stove top sous vide – a water wing on the high seas of haute cuisine

JC and I both had a heavy week of recipe testing. Between us, I believe we tried 15 recipes and finalized about 8 of those. Great progress! But we are at the crunch time. (And I am feeling the pressure!)

Sometimes my ideas for recipes are weird. This week, one of my more strange thoughts had JC wondering if I should maybe consider meds. I wanted to try stove top sous vide of salmon. Sous vide is a somewhat new and trendy cooking technique, (although at its core it is one of the oldest and most pure ways of cooking – poaching). Sous vide, French for “under vacuum” is a technique that is a part of the whole molecular gastronomy craze. You take your protein, (in this case salmon – which, according to my research is one of the easiest things to sous vide), and place it in a vacuum-sealed bag. (Luckily, I have a vacuum sealer. They are actually a very handy and fairly inexpensive gadget to own.) You then cook the food in water at a low temperature. The idea is that the sealing of the bag will lock in every bit of moisture and the food will come out with a soft, moist texture while retaining intensity of flavor.

Now in a professional kitchen, you have a big old impressive machine called a thermal circulator in which to sous vide. But these are not only over-sized but also outrageously expensive and therefore totally impractical for a home kitchen. There is, I’ve read, now a gadget you can purchase for a couple hundred dollars to attach to a crock pot and allow professional sous vide cooking at home. But it really seems impractical to expect our cookbook readers to go out and buy this pricey gadget just to be able to make one dish. Instead, I wanted to try the the rogue method, stove top sous vide.

The idea is that, with a gas stove top, you can take a pot of boiling water, a bucket of ice cubes and a meat thermometer and basically recreate the effects of a thermal circulator. (I do want to state here that everything I read prefaced instructions for this technique by saying that it is by no means a perfect vehicle for sous vide cooking – but it sounded close enough to me!)

After seasoning the meat with salt and pepper, and topping with a sliced garlic clove and some lemon slices, I sealed it in a vacuum sealer bag. But my sealer can be a little tricky and sometimes it skips the vacuum step, going straight to seal – which it did this time. I thought it would be fine. The important thing is that the bag is entirely sealed, right? …. Except that once I transferred it to the water, the air-filled bag turned into a flotation device. There it was, a little salmon raft bobbing on the sea of carefully warmed water.

The instructions for stove top sous vide are to use the thermometer and ice cubes to regulate the water temperature, keeping it between 113 and 123 while the fish cooks, (or in my case floats on the surface of the pool sipping a lemon cocktail). But after a few minutes, the fish started turning in color, a sign that the method was working. And then my thermometer went haywire.

So there I stood, stomach growling, with my salmon water wing bobbing in a sea of unknown temperature. What to do? Well, I turned the burner to low, made a fennel and apricot slaw and let the dumb thing cook for another fifteen minutes, hoping for the best.

Even when it is cooked properly, I have one issue with sous vide. Although the food has brilliant flavor and excellent moisture, it has zero texture. This is where my slaw comes in. I believe that an important part of an aphrodisiac meal is to tease the senses with a variety of texture. (More on this in a later post.) By putting my texture-less fish fillet on a bed of raw fennel tossed with deliciously sticky dried apricots, I could layer the dish with both libido-boosting ingredients and a seductive variety of texture.

After about 18 minutes had passed – enough time for JC to make dozens of scoffing sounds under his breath, I sliced open the bag and introduced the salmon to its final resting place atop the fennel. The piece de resistance, I topped the whole thing with a dollop of salmon roe – more texture (as well as a briny sea flavor) while JC stared on, politely silent in his disbelief.

I have to admit, there was hesitation in my first forkful. But then I reached for a second and third. And guess what? JC was on his fourth! Ha! Finally, he spoke. “I was a little worried about this one….” (What JC, potentially raw salmon with apricots and fish eggs to much for you?) Luckily, he was willing to go out on the limb with me and the results? With a little fine tuning I think this one is going to be one of the book’s best… just as soon as we get a new thermometer!

Tags: molecular gastronomy, salmon, sous vide

This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 3:54 pm and is filed under recipes: failure!, recipes: success!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.