If you’ve eaten out at a relatively nice restaurant in the past decade, it’s more than likely that something on your plate was cooked sous vide. Ever wondered how chefs get their steaks so perfectly cooked, what the secret is to getting vegetables so tasty or why a particular fillet of fish has such a satisfying texture? In many cases, the answer is a temperature-controlled water bath, a vacuum sealer and some plastic bags.
Until relatively recently, recreating this technique at home was pretty pricey, but in the past few years the kit has come down in price and you can be cooking like a pro for under £200. To spread the word about sous vide and how much of a difference it can make to your cooking, we enlisted Russell Bateman – head chef at Colette’s – to run a workshop with bloggers and journalists at Le Cordon Bleu in London. As well as demonstrating a few ways in which sous vide works best, everyone got hands-on and cooked their own fish dish using the equipment.
‘We’re doing a halibut poached in vanilla beurre noisette with escabeche vegetables and saffron potatoes, which is quite a classical French dish but using modern techniques,’ says Russell. ‘I wanted to cook every element in the water bath, and we only need to make the beurre noisette over the stove, so only one pan is needed. It’s a great way to show people you can cook lots of different ingredients and create different textures using sous vide.’