Cooking Basics: Sous Vide and Stabilization Cooking

Last week, I read an article about sous vide cooking that admonished home cooks not to get too excited about it. Sous vide, it argued, was a new technique. Before they delved into its mysteries, they should master established cooking techniques. Sauté before your sous vide... or something like that.

I spent a good bit of time this morning looking for this article, but I can't find it. I suppose that's just as well, since I don't want to lend any credence to the argument I found there. Normally, I'm fairly charitable with the arguments of others, but this one made no sense to me. Why? Because cooking sous vide is just about the most basic technique I know.

Of course, this is dependent upon what I mean by basic. Sous vide is certainly new. It was invented about 50 years ago. Still, there's no reason we should be learning and mastering cooking techniques in the historical order in which they were developed. I haven't studied culinary school curricula, but I'm pretty sure that the first bit of it doesn't generally involve going out into the woods and tossing dead animals into campfires.

What does it mean to be a basic cooking techniques, then? Cooking is primarily about temperature control – the application of heat to food in a transformative manner. It seems to me that the most basic cooking techniques would be those that do very little other than allow you to apply heat in a controlled way.

In many ways, sous vide cooking is the most pure application of heat to food that I know of. Let's compare it to roasting in an oven. You might set your oven to 350 degrees. That heat will begin at the surface of your food and work its way in. When the surface of your food reaches 350 degrees, the center might only be a bit over room temperature. What you are doing when you cook sous vide is bringing the food up to a consistent temperature that is in equilibrium with its surroundings. You're essentially raising the room temperature. If you want your food to be 135 degrees at the center, and you cook it in an oven, you'll set the oven to a few hundred degrees. The outside of your food will be cooked far more than the inside. In sous vide, your food will be 135 degrees from edge to center. Moreover, when you roast your food, moisture drains away and gasses escape. In sous vide cooking, everything that was placed in your vacuum pack stays there.

It seems to me that if you understand how sous vide cooking works, then you are well on your way to understanding other sorts of cooking. Moreover, the precise temperature control of sous vide can give you tremendous insight into how different foods react at different temperatures: how collagen breaks down in meat, for instance – or when proteins in eggs coagulate. This knowledge is fairly easily transferable to other cooking techniques.

Personally, I think the biggest problem with considering sous vide as a basic cooking technique is the name. There are two big reasons for this.

The first is that “sous vide” refers to vacuum sealing food rather than equalizing it to a stable temperature. I don't know why this was chosen, but I think it was an unfortunate choice. People focus on the vacuum sealing. While important, it isn't really the what I consider the most central concept of sous vide cooking.

The second is that, well, "sous vide" doesn't roll of the tongue. It doesn't become a verb well. Consider the sauté, in comparison. We can't really talk about “sous viding” food. “Cooking sous vide,” is about the best we can do. That's a lot more awkward to say than roasting, baking, or frying.

The best thing I can come up with as an alternative term is Stabilization Cooking. To my mind, this captures, the essence of what this cooking technique is about. It's also easier to give instructions that involve stabilizing something at 135 degrees than it is to use a circumlocution like “cook it sous vide at 135 degrees.”