Sous vide
It's a French term meaning cooking under pressure. It's a cooking method first tried in France in 1974, hence its French name. Next week, I'll tell you the fascinating history of this scientific gastronomic development, but let me tell you now that the sous-vide technique in the 21st century is far ahead of those early years. The process is simply this:
First, you place the food you want to cook—steak, meat, fish, vegetables, or fruit, for example—in a vacuum bag. Specially designed pressure vacuum sealers extract the oxygen, effectively vacuuming it up. Removing oxygen prevents discoloration in foods like artichokes and potatoes due to oxidation, resulting in perfectly cooked vegetables. This is the first of two stages of the sous-vide technique. The name "under pressure" essentially refers to this stage. But the most important stage of this technique is the second: slow cooking in water at a constant, low temperature. For this, you'll need another piece of equipment.
This device is called Immersion Circulator.
In Turkish, it's something like an immersion circulator. You immerse this circulator in a container of clear water (which is called a water bath), and the device (a) heats the water, maintaining its temperature at a constant and consistent level, and (b) circulates the water slowly and steadily. You place pre-cooled food in vacuum bags into this constant-temperature water bath, then cook, for example, a steak at 65°C for 48 hours. Your steak arrives cooked to the same temperature inside and out, preserving all its flavor and aroma, without losing any water. "The most important culinary revolution of recent times: Sous-Vide"
The idea of sous-vide dates back to the 1960s. Those were the years when vacuum packaging techniques, with plastic packages suitable for food storage, first emerged. The vacuum technique was developed by French and American researchers to pasteurize foods by cooking them in hot water in vacuum packages, thus extending their shelf life. The goal wasn't to develop a perfect cooking technique for fine dining restaurants, but to address the food industry's needs for efficiency and economy. However, as a result of an interesting initiative in 1974, the sous-vide method began to enter fine dining restaurants.
Found while searching for a cure for waste
Three-star chef Pierre Troisgros, who owns a restaurant in Roanne, France, was experiencing excessive melting of fat while cooking foie gras, a type of fattened foie gras. Because foie gras is one of the most luxurious and expensive food ingredients and consists almost entirely of fat, it can melt completely if left in the pan for too long. Troisgros, driven by this predicament, asked Georges Pralus, a charcuterie chef renowned for his research and curiosity, to find a solution. Pralus discovered that by wrapping foie gras in several layers of plastic and cooking it in low-temperature water, the volume loss did not exceed 5%. Once he determined that this was achieved by vacuum-packaging it, the sous-vide technique began to emerge from industrial settings and enter the kitchens of refined restaurants. Cryovac was the leading manufacturer of vacuum bags at the time. Following this invention, Pralus began working more closely with Cryovac and, with the company's support, opened a school to train chefs from around the world in sous-vide. However, Pralus's sous-vide technique was developed through experimentation and lacked a scientific basis. It was merely a craft. However, because relying solely on artistry when cooking with sous-vide could have extremely dangerous consequences, Cryovac suggested Pralus collaborate with Dr. Bruno Goussault, the most renowned industrial scientist of the time, on vacuum-sealing food. Ultimately, Pralus focused on the craft and Goussault on the science, and together they began developing the technique and teaching it to thousands of chefs.
