Is it worth trying sous-vide at home? | Kitchen Aide
If you don’t run a catering outfit from your home kitchen, probably not…
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What is the point of sous-vide? And can you replicate it at home without having to buy a lot of expensive kit?
Christine, St Helens, Merseyside
Sous-vide takes the guesswork out of cooking, because it means a chef can monitor a piece of meat or fish to the nth degree and guarantee near-as-dammit-identical results every time. That’s one reason it’s favoured by supermarket ready-meal developers, for whom consistency is, of course, the Holy Grail – often at the expense of flavour. Waitrose’s new range of frozen meals, for example, which launches at the end of the month, makes great play of its use of sous-vide (which it mystifyingly describes as “innovative”: the technique was pioneered way back in the mid-1970s, in the heyday of nouvelle cuisine). Perhaps even more depressingly, though, Waitrose says its new products were developed in response to a 500% increase in searches for “frozen ready meals” on its website in the past year.