I applaud Serious Eats for attempting sous vide in a beer cooler, but the adventurous article didn’t convince me that the mass sous vide revolution would come via Coleman or Igloo.
Remember, sous vide cooking consists of holding water at a specific temperature, and immersing vacuum-sealed food into that water, cooking it right up to the water temperature – and no more.
Not long ago, we tested the SousVide Supreme, a $US450 machine that does this pretty well, and is “affordable” compared to a PolyScience precision water circulator. The basic premise is that you can keep water at a relatively fixed temperature in pretty much any insulated container, so why not use a cooler?
The tester, Chef J. Kenji Lopez-Alt – whose superior cooking skills and experience are in no way called into question here – demonstrated that a cooler could be used as a sous-vide device when bringing tender meats to a pleasing internal temperature (around 52C) before searing, and for holding cooked food at a nice warm serving temperature. I buy that.
But even Chef Kenji says that there are places you can’t go with the cooler method, namely, “the ability to tenderise tough pieces of meat”, and “the ability to cook vegetables without loss of flavour”. Those two are big benefits of sous vide, as is any cooking practice that requires you to hold food at a particular temperature in order to ensure that all bacteria has been killed, without destroying too much of the food’s own flavour by overheating. I wouldn’t necessarily trust a cooler with that task, either.
The cooler sounds like it makes for unexpected fun in the kitchen, and a handy backup for people who already know what they’re doing. But it’s not a replacement for the SousVide Supreme. That’s not to say there’s no replacement for SVS. I’ve seen a few hacks involving slow cookers and temperature controllers that do a job that comes pretty close, and I may test some of those out. I’ll keep the cooler method in mind, too, but for now I’m leaving my beer in it. [Serious Eats]
Karen
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 9:50 PMI tried the beer cooler methodology at home, the major challenge is getting the temp right to start with. My methodology is to have the water 2-3C above your desired temperature, let it stabilize for 10 mins. Then put in whatever you wanted to Sous Vide, quantity does matter, the more food you put in, the temp drop faster. I only putted in 2 pieces of steak. The water temp can be kept for approx. 2-3 hours, and my steak was perfect.
You can argue there is no water circulation around the food, which suppose to allow better heat transfer. But I cannot agree this lack “the ability to tenderise tough pieces of meat”, and “the ability to cook vegetables without loss of flavour”.
As long as you can keep up the temp of the water, it does the same job. It is not rocket science, just heat reaction. And will the process drop dead if you take the food out and spend few mins to add more hot water? It is troublesome, but doesn’t mean it cannot do the job