What is the point of sous-vide? And can you replicate it at home without having to buy a lot of expensive kit?

Christine, St Helens, Merseyside

Sous-vide takes the guesswork out of cooking, because it means a chef can monitor a piece of meat or fish to the nth degree and guarantee near-as-dammit-identical results every time. That’s one reason it’s favoured by supermarket ready-meal developers, for whom consistency is, of course, the Holy Grail – often at the expense of flavour. Waitrose’s new range of frozen meals, for example, which launches at the end of the month, makes great play of its use of sous-vide (which it mystifyingly describes as “innovative”: the technique was pioneered way back in the mid-1970s, in the heyday of nouvelle cuisine). Perhaps even more depressingly, though, Waitrose says its new products were developed in response to a 500% increase in searches for “frozen ready meals” on its website in the past year.

To its critics, however, sous-vide is little more than boil-in-the-bag with a physics degree, and takes much of the skill, not to mention the fun, out of cooking. “It’s ideal for larger-scale, high-end restaurants that are seeking consistency and accuracy,” says Adam Byatt, chef/owner of Michelin-starred Trinity in Clapham, south London. “But is that really what you’re looking for when knocking up dinner at home?”

It's little more than boil-in-the-bag with a physics degree

Others are even more forthright. Rowley Leigh, a bona fide legend of the UK cooking scene, with the likes of Kensington Place and Le Cafe Anglais on his CV, takes a characteristically no-nonsense view: “A lot of us have been asking what the point of sous-vide is for years,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s employed by chefs to circumvent the annoying business of actually cooking food – mostly meat and fish – by the traditional methods of touch, feel and timing. By cooking at low temperature for a long time, the proteins never get stretched and overheated.”

Consistency, of course, is the hallmark of any professional outfit worth its salt, but Leigh argues that sous-vide throws out the baby with the (temperature-controlled) bathwater. “Like all ‘idiot-proof’ techniques, it has produced a generation of idiot chefs who cannot cook by conventional means.” Not only that, but many of the flavours that come from regular roasting, frying and baking “have to be faked afterwards, with blow-torches and other gadgets”, adds the cook, whose latest book, A Long and Messy Business, came out late last year. Considering you’ll also need a vac-packing machine, lots of sturdy plastic bags and a temperature-controlled water bath, the expense on kit alone is enough to give anyone the screaming heebies.

That said, Byatt admits he does use sous-vide at work, but “only for one dish. We cook brined wild salmon in olive oil at 55C for nine minutes, and the results are tremendous. Of course, I could achieve much the same in a pan of oil, but that’s very tricky during a busy service and wild salmon isn’t what you’d call cheap.”

In short, while sous-vide has some benefits in a restaurant environment, it’s really not worth bothering with at home, unless you have more money than sense. If you enjoy the process of cooking, as Byatt does, “be prepared to be underwhelmed. And if you’ve been led to believe food tastes better cooked sous-vide, you are very much mistaken.”

Or, as Leigh puts it just a tad more bluntly: “Sous-vide produces food with a soft, pappy texture that obviates the need for teeth, so my advice, Christine, is don’t do it.”

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