You Should Sous Vide Leftovers.
You’ve prepared a meal, stored it in the refrigerator overnight, and now you need to reheat it. Some foods, such as soup, rice and vegetables, reheat great. But other foods, like proteins, don’t do this because you don’t actually heat them, you cook them… and possibly overcook them in the process. In order for a microwave or oven to fully heat whatever you’re cooking, it often has to overheat the outside, causing leftovers to dry out, become tough, or even burn. Of course, you can still eat it, but it will certainly not be as tasty as the first time. But another reheating method may help you avoid this problem altogether.
Sous vide machines trap air and preserve flavor.
Your sous vide machine is designed to circulate water around a completely sealed container, slowly bringing all the food inside it to the same temperature. This means you can’t overcook it. You simply bring it to the ideal temperature and wait long enough for it to heat up completely. It will take longer than in the microwave, but the outside will be no better cooked than the inside. There are other benefits too. Depending on how sous vide works, the container in which the food is heated will be airtight because trapped air can cause it to float. This means there is no air inside the container that could cause the food to dry out or cause the moisture inside to overheat and evaporate. In fact, the opposite happens: the contents of the bag come into contact with each other, actually retaining moisture. For the same reason, vacuum bags are a popular way to make pickles and marinate foods: they work more efficiently in the absence of air.
Stop wasting space in your refrigerator and freezer on air
Planning your reheat sous vide can also save you space in the fridge because ideally you’ll be storing them – or at least the whites – in a vacuum sealed bag, making it easy to toss them straight into the sous vide. This also allows them to fit better in your refrigerator or freezer since the bag will be exactly the same size as the food inside it, so you’re not wasting air storage space (say, inside a Tupperware container).
Ensuring food safety
When you cook food, especially proteins, we are accustomed to certain temperatures that it should be heated to. For turkey, it’s 165°F; The beef ranges from rare to well done, starting at about 135°F. This depends on how well the protein is cooked, but also has something to do with food safety: you want the food to be exposed to a high enough temperature for a long enough time to kill bacteria. However, this is not a strict rule. For example, you can cook at a lower temperature for a longer period of time or at a higher temperature for a shorter period of time to achieve similar results.
How to Reheat Food Safely Using Sous Vide
Of course, it makes sense that when you reheat food, you do so to the same temperature that you originally cooked it at. The FDA is pretty clear in its reasoning that all foods must reach 165 degrees for at least 15 seconds when reheated. In my kitchen, I bring them up to the original cooking temperature (for steak this might be 140F) and leave them at that temperature for an hour after they’re done. Conventional wisdom says it takes 45 minutes per inch of density to preheat the contents of a sous vide container, so I figure for steak it would sit in the bath for about an hour and 45 minutes. The time will be shorter if you are heating something less dense, and longer if it is denser. You get the idea.
Reheating sous vide is certainly not the fastest method, but it will ensure that your food tastes more like it after you reheat it.