Sous Vide

If woot.com and Amazon.com were a mall, my husband would be a teenage girl on a Saturday afternoon. One could say that he has a mildly concerning shopping problem. So I was not surprised to come home recently to find a vacuum sealer on my dining room table. Given the number of hours I have dedicated to watching cooking shows, I immediately knew what to do with this new toy: sous vide!

For those of you who are slightly less obsessed with food than I am and may not be familiar with this technique, sous vide is a method of cooking food in an airtight plastic bag in lukewarm water for a long time.  Sounds gross and boring, doesn’t it?  I don’t have any fancy equipment, like an immersion circulator, that the pros, use so I used a regular saucepan and a food thermometer.  For my first attempt, I bought chicken because I didn’t want to ruin anything more expensive than that.  I had pretty low expectations.  Boy, was I wrong.

I found temperature and cooking time guidelines online, and away I went!  I started by sprinkling salt, pepper and chile powder to boneless, skinless chicken thighs.  I vacuum sealed them (a process that was far more fun than it should have been!) and put them in the fridge for a couple hours.  When I was ready, I plunged the entire plastic bag into water I had barely warmed on the stove.  I worried about the plastic melting where it was in contact with the sides of the pan, but it was fine.  After adjusting the gas a few times, I finally stabilized the water temperature at 160 degrees (farenheit), and cooked the chicken for 2 hours.  When I took it out of the plastic bag, it fell apart beautifully.  I wanted to sear it to give it a little bit of a crispiness, and I added some barbecue sauce to the hot pan at the end.  It was the most tender chicken I have ever eaten in my life.

Hopefully the chicken wings I am sous-viding tonight are as successful.  I’ll let you know.  And if Chuck wants to keep shopping like a teenager, he’s got my full support.