Culinary Technology: Sous-Vide Intensive, Part 1

By Mindy Lvoff, French Culinary Institute

Eggs waiting to be cracked during the French Culinary Institute's Sous-Vide courseNils Noren, vice president of culinary and pastry arts at the French Culinary Institute (FCI), and Dave Arnold, director of culinary technology, teach three Advanced Studies courses at the FCI: Hydrocolloids, Harold McGee Lecture Series, and the first class of 2009—Sous-Vide.

The two-day Sous-Vide Intensive covers the “what” and history of low temperature and sous-vide cooking (read on for more on why they’re not synonymous), and then spends the majority of the class on the “why” and “how.” True to tradition, the preparation days leading up to this class were filled with agenda re-writes, last-minute custom-building of equipment, threats of quitting, and temper tantrums… and that was just Dave. Nils and Dave are perfectionists who always spend the days leading up to any of their classes rethinking every detail and challenging themselves to make the class better each time.

When the class does finally hit, they always deliver. Only 16 students are allowed in Sous-Vide Intensive, so it becomes a very intimate environment. Nils and Dave prefer when their classes are open forums, with students asking questions throughout. This allows them to constantly tailor the class to the specific interests of those in the room.

My favorite part of the class (and I know from speaking with past students that it enhanced their experience as well) is the Dave and Nils banter: Dave making jokes about how Nils loves to make all his food tubular; Nils sarcastically saying “nice job” if/when Dave explodes something; both of them going off on tirades about which foods and equipment bother them, like canned tuna and digital ovens; or the true origins of Porcini mushrooms.

Dave and Nils don’t teach this class out of obligation—they truly love low temperature cooking. Each of them personally owns a PolyScience circulator (about $950) and together have led The FCI to purchase five. Once upon a time, some of the chefs at our school had never used a circulator and were skeptical about doing so. A year ago, we could have all seven circulators to ourselves for days and no one would care. Now, we can barely get our hands on three at a time and within hours, someone comes to us to borrow one. Dave laughs, “The same guys who used to give me crap about using a circulator now give me crap for hogging them! Circulators are like potato chips. You get one and you want more. Once it becomes an option, you’ll use it all the time.”

Compare our current class to past classes and you can see how prevalent low-temperature cooking is becoming in the industry. Before, many students had heard of, but had no experience with, Sous-Vide. In this last class, every single student either had experience doing low temperature cooking, access to a circulator or some form of steam oven at work, and a few of them even owned their own personal vacuums, circulators and/or combi ovens!

In Class

In class, Dave starts out with an intro covering the history—development of sous-vide in 1960s Sweden and the frenemies of sous-vide cooking: George Pralus (worked with the Troisgros brothers cooking foie gras in plastic pouches and serving it in high-end restaurants) and Bruno Goussault (who worked with Joël Robuchon and French railway company SNCF). After another 15 minutes or so of back story, Dave promises to wrap up the segment shortly, “Almost done with this, I swear to God…” he mutters under his breath, gauging both the students’ and his impatience to move on to discussions and demos on the “why and “how.”

FCI Egg SeriesHe starts with the Egg Series, his classic method of showing what low-temperature, 0— ΔT cooking means. In traditional cooking, you heat the instrument you cook with to higher than the final temperature you want the object you’re cooking to achieve. That difference between, let’s say, the oven’s temperature and the chicken’s final temperature (T) is the Δ (delta/difference). The immersion circulator allows us to cook without that difference by constantly regulating the temperature of a water bath (a much better heat conductor than dry oven air or oil/fat) by circulating it through a heating coil attached to a thermal couple. Simply set the circulator temperature to the end temperature of what you are cooking.

Dave cracks out eggs that have been cooked by circulated bath for an hour set at varying temperatures, ranging from 57°C (basically raw) to 70°C (hard-boiled, right before it gets that green ring around the yolk). As he moves up the temperature range, students begin to understand how each degree change in temperature makes a difference. He cracks out perfectly poached 62°C eggs and then shows his favorite 63°C “custard egg”—so named because of the creamy consistency of the yolk, which cannot be achieved with conventional cooking. Yolks at 64-66°C have a playdough consistency. (Dave suggests molding a playdough yolk into a small animal figurine for your next plating… Maybe not.)

The Egg Series demo is the “ah ha!” moment for most people. As Dave cracks out several 62°C eggs, perfect Eggs Benedict or toast-poached eggs, you start to see service-related benefits. No more simmering whirlpool with a drop of vinegar in it. The only limit on how many eggs you can cook at once is how many you can fit into your bath comfortably. During service, you can plate as soon as you can crack open the egg. And that’s just for eggs…

This article is part one of a series about food technology courses, courtesy of the French Culinary Institute's Cooking Issues blog. Learn more about the French Culinary Institute, and how you can take your culinary career to the next level.