The Sous-Vide Circulator Is a Forgetful Cook's Best Friend
Sous-vide cooking may seem elaborate and mysterious, but it's truly a helpful tool for the unorganized and forgetful.
Sous-vide cooking has a reputation for being elaborate and time-consuming, and while it does require a little extra equipment and longer cook times, it’s actually pretty chill—and a helpful tool for the unorganized and forgetful.
What is a sous-vide circulator?
It all starts with the wand. Despite complicated images of vacuum sealers, large tubs filled with water, and bagged meats in water, the sous-vide circulator is quite small and simple. A sous-vide circulator is an electronic device—a stick that's about 12-inches in length, that precisely controls the temperature of a water bath. The water bath is what you cook your food in.
The sous-vide, also referred to as an immersion circulator, has two sides: the side that heats the water (the business end), and the control panel display. The business end has small openings; the device sucks in water here, and heats it on its way out. That's the circulation part. Cool water goes in and warm water spits out continually until the water reaches the exact temperature you indicate on the panel. After that, the device continues to maintain that precise temperature. You can use any vessel to hold the water, like a plastic tub specifically made for your circulator, a beer cooler, or a dutch oven.
Why should you sous-vide your food?
If you thought floating food around in hot water sounds like a slow process, you're not wrong. However, the benefits are notable. As long as you sent the correct temperature, you won't overcook your food. No more accidentally well-done steaks, or tough hard-boiled eggs. For that matter, no more dry meat or fish. The food is vacuum sealed as it cooks. Of course, this keeps the water bath out, but just as importantly, moisture stays in.
For the forgetful, sous-vide cooking is a great option if you're prone to accidentally leaving something on the stove or in the oven too long. Just let your sous-vide keep a careful eye on dinner. The circulator also helps on the preparation side, like when you've forgotten to thaw the chicken all the way in the back of your freezer.
Cook frozen food without thawing it first
Take, for instance, the chicken thighs I ate for dinner earlier this week. It was Monday (squat day at the gym), and I knew I would return from my workout craving protein. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to remove the vacuum-sealed package of bone-in, skin-on thighs from the deep freeze, and they were solid as a rock at 4 p.m., an hour before I was due at the gym.
Immersion circulators to consider:
Rather than trying to thaw them in a bowl of water, I set my immersion circulator at 175℉ and tossed the chicken, still in its vacuum bag, in the water bath. Then I went to the gym. When I came back, the thighs were fully cooked, but not overcooked (such is the nature of sous-vide cooking), and all I had to do was finish them with a quick sear in a cast iron pan. I made a quick pan sauce and an even quicker tomato salad (with preserved feta and honey), and dinner was served.
How to rapidly thaw protein with your immersion circulator
Sous-vide circulators can’t cool water, but they can keep cool water moving, and tell you the exact temperature of the water, which is helpful from a food-safety perspective. Instead of filling a bowl with cold water and changing it out as it warms, you just add ice as needed to keep the temperature in a safe range. This saves water (which is not cheap) and time.
I use my immersion circulator to thaw a large pieces of meat I intend to cook using another method, such as smoking or roasting. It’s particularly useful come Thanksgiving, but I’ve also used it to thaw other whole birds like chicken and duck. I’ve described my method before, but let’s re-cap:
The cold tap water that comes out of the average faucet is around 45℉, so try and keep it around there. Fill a big bucket with cold tap water, set your circulator temp to 45℉, and add ice as needed to get it down to that temperature. Turn on the circulator, and let the water move and groove around the bird. The frozen turkey will keep the water from climbing in temp—even though the water is five degrees above the upper end of the danger zone threshold, the meat itself is going to stay well within the safe range for quite a while, and it definitely won’t be in the danger zone for two hours.
If you start to feel a little nervous towards the end of the thaw, you can add a little more ice and drop the temp of the circulator to 39℉. (I’ve also started the water at around 60℉, then dropped it down by adding ice once the turkey starts to soften.)
Use your sous-vide circulator as a beverage chiller
Put down the wet dish towels; you don’t need them anymore. Room-temp beverages can be chilled in just 10 minutes using your immersion circulator. As I’ve mentioned previously, sous-vide machines can’t cool, but they can circulate water, and it’s the motion of the ocean that works so well here:
Just set your circulator as low as it will go—my Anova goes down to 32℉—and add some ice cubes to help it drop down. Once the bath is nice and cold, set the bottle of whatever you intend to drink down in the bath for 10 minutes or so. Remove it, dry the bottle off, and serve (in chilled glasses, for extra credit).
This maneuver is a fast and easy way to chill that bottle of rosé, but it works just as well with non-alcoholic beverages, such as Diet Coke (my favorite beverage of all time, alcoholic or not).