Sous Vide Cooking Equipment – What Do you Need To Start Sous Vide Cooking At Home
Sous Vide is a fairly modern cooking technique that involves vacuum sealing a raw food item and then placing it into a hot water bath for a length of time. This method ensures that all the flavor and nutrients of the foodstuff are not lost to the cooking environment. They also provide a different texture to the food than most people are used to which will result in a new eating experience.
The technique was largely reserved for professional kitchens until recently. However various sous vide cooking equipment was released in 2009 that was aimed at the amateur cook. Now cooking enthusiasts can try sous vide cooking at home. But what equipment do you need to do this at home ?
Sous Vide Equipment
Basically there are two elements to this cooking technique.
The first is sealing the food in a plastic bag so that there is no air in contact with it. This is the vacuum part. You need a vacuum sealer machine for this and plastic bags that can be placed in hot water without deterioration or affecting the food in any way.
There are a number of vacuum sealing machines available on the market at the moment. Most vacuum sealing machines have two options. One is to create a vacuum and seal the bag. This is for solid foodstuffs like vegetables and meat products. The other option is to seal without a vacuum for liquids like soups and sauces. This is needed for liquid items as the vacuum would draw out the liquid as well as the air using the first option.
The plastic bags can be purchased in set sizes or you can get a roll that you can cut to your own desired size.
The next piece of equipment that you need is a sous vide oven. This is actually a water bath. The idea behind sous vide cooking is that you place the sealed food item in a bath of water that is heated.
Usually this temperature is not really high, it all depends on the food you are cooking, the size and how you like your food. You can experiment with this and follow various recipes. This is the fun of cooking and creating interesting meals.
As already mentioned, there are numerous appliances coming out now that are specifically aimed at cooking sous vide at home. One such item is the SousVide Supreme SVS-10LS and it’s little brother the SousVide Supreme Demi Water Oven.
The SousVide Supreme SVS-10LS can hold up to 10 liters of water in it. This allows you to cook a large item of food or lots of smaller ones at the same time. The SousVide Supreme Demi Water Oven is half the size and obviously has half the capacity. You can still make plenty of portions in this oven however.
These machines are designed to make the this technique of cooking easy for novices. Another piece of equipment that can be used to cook sous vide at home is an immersion circulator. This is a machine that can be placed in any bath of water to heat it up. This is probably consider more difficult to use and seems to be a lot more expensive.
More Sous Vide products will pop up as this innovative method becomes more widespread and popular with the average cooking enthusiast.
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