Current Topics- Sous Vide Cooking

I finally recovered enough to go back and fill in the blanks of last week for those who were wondering. It was a fast moving intense class. My first attempt at being a short order cook under pressure. I never want to see an egg again!

We continued this unit on Current Topics. We focused on recipe and menu items that utilized a slow cooking method that is popular in today's restaurants.
Sous vide is a cooking technique - which literally means "under the vacuum" and was originally utilized in the early 1970's to minimize product loss when cooking foie gras . This cooking method was started in France and is being embraced by chefs worldwide for the preparation of an ever-widening array of dishes. With this technique, food is vacuumed sealed in a polymer pouch and then slowly cooked at a low precise temperature. As a result, foods become tender without loosing their original color, nutrients, or texture. (This is the method that we used to cook the pork bellies for the Garde Manger Banquet we had two weeks ago.)
We also used a marinater that created a vacuum to pull the marinate into the meat then tumbled it. This machine took 20 minutes to fully marinate 2 pounds of meat that would normally have taken 12 to 24 hours. That doesn't account for the time that it took to figure out how to operate it. Thank goodness for instructions.
We vacuumed packed all the various recipes we made today and will complete the final cooking tomorrow "sous vide".


Goodnight