basically, as the water was getting hot (not to a boil, maybe to 180F), I put in the fish, still in the vacuum package. I assumed that the water dropped in temperature, maybe down to 150F, and I wanted to keep the water at that temperature. So, I put the burner to "warm," and then put the cover on the pot. A few minutes later, you see the fish turn opaque, and you're good to go.

Of course, you'll need to season the fish again, but I find that a simple seasoning (just salt and pepper, or maybe some soy sauce and ginger) works great. The fish is incredibly tender, and still has a great flavor to it.

I'd recommend using fish that are a little fatty (I've used halibut and flounder fillets, both of which were great). They tried to sous-vide salmon on Top Chef, which was disastrous, so I'll probably avoid that. But at some point, I'll give this technique a shot for whatever fish that I can find at the store, and see what works. I'm guessing that tilapia and other lean fish won't be so hot, but you never know.

Anyway, it's about to be grilling season, so I'll probably be moving away from this sous-vide thing for a while :-)

-foodgeek