Having a bunch of components packed in vacuum bags and ready to heat and go was a real lifesaver at times. I was going for specific textures with sous vide, but the convenience aspect shouldn’t be missed. If you make one component of a meal easier, that means just freed up a lot of time and effort for another aspect. Sometimes you have to learn to be lazy to get more done.

1. I already talked about the duck leg confit. It’s incredibly convenient to be able to cook this two weeks ahead of time and just have it ready to go. I oversalted the legs just a touch by leaving them in the salt cure for too long. I suspect this is from the principle that flavors are more intense when cooked en sous vide. There is a lot less fat for the salt to disperse into. Note that the Under Pressure recipe calls for a shorter cure than the Bouchon recipe.

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Alinea have the best duck leg confit I’ve ever tasted, and theirs is produced en sous vide of course. The only possible reason to do it the old fashioned way is if you have to make a few hotel pans at a time. Then maybe it makes sense. Fundamentally, confit en sous vide is the same idea as the classical preparation except that you’re counting on the water bath to have better temperature stability than an oven. Temperature stability means more tender confit. And that’s everything.

My considerations for Keller’s recipe. (more…)

So I had a bunch of leftover food from my cookout, some of which I froze under the original packaging, and others of which I packed in vacuum bags so they’d keep better in my refrigerator. Honestly, I wasn’t thinking of cooking sausage sous-vide. But anyway, how could I resist cooking a bratwurst en sous vide as long as I already had it packed in a vacuum bag? So 70ºC for 20 minutes resulted in perfectly medium-well pork sausage. All the advantages of poaching, but with none of the flavor lost to the cooking liquid.

Here’s a thought for next time. Pack beer with the sausage. Since sous-vide cooking amplifies the flavor of the cooking liquid, you can use nice beer you would never imagine cooking with. Freeze an ounce of nice beer you enjoy drinking, and pack in with the sausage. Think micro brew. Think Delirium Tremens even.

Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide is an odd sort of book, to say the least. From the look of it, it is yet another coffee table foodie book, and that’s certainly the knock on it. But then, it is also a technical cookbook written by chefs for chefs. As the first book, it’s aimed at me with more money but with more money, but that’s not really relevant to this review. Jeffrey Steingarten covers that. Instead, I’m interested in how well the book explains how to cook sous vide.

Here, it’s a mixed bag. There is a rather longish introductory section that explains how The French Laundry came to start cooking sous-vide, and what sous-vide is good for (not everything, obviously), and where it fits in the cook’s repertoire (alongside sauteeing and big pot blanching, sometimes replacing braising). However, unlike Alinea, and very much like The French Laundry Cookbook, it explains along the way. Why this technique for this sort of food, what doing this to that accomplishes, what results to expect, and so on and so forth. Alinea’s recipes are rote, while these recipes are recitations. It is, perhaps more helpful to think of Alinea as a catalogue raisonée, with a hypothetical year of Tour menus. It certainly isn’t a cookbook, in the sense of a collection of recipes one is meant to follow (and since it isn’t, a lot of the press surrounding it simply misses the point).

Explanation is where Thomas Keller/Michael Ruhlman cookbooks always shine. While the recipes don’t include step by step line-drawings like Cooks Illustrated recipes, they’re include an immense amount of detail about the ingredients and how to handle them. Alinea simply asks you to fillet and remove the loin from the Turbot, while Under Pressure tells you that artichokes should be cooked sous-vide because artichokes are susceptible to oxidation, and a certain temperature guarantees the perfect texture. The explanations of ingredients, and how they ought to be treated, as well as the though process of how that particular dish came about is presented in italics. Even if you never intend to buy a vacuum packer, you will grow as a cook reading everything in italics in the book.

Whether the recipes (at least the sous-vide portions) work in the home kitchen (granted, I have a rather strange kind of home kitchen), is something that I want to look at in this blog. This is partly why I find the one-off attempts to cook Alinea at home from every publication that has content about food in Chicago kind of disingenuous, but not Carol’s new Alinea blog. This is the sort of cookbook you have to live with for a long time to appreciate. I’m going to do my damnedest.

One thing that strikes me about how this book differs from The French Laundry Cookbook is how much more the food looks like it comes from Alinea rather than French Laundry. Once, after Grant had come back from eating at El Bulli, Thomas Keller dressed a young Grant Achatz down by telling him that the modernist food he was bringing to French Laundry wasn’t, well, French Laundry. This set up the chain of events that led Grant to Trio and eventually to 1723 N. Halsted. I mean, some of the plating still looks like it comes out of a Nouvelle Cuisine coffee table book (not that I know of any) but others look like tamer versions of “Tomato” (which graces the back cover of The Alinea Cookook) for example.

I am starting this blog with the hope that it will be as useful as Carol Cooks Keller was. Carol’s new blog is about the Alinea Cookbook which is a book I also have. I consider this to be a fork (open source software terminology) of her At Home Blogs.  I want  to keep a lot of her ground rules, because I think they work.

1. Please, please, please feel free to comment, although try to keep your comments as civil as if you were at my dining room table. For the time being, I’m happy to let Wordpress moderate the comments. First time commenters are almost always sent to my inbox for further review, so don’t be too surprised if your comment doesn’t appear right away.

2. I won’t be posting any recipes from Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure.
Amazon sells it for less than $50, and if you want to do sous-vide, that’s really the least of your worries. We will discover (much to our chagrin) that an immersion circulator runs for about a grand, and a chamber vacuum sealer goes for two to four. Yikes! In large part, this blog will turn out to be about how to do this on a budget. Kind of.

3. I don’t work for any of Thomas Keller’s restaurants, although I have cooked professionally before. Not that I necessarily did it well, and I never did it for all that long. Jimbo Cooks Under Pressure is a pun on that time in my life, when I was called Jimbo, and I was cooking under a lot of pressure. From a ticket machine, not a vacuum sealer. While there was even some sous-vide cooking being done, there wasn’t very much of it.

4. In a way, I’m the worst person to be doing this blog. Even though I have some cooking experience, I’m really bad at following recipes, especially not recipes that call for exact measurements. I’m the sort of cook who goes by touch, and by taste, and that’s what makes me hopeless as a baker. It’s one of the reasons I never would have blogged about cooking the Alinea book at home. That said, I have cooked a few things out of the French Laundry Cookbook verbaitim, including both versions of veal stock, and foie gras torchon. But I’ve never done a completed dish. To be honest, I don’t really imagine ever doing a dish start to finish. Instead, I intend to pull together information from a variety of other sources about sous-vide at home, not just from Keller’s book.

Viddy? Ok then. On with the show.

Oh, and by the way,

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