I’ve had a few friends and family recommend getting a vacuum sealer and slowly cooking meat with a sous vide machine. Have any of you done this? What has your experience been? If I get one I plan on mostly using it on chicken and maybe steak.
Any experience or advice would be greatly appreciated.
I have used a Sous Vide quite a bit over several years now.
It is not the end all be all of cooking to be sure, but it is really good for a few different things.
In my opinion one of the very best use of sous vide is for thick pork chops. That really shines a light on the best qualities of sous vide cooking.
With thick pork chops, especially ones you pull out of the freezer, the challenge is always about getting it cooked through without overcooking the majority of the meat.
In traditional pan or oven cooking you use a temperature much much higher than you want the meat to reach. With sous vide you select the temp you want meat to reach and then give it enough time for that temp to permeate the entire piece of meat. You can sear before putting in sous vide, but will need a quick sear after because the moisture will sort of ruin the browning quality while it is in the sous vide, but this is the best technique in my opinion. For beginners, though, I'd just do the sear after pulling it out of the sous vide. Either way a pan sear, or a quick broil, or using a torch to get browning (Maillard reaction) is essential.
Why thick, like 2" or even more, pork chops are the perfect use case is because pork should be cooked to a specific temperature all the way through. Even if some people claim it is safe to eat rare pork, most people are not comfortable with rare pork. By getting to but not 1 degree above the desired finished temperature uniformly from center to edge you do not end up with dried out meat, or potentially worse, overcooked on the outside and still rare in the center.
Works well with beef steaks also, but because most people like medium rare steaks it isn't as critical and I think there are ways to get the very best results with steak other than sous vide. I think sous vide will consistently get you 8/10 results with beef. No more, no less. If you struggle to get consistent results with steaks then 8/10 is a very good result. If you are capable of getting consistent 8-10 out of 10 results using a different method then I'd suggest sticking with those methods over sous vide.
Sous vide takes time. 2hrs is the min time I would cook meat. Seafood might be less but I haven't used sous vide for seafood very much. Also, for a normal sized steak or chop, you shouldn't go much over 4hrs or the meat can start to get mushy.
Chicken, particularly white meat, works really well in sous vide. I just haven't used it much because I typically use dark meat (thighs) and that doesn't benefit as much from sous vide. When I have made chicken breast I was really happy withy the results.
If you have any specific questions I'd be happy to see if I can answer them.
