The Sous-Vide Thermostat Is the Forgetful Cook’s Best Friend
Cooking sous vide has a reputation for being difficult and time-consuming, and although it requires a little extra equipment and longer cooking times, it’s actually quite cool and rewarding for the disorganized and forgetful.
What is a sous vide circulator?
It all starts with a stick. Despite the complex images of vacuum sealers, large bathtubs filled with water, and water-packed meat, the sous vide circulator is quite small and simple. A sous vide circulator is an electronic device—a wand about 12 inches long—that precisely controls the temperature of the water bath. A water bath is what you use to cook your food.
A sous vide, also called a submersible circulator, has two sides: the side that heats the water (the working part) and the control panel display. The business part has small holes; Here the device sucks in water and heats it up at the outlet. This is part of the circulation. Cold water flows in and warm water is constantly poured out until the water reaches the exact temperature indicated on the panel. The device then continues to maintain that precise temperature. You can use any container to hold water, such as a plastic tub designed specifically for your circulator, a beer cooler, or a Dutch oven.
Why should you cook your food sous vide?
If you think that floating food in hot water is a slow process, you are not wrong. However, the benefits are noticeable. If you set the temperature correctly, you won’t overcook your food. No more accidental well-done steaks or hard-boiled eggs. No more dry meat or fish for that matter. During cooking, food is vacuum sealed. Of course, this prevents the water bath from entering, but just as importantly, the moisture stays inside.
For forgetful people, sous vide cooking is a great option if you’re prone to accidentally leaving things on the stove or in the oven for too long. Just let your sous vide keep a close eye on your dinner. The circulator also helps with cooking, such as when you forget to completely defrost your chicken in the back of the freezer.
Cook frozen foods without defrosting them first.
Take for example the chicken thighs I had for dinner earlier this week. It was Monday (squat day at the gym) and I knew I would come back from my workout craving protein. Unfortunately, I forgot to take the vacuum-sealed package of bone-in, skin-on thighs out of the deep freeze, and at 4:00 p.m., an hour before my gym appointment, they were rock hard.
Submersible circulators worth paying attention to:
Instead of trying to defrost them in a bowl of water, I set the immersion circulator to 175℉ and tossed the chicken, still in the vacuum bag, into the water bath. Then I went to the gym. When I returned, the thighs were fully cooked but not overcooked (that’s the nature of sous vide cooking), and all I had to do was give them a quick sear in a cast iron skillet. I made a quick pan sauce and an even quicker tomato salad (with canned feta and honey ) and dinner was served.
How to quickly defrost protein using an immersion circulator
Sous-vide circulators cannot cool water, but they can keep the cold water moving and tell you the exact temperature of the water, which is helpful from a food safety standpoint. Instead of filling a bowl with cold water and changing it as it heats up, you simply add ice as needed to keep the temperature within a safe range. This saves water (which is expensive) and time.
I use an immersion circulator to defrost large pieces of meat that I plan to cook using another method, such as smoking or roasting. This is especially useful for Thanksgiving, but I have also used it to defrost other whole birds, such as chicken and duck. I have already described my method earlier, but let’s repeat it :
Cold tap water coming out of a regular tap is around 45℉, so try to keep it at that temperature. Fill a large bucket with cold tap water, set the circulator temperature to 45℉ and add ice if necessary to bring the temperature down to that temperature. Turn on the circulator and allow the water to flow around the bird. A frozen turkey will not allow the water to rise in temperature – even though the water temperature is five degrees above the upper limit of the danger zone threshold, the meat itself will remain within the safe range for quite a long time, and it will definitely benefit. I will not stay in the danger zone for two hours.
If you start to get a little nervous towards the end of the thaw, you can add a little more ice and lower the circulator temperature to 39℉. (I also turned the water temperature to about 60℉ and then lowered it by adding ice once the turkey started to soften.)
Use a sous vide thermostat as a drink cooler
Place damp kitchen towels ; you don’t need them anymore. Room temperature drinks can be chilled in just 10 minutes using an immersion circulator. As I mentioned earlier , sous vide machines cannot refrigerate, but they can circulate water, and this is where ocean movement works very well:
Just set the circulator as low as possible—my Anova goes down to 32℉—and add a few ice cubes to bring it down. Once the bath is nice and cold, place the bottle of whatever you’re about to drink in it for about 10 minutes. Remove it, dry the bottle, and serve (in chilled glasses, for extra credit).
This trick is a quick and easy way to chill a bottle of rosé, but it works just as well with non-alcoholic drinks like Diet Coke (my favorite drink of all time, alcoholic or not).