book recommendation

[bosco]

Is there a go to book for sous vide that anyone can recommend??

 

I have no clue times to cook, temps etc for these things.  I want a good book that I can use as a bible/starting point

[MacKenzie]

There are some very important things that need to be read for safety sake. I started with Douglas Baldwin, but that is a few years ago. His book is called "Sous Vide  for the Home Cook" and after Tony's recommendation I bought Modernist Cooking Sous Vide Made Easy.

 

You will find a lot of Baldwin's book on the web that you can view for free.

[egmiii]

Check out www.seriouseats.com. They partnered with Anova to create a sous vide cooking guide. Kenji, the author of The Food Lab column just released a new book. I was going to post a review once I've had more time to read it. While not a complete guide to sous vide, it does offer some excellent material.

[tony b]

Eager to hear what you think of Kenji's book. 

 

I like the Modernist Cooking one, since it has all the time & temperature tables in the back for the different foods/cuts.

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0991050177?keywords=sous%20vide%20cookbook&qid=1445371706&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1

[bosco]

I ordered that book tony. Seems to be one many recommended!!

Thanks everyone

[GrillingMontana]

the chef steps website is a fantastic recourse as well @bosco

[tomahawk66]

I 2nd both Chefsteps and Serious eats as great resources.

Chefsteps has a great PDF guide to times and temps as well as video lessons on a lot of individual cooks, also safety tips as there are potential pitfalls with sous vide.

I haven't got my hands on the FoodLab book yet but Kenji is amazing! Search the serious eats site for sous vide and they have a tonne of info. I love the food labs approach to cooking: improving with science but from a position of great skill and traditional food know how.

I personally cook a lot with sous vide, especially as I've not yet got a KK. You'll find some of my more fun cooks on the forum. 'Smokeless smoked brisket' was a Chefsteps recipe and my go-to duck leg confit is straight off the ANOVA app and is amazing!!

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[Syzygies]

I have Modernist Cuisine at Home, Sous-Vide Cuisine (Joan Roca), Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide (Thomas Keller). I have post-its in each marking the few pages of tables I use as refreshers. No one agrees. For example, a friend and I just braised six beautiful pig trotters, fresh off the pig from an artisan Harlem butcher. We went for 36 hours at 65 C, the consensus value in a range. For our actual recipe we adapted Fergus Henderson (no mention of sous vide), conventionally cooking the braise base, chilling the base, then finishing with sous vide.

 

Other than these tables, this set of books makes for an impressive coffee table collection of questionable actual utility. Joan Roca's book is most squarely a technical tome aimed at training professionals. I managed to find it for far less than current prices, and I appreciate the dual languages as a great way to sharpen my cooking Spanish at the same time. My bias here is that one should always read original sources. If you're afraid of killing someone through complete misunderstanding of the food safety, this book goes squarely for the issues involved.

 

With all due respect to Baldwin, he's a fellow mathematician and at best a strong home cook like any of us, who happens to understand the math and has started a franchise pitching the math. He's using models he trusts, and I don't see a problem with the models. Does he get out a microscope and double check his predictions? Not to my knowledge. All of my training therefore teaches me to take his tables as assertions, not gospel. He's just a guy who realized he understood how to model the curves with respect to meat thickness and such better than he was reading elsewhere. One thing lead to another, and this became part of his identity and income. They're still just models. If I could get good odds in a betting pool that some of his models are off by 20%, I'd jump at the chance to take these bets. Nevertheless, there are no reported deaths following his advice.

 

My general food bias is this: Haute Cuisine is every bit as deeply embarrassing and not to the point as Haute Couture. What is far harder than edible art is to make classic dishes better than one has ever tasted them executed, without tipping one's hand on technique. There are various top chefs who will sometimes pretend to go there, then they recommend cream in Thai dishes, and so forth. If one shares my distaste for Haute Cuisine, then the most technical books on sous vide aren't that useful for home cooks.

 

Rather, sous vide is technique, pure and simple, and should vanish by the time of presentation. With an interest in this technique, one can problem-solve on one's own making better braises, adapting Moroccan tagines and Indian curries. And good luck finding books to support this. Nevertheless, technique never works that way: If one has mastered technique, one reads cookbooks to understand flavor and ingredient combinations, then executes as one sees fit. Most cooking on the planet can be improved with classic French technique, for example, as long as someone has already hid the cream from the cook.

 

Food safety: Avoid the lowest temperatures, because it's juvenile stunt cooking, and flunks the test that one should hide one's technique. Understand that the classic safety rules (pasteurize at temperature NN) are absurdly cautious rules of thumb for the unwashed masses: Safety is a combination of time and temperature, and the numbers we learned in childhood are for one minute, not many hours. Over many hours, surprisingly low temperatures are not only safe, but actually pasteurize.

 

Food doneness: Vegetables don't cook until an hour or more at 85 C. That's too high for any meat sous vide. For complex dishes one needs to problem-solve here. I prefer to make the vegetable base by conventional means, cool it so it doesn't boil over in my vacuum chamber (circulators are great at circulating ice water), then combine the meat for a long sous vide cook.

 

In short, one learns the barest set of basics specific to sous vide, then focuses on the cooking one actually wants to do. The best references for the cooking one actually wants to do will rarely involve sous vide. One adapts on one's own. It is a big mistake to learn sous vide by trying to cook dishes from sous vide cookbooks.

 

[tony b]

Understand completely, Syz, about adapting technique into whatever you're cooking; it's a means to an end! I look at SV the same as I look at using my pressure cooker - is this the best technique for achieving what I want the dish to be?

 

I don't think I've used a single recipe in my SV book, just the info at the beginning on safety, etc. and the tables in the back for time/temp. 

[bosco]

I agree!! I am extremely new to SV and don't want to get anyone sick when I cook with it.  I really do not understand how one chooses a temp and time to cook a cut of meat, but now after reading the two above posts, the readings are only recommended times.  I hope to find a system that works for me and really hope the book I ordered helped. 

 

I just picked my modernist cooking made easy by Jason Logsdon from the mailbox and will begin reading it.  I have never really been one to follow cook book recipes, however, I am hoping that I learn techniques and the cooking table index to better understand SV

[bryan]

Well said Syz. I hope sv cooks hear you.

[tony b]

Will be interested in the feedback from you on that book, Bosco. 

 

If you follow the guidelines, you shouldn't have too much to worry about food safety wise, as the minimum times for a given temperature are to ensure the food is safe. However, don't discount the upper end of the range, as it is generally about not overcooking the food - not in the traditional "doneness" way we're all accustomed to, but you begin to effect the texture in a negative way - the food will start to get "mushy." 

[bosco]

I read the entire book today. Very resoruceful. Lots of do'sand dont's for SV

The table index is exactly what I wanted. Cuts of meat and thickness vs time and temp

[tony b]

Good to hear, Bosco! My book doesn't account for varying thickness in the cuts. Does it make that much of a difference in the cooking times? Just curious.