Curious about the potential of a science lab to create the perfect steak?  Mathematician and scientist Dr. Douglas Baldwin has taken sous vide cooking to a new level of perfection.  While emersion circulators are not yet regular items at your local kitchen gadget store, sous vide is an up-and-coming revolutionary new technique for healthier, more precise meal preparation.

As a scientist and mathematician, what has inspired you to research sous vide cooking?

As a scientist, I'm a very inquisitive person.  When I saw sous vide mentioned in an article by Harold McGee, I just had to know more.

After reading everything I could find online, I turned to the academic literature.  When I realized much of the information online was wrong, and potentially dangerous, I quickly wrote up what I had learned in my "A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking" and posted it online.  There are still many open questions in sous vide cooking, and I look forward to addressing some of them in future revisions of my guide.

What does sous vide cooking involve?  Is the cooking equipment hard to come by?

Sous vide cooking is really just a method of cooking food at very precise temperatures to achieve results which cannot be obtained using conventional methods.  The raw foods are placed in heat stable vacuumized pouches and submerged in a precisely controlled water bath.

The water bath transfers heat to the food much faster than air would at the same temperature --- you can reach into a hot oven without the air burning your hands, but you would severely burn your hand if you plunged it in boiling water!  The food is sealed in a plastic pouch to keep it from coming into contact with the water, and the air is removed from the bag so that it doesn't insulate the food from the water or cause the bag to float to the surface.

There are quite a few equipment options available.  The first is the ability to precisely control the temperature of the water bath.  Most professionals use immersion circulators, but they typically cost around a thousand dollars.  Most home sous vide enthusiasts use a "PID" controller (from Auber Instruments or Fresh Meal Solutions) to precisely control the temperature of a rice cooker, slow cooker, or roaster; these PID controllers cost less than two hundred dollars and work great.

As for packaging the food for cooking, high quality zip-lock freezer bags work quite well.  Place the food and a little stock (or other liquid) in the bag, submerge all but the top of the bag in water and squeeze out the remainder of the air before sealing.  For a little more money, a FoodSaver or Seal-A-Meal is a very popular solution (although they make adding liquids in the bag with the food difficult).  Professionals typically use vacuum chamber sealers because the bags cost less, but these units cost several thousand dollars.

What are the advantages of this unconventional cooking method over others?  Are there substantial health benefits?

Sous vide cooking gives unparalleled control of texture.  With traditional methods, meat is cooked at temperatures which are much higher than the desired final core temperature of the meat; this results in a bull’s-eye with everything but the very center of the meat being overcooked.  In contrast, meat cooked sous vide is the same doneness at the edge as it is at the center.  Moreover, tough cuts of meat (like beef chuck or leg of lamb) can be cooked medium-rare and held at the temperature until the collagen dissolves into gelatin --- transforming a tough cut of meat into something as tender as filet!

Because the food is sealed in a heat-stable pouch, the food loses significantly fewer nutrients than conventional methods; indeed, vegetables do not lose their nutrients to the boiling water and fish retains much more of its essential fatty acids.  Moreover, since meat is (typically) seared for a very short time at a very high temperature after being removed from the bag, fewer carcinogens are formed than traditional frying, grilling or roasting techniques.

4. What do you see as the future of sous vide cooking?  Do you think it will become main stream on the professional and/or domestic level?

I think sous vide cooking will become very common at the professional level.  At the domestic level, I can easily see it becoming as popular as rotisserie ovens and smokers.