Fish in a Bag in a Bath
Sous Vide Cookery
They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I’m an old dog as stubborn as a geriatric mule, so I guess the saying is somewhat correct. Anyway, the older I got, the better I was, and, as David Mamet once so brilliantly put it, ‘youth and vitality are no match for age and treachery’.
The game has changed so much in the past decade. Such new inventions as social media; its essential role in the hospitality industry, the rise in popularity of ‘street food’ that so often provides a faster, cheaper route to market for budding cooks who want to run their businesses, and the never-ending development of food preparation technology that sees the Ferrans’ and Blumenthals’ of the world creating flavours with centrifuging machines that can spin liquids with 30,000 times the gravity of earth.
Another of these ‘new tech kits’ that have seen a proliferation in recent times is sous vide cooking. Pronounced ‘soo veed’, the French term translates to “under vacuum” and describes a method of cooking in vacuum sealed plastic bags at precisely controlled temperatures. Sous vide is different from traditional cooking methods in that by cooking in heat-stable pouches, you can cook at a significantly lower and precisely controlled temperature over much longer times. Compared to cooking over a flame, steam or boiling water, the end product is often vastly different in texture and flavour to those other cooking methods.
So, just what does this translate to? Cooking in a vacuum-sealed bag means flavours cannot escape their destiny through the evaporation and moisture loss that often comes with cooking over high to extreme heat. So you get a taste-bud orgy on your tongue as every nano-particle of flavour from whatever ingredient you’ve managed to bag up works its magic in your mouth. Tasty.
I never worked with sous vide while I was a chef, but it was already becoming commonplace in many restaurant kitchens in London and around the world. So seeing as Issue 11 is themed ‘liquid’, I figured this a perfect opportunity to throw my proverbial chef’s hat back in the ring and see all the fuss.
To get into the game, I needed the tools of the trade. The good folks at sousvidetools.co.uk, suppliers of sous vide equipment to both business and the home punter alike, were kind enough to lend us all the kit we’d need to get wet and cooking; the immersion circulator, the vacuum sealer and a bunch of food safe pouches. Next, we needed to figure out what we were going to cook. A little research online revealed all the big hitters and heroes of water bath cooking; steaks, fish and, surprisingly, from the vegetable corner, carrots.
Having procured a bunch of magnificent sirloin steaks from Hill & Szrok Butchers on Broadway Market, we got to task. We bagged up each of the four steaks with a bit of butter and a sprig of thyme in the pouches and sealed them with the vacuum machine. Realising we had no vessel to cook them in, we used the kitchen sink to test the waters.
Our weapon of choice for this experiment was the new sous vide machine from Anova Culinary. This wand-like machine is not much bigger than a stick blender, only way more jammed with tech, some of which includes temperature-controlled precision that can be controlled from an app on your smartphone. Just what you need when you’re cooking and can’t be assed getting up off the couch to adjust the temperature of your dinner. The control panel is about as simple as you could want. Set your temperature, set your cooking time and bugger off to the pub/couch/bed.
With such magnificent steaks in our hands, we were nervous that we would fuck this up and waste the beef. At one point, we even considered keeping two of the four steaks aside in case we did indeed screw this process up. But we figured, no guts, no glory, and if we were successful, there was a risk of not one of us wanting to share their cut, which we all know can lead to fisticuffs.
Using the app on my smarter-than-me-phone, we set the controls for the heart of the sun, which translates to 54 degrees Celsius with 2 hours of cooking time. The Anova circulator did a fine job getting the water in the sink up to temperature quickly, and, with the four of us hovering above the sink, we dropped in the bags and retired to the living room for too many beers. We almost forgot about the steaks, if not for the App alarm on our phone letting us know dinner was ready. We cut the steaks free from their bags, seared them in a stinking hot frying pan with just a touch of oil, sliced them up and were rewarded for our complete and utter laziness with perfectly edge-to-edge medium-rare flesh, butter-like texture and undoubtedly the finest tasting beef we have ever put in our mouths. Sold.
Next, we had a crack at some baby carrots, cooked for about 45 minutes at 80 degrees (vegetables need slightly higher sous vide cooking temperature to break down the pectin and sugars) and, just as I had read on the interweb – they did indeed taste unlike any carrots we have ever tasted—firm to the tooth, yet a perfect uniform texture throughout with a concentrated sweet carrot flavour.
We were already sold on the sous vide cooking method for the fish test, so we thought we’d mix it up a little. Sous vide is often referred to as ‘water bath cooking, and we happen to have a fantastic Victorian bath in our house. Hello. We called our friends at Sutton & Sons fishmongers on Stokey High street with a simple request; we need a whole shark or other suitably large fish that we can cook in a bathtub. Now while many would shy from such a request, the crew at Sutton & Sons rose to the occasion, suggesting that a hake would be more suitable for this adventure. Sound advice: With some further research, we discovered that a whole shark has high ammonia levels and, unless filleted immediately when caught, can smell like urine when cooked.
The stage was set for a Saturday morning adventure with the Root + Bone editorial team. We immediately hit a snag in that there was no way the vacuum sealer could seal the large bag we planned to put the 3-foot-long hake. The sealer wasn’t designed for such stupidity, and the machine excelled on the steaks and carrots with the correct-sized pouches.
We concocted a cunning plan; bag the fish, use our Henry hoover to extract the air from the bag, and bit by bit, use the heating element of the vacuum sealer to seal the bag. Everything was working perfectly until Henry, constantly looking on with his judgmental eyes, shat himself and broke down, refusing to work. Bastard.
When that failed, like Mcgyver and B. A Baracus before us, we rose to the occasion and employed the dunk-the-bag-in-the-bath-of-water-to-expel-the-air-then-tie-with-elastic-band trick. I love it when a plan comes together.
Now while not exactly a perfect no-air vacuum sealed bag, it was about as near as we were going to get with that asshole Henry the Hoover letting the team down when we needed him most. Bastard. Anyway, next was the easy part; fill the bathtub with water, set our Anova sous vide machine to ‘delicious’ (50 degrees Celsius) and drink beers in the lounge room again for two hours till the fish was cooked to perfection.
How wrong we were. Removing the fish from the bathtub, we concluded that either there was a small leak in the bag allowing water to get in, or the huge, whole fish had merely seeped water from itself to create a, well, I don’t know what to call it, but there were a lot of juices/bathwater. We cut open the bag and, as true scientists/idiots, had to try the finished product. It was edible but could have used about another hour of cooking. It probably could have used some seasoning before going into the bag, but we weren’t sure what the salt would do when cooking this method. Besides that, it was incredibly moist, and the texture was also butter-like.
One of the most surprising revelations we discovered about cooking your food in the bathtub was realising you can take a bath and cook your dinner while you soak the stress of your day away. You can even eat your dinner in the tub once it’s cooked. This changes the ‘come over and take a long hot bath while I cook you dinner, babe’ proposition. And the most significant discovery of the day; you can use the sous vide machine while you take a bath, and the bathwater will never go cold.
So to conclude, Sous vide is everything we have heard from the young bucks – precision cooking rewards the cook with unmatched textures and flavours. What makes it even better is that with affordable machines such as the Anova Culinary sous vide machine, this cooking method and its exacting results are no longer resigned just to top-end restaurants but rather the home cook…or, in our case, old dogs. Next lesson; how to dispose of huge bags of semi-cooked fish without mustering every stray cat in the area.
A huge thank you to Sutton & Sons for providing the fish and having faith in our experiment. If you’re up Stokey way, stop by their shop and chippy across the road.
All photos by Steve Ryan https://steveryanphotography.com/
Check out www.sousvidetools.co.uk for all the kits you need to get involved.
