National Culinary Review

He notes that the end result is greatly affected by the freshness of product and that, in fact, the sous-vide process greatly exacerbates negative products. “You want product as impeccable as possible—as close to slaughter or harvest as possible. So if fish, for example, is a little off, you can’t fix it with sous-vide. The negative attributes are trapped in the bag.” For many restaurants, start-up costs of purchasing a circulator and cryovac machine could be prohibitive, Zearfoss says. “If you want to leave a certain amount of residual pressure in a bag, you’d need a high-end cryovac machine. As Goussault pointed out in one of the courses he presented here, when doing birds with bones, you need a high amount of residual pressure. He also noted that some game—venison and rabbit, for example—are not ideal because they have a high amount of lactic acid that yields a negative, and not aesthetically pleasing, result.” Although Zearfoss especially enjoys Wagu short ribs prepared sous vide, he’s particularly intrigued by the cooking of vegetables. “You don’t want to enclose them without air, since that leads to discoloration. So braised leeks, Belgian endive and other root vegetables plus seasoning, butter and oil work best.” On balance, he believes that any technique, including sous vide, “is only of value if it’s the best technique of the moment in regard to time saving, energy saving, space saving, etc.” Students at the Hyde Park campus begin their training with the Nutrition and Food Sanitation course taught by Richard Vergili, who underscores the need for an approved HACCP plan if you’re doing sous vide in your location. He is impressed by Goussault’s constant time/temperature documentation achieved by inserting probes that penetrate the bags while in the circulator.

“It’s a matter of tracking in two places,” Vergili says. “First, how long is product in a vacuum bag before it’s put into the circulator? It should be within a day or two, because there is one strain of clostridium botulinum that can grow in the refrigerator, but slowly. And second, water should be a minimum of 135°F.” Vergili notes that clostridium perfringens and bacillus cereus are two other bacteria that can grow under anaerobic conditions. “But you can control [growth] by time and temperature,” he says. “If sous vide is done right, it’s OK.”

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There are three circulators in the compact kitchen at The Publican, the 120-seat Chicago restaurant created by executive chef Paul Kahan and chef de cuisine Brian Huston, who also created Blackbird and avec restaurants. With a menu that focuses on pork and seafood, at least one of the circulators is always running, Huston says. “Sometimes we’ll plug in all three to run for 8-12 hours of cooking. We rarely circulate things for an hour or an hour and a half—maybe veggies—but that’s easy to do a la minute. Most sous vide here is long cooking.” Sausage is the exception, going into the circulator for an hour or two. “It needs to be cooking at a consistent temperature. If it’s too high, it could explode, if too long, it becomes too dry,” Huston says. “Make sure it’s partially to fully frozen, otherwise, it [cryovacing] will fill the casing with air, causing the sausage to explode. The sausage can be thawed or partially thawed when actually putting it into the water bath.” Pork shoulder and pork bellies go 10-12 hours. It’s a space-saving thing, and also knowing what the temperature is going to be if you walk away. “You’d traditionally braise for three or four hours, but with sous-vide, you can go longer with the same results,” Huston says.

He aims to go “as old-school as possible,” so fish is never prepared using sous vide. Smoked-in-house fish is refrigerated in cryovac bags to maintain freshness until service.

“Sometimes we pickle fruit in a bag with pickling liquid,” Huston says. “If you put a vinegar in the bag, it will penetrate the fruit faster. So we cryovac it, not sous vide.”