Sous vide cooking equipment
As I said in the previous post, sous vide is cooking food under vacuum, to do so a couple of appliances are required. The point with sous vide being extreme precision I will talk only briefly of the techniques that can be used to emulate the process as none of them provide enough precision to achieve the restaurant grade dishes that are otherwise possible. I don’t want to be responsible for you ruining a beautiful and expensive piece of beef fillet. Let’s start at the beginning.
VACUUM PACKING MACHINE
Yes! To cook food under vacuum you need to create a vacuum. To do so you’ll need a vacuum sealer. You can find several models of those machines, with prices ranging from £30 to more than £2500. It’s all going to depend on the space you have in your kitchen and determination to using this technique of cooking and of course your bank account. There’s mostly two types of machines, the first one which is mainly used by home cook is the “clamp style vaccum sealer”.
These models are quite good, although not all of them are. Some are no more than glorified bag sealers with very bad vacuuming cappabilities and I wouldn’t recommend them for sous vide applications. The picture above shows the la.va V.300 which is the model I use. It’s very sturdy and has variable pressure settings to allow vacuum packing soft food without destroying them and a liquid stopper that prevent liquid to enter the mechanism of the machine.
There’s lots of other models, in the states, the favorite is the foodsaver range. and you can find something for all wallet size.
The other type of machine are called “chamber vacuum sealers”:
Chamber vacuum sealers are way more expensive cheapest around £1200. But allows you more control on the type of vacuum you want to create and also allow you to vacuum pack liquids, which is very practical when you want to cook food with stock or sauces. they are also very powerful and you can use them to boil liquid at room temperature or use compression which is another technique of sous vide that allows you to compress fruit to change their textures and colour.
WATER BATH
Being able to vacuum pack the food before cooking it is quite important, but not as important as controling the temperature of the water bath. After all you could wrap a chicken breast in several layer of cling film and you’d be very close to what’s necessary. But when it comes to cooking the slightest change in temperature can have a catastrophic effect on what you’re cooking. The following example comes from a thesis written by Douglas Baldwin. See how very little change in water temperature yield very different cooking results.
- ©2008 by Douglas Baldwin
To control the temperature of a water bath several technique exist, you could use a Jam thermometer in a pot and have a bucket of ice and a some hot water at the ready, if the temp drop add some hot water, if it gets too hot add a couple of ice cubes. You wouldn’t like that though, would you? When you know that it take around an hour to cook the eggs above, you would have to stay by the stove for an hour and wouldn’t be able to keep the temperature steady enough anyway.
There’s mainly two types of water bath. Stirred and unstirred. Unstirred bath are able to control the temperature inside fairly precisely, but as it is unstirred, the water is still and chances of having cool spots or hot spot is greatly increased. There’s wide range of models from professional-very expensive models to Home kitchen-quite cheap models.
Above is the New Sous vide Supreme, which will make sous vide available to the every day home Kitchen. A couple of testing have been made and it seems to react quite well. Actually three times Michelin star chef Heston Blumenthal demoed it recently.
Professional grade water bath by Clifton food range. You can find these unstirred water bath for a relatively low price around $500 for a 5L version and can go up to $4000 and more for bigger models
Stirred water bath are what I would recommend. The main difference between those and the models above is that the machine uses a air pump to circulate the water, which helps keep a steady temperature uniformly across the bath. they either look like the unstirred models but most commonly they are look like this:
Polyscience model 7306 lab equipment, made it to the kitchen
Addelice Swid, first immersion circulator dedicated to cooking
You attach the circulator to any type of container, fill it with water and kick it off. the machine is equip with a heating element which heats the water to the desired temperature, a thermometer checks it and a pump agitates the water to circulate the heat uniformly. the machine were first developed as science lab equipment where precision, control and repeatability is key. I own a Swid and it’s a pretty good machine, I would like to be able to compare it with the Polyscience 7306 to see if the price difference is justified. Water agitation is an important point as it’s the only way to garanty a constant and uniform temp. They cost around £400 for the Swid and around £800 for the 7306.
Now you can Vacuum pack and you can cook what else do you need? A thermometer would be a useful item as some technique of cooking involve a higher temperature than needed you need to be able to extract the food when it reaches the desired core temperature. To do so you will need a thermometer with a probe that you can stick in the food through the bag, without loosing the vacuum of course. You’re going to need foam tape and a hypodermic probe. most common kitchen thermometer are not precise enough or don’t have probes fine enough for this usage, so you’ll go toward thermocouple thermometers. these are the one most used in the professional kitchen. they’re quite expensive but cheaper or second hand models can be purchased on Ebay. But then you will still need to buy the hipodermic probe to go with it.
thermocouple
Type-K hipodermic probe
If you pick through the bag, even with a probe that thin, you will loose the vacuum, to avoid that problem, chefs use foam tape that stay airproof, maintaining a perfect seal. If you buy second hand or from an electronic store, make sure that the probe is water proof and the foam tape is food grade.
foam tape
Now you’re set. You are ready to cook sous vide. In a future post I will explain a couple of alternatives to all this equipment, you can start slowly, but if decide that you’re very serious about using this cooking technique, buying some or all of the equipment shown here is highly recommended. Most of these are multi taskers. the thermometer will be useful in any circumstances where you need to check on temperature, in an oven, in the fridge etc… A vacuum sealer can be used lenghen the shelf life of properly refrigareted food or even circuit boads or collector items….
Now get cooking.
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please can i have a price on the model 7306 all included postage and packaging please
[...] blog Fifty four degrees también tiene pruebas y comparativas: Sous-vide cooking equipment y los artículos con la etiqueta [...]
that’s a really nice post,,, a wide range of home and industrial machines a vide are available at http://www.emballage-systeme-sous-vide.fr/ at an attractive prices………..