Bittman vs. the Sous Vide Wand
Bittman vs. the Sous Vide Wand
Three consecutive nights with a new gadget: Will dinner be okay?!
Now: Do not be deceived by the lack of my own photography here; this is an interesting cooking piece, but without natural light the shots were dreadful. However, that’s not the point.
The point is that I used a sous vide wand – which looks a lot like an immersion blender (some clever soul could probably merge the two, and we’d have one less appliance in the house) – to cook fish three nights in a row. Encouragingly, the results were consistently within striking distance of what I wanted.
I will share a bit: The “Joule,” which is what this wand is called, cycles water through its body and turns a cold pot of water into a pot of water at precisely the cooking temperature you want it. Though sous vide means “under pressure,” that’s not really what’s happening: The “under pressure” role now means “put the food in a zip-lock and get as much air out of there as you can,” and sous vide has come to mean “A bath of food encased in plastic at hyper-precise temperatures (to within a tenth of a degree, usually) for a pre-determined amount of time.”
There’s a lot to like about this. It’s very exact, given certain parameters; it’s not messy; and you can get some flavors and textures that it would take a lot of work to achieve by conventional cooking means, and sometimes with fewer ingredients and steps. Especially if you don’t care about browning (which is only partly about flavor), it also lends an appealing appearance. It’s also dead easy.
I have a major problem with sous vide in general, but first the good stuff.
My Joule is clearly outdated: You can only control it using Bluetooth, which is horrible, because if your phone is out of juice, or in the car, or in your partner’s car, and your partner’s in Boston … you’re just out of luck. (I did realize I could control it with my iPad, but come on.) The company has recognized this, it seems, because now there are times and temps on the device itself, so I have to hope that the controls are easier.
I broke the thing out because I wanted to make something like tuna confit –tender but not overcooked tuna, kind of like the best canned but fresh. I know how to do this, but it takes at least a pint of olive oil, and there aren’t a lot of uses for tuna-scented oil. (Probably number one would be mayo for turkey tonnato, but how often do you make that?) I thought of my sous-vide wand buried in the drawer and wondered … if I just put some olive oil in there, and some thyme, garlic, salt and pepper, do I get what I want?