Hello again readers! I am going to discuss some reasons why purchasing a sous vide may be a worthwhile investment - especially if you enjoy creating restaurant quality dishes in your own kitchen at home. However, I am sure that there are some people reading this who are scratching their heads wondering, "What in the hell is a sous vide?"

Sous vide is French for "under vacuum." This eludes to the fact that whatever ingredients you are preparing using the sous vide (also called an immersion circulator) technique are tightly sealed within a plastic or nylon bag using either a vacuum sealer or using water displacement to remove as much air as possible from the container.

The ingredients and corresponding flavors/seasonings are then cooked in a circulating water bath at a specific temperature for a specific amount of time. The time and temp required will vary based on what it is you are trying to cook.

While this may sound overly technical at face-value, there are a number of ways that preparing your meals by sous vide will make your preparation of food easier and the end results better than ever before.

1. Set it and forget it - Sous vide cooking can be highly useful because it is basically a 'set it and forget it' cooking technique. Once you have allowed your water bath to come up to temp and place your bagged ingredients in the water, you are pretty much done with that component of your dish. This is because the bath is heated to a precise temperature and you have a target window of time, and it is a liberal window, to remove your ingredients. Which means you don't have to hover over it the way you would a chicken in the oven. This will allow you ample time to focus on putting together a time consuming side dish, perfectly pan seared proteins with time to rest, or perhaps a complex sauce to go with your meal.
2. Perfect Doneness - When cooking with a traditional oven the air temperature and the temperature of any cookware you may be using ultimately need to get hotter than the ideal temperature for your ingredients. This means that it is incredibly easy to either overcook or undercook your food. With sous vide cooking you can target a lower temperature than would be recommended for traditional cooking methods which allows you to produce a more tender and juicier dish while still eliminating any potentially harmful bacteria. As long as you follow the recommended temp and times for your ideal doneness, you pretty much can't mess up!
3. Flavor Infusion - Because the ingredients you are cooking are contained in a sealed environment all of the natural juices and moisture are retained within the food. Additionally if you add seasonings, rubs, herbs, or even fruit in with your meats or vegetables you can infuse intense flavors into your food while its cooking. The chicken I sous vide for this article used a pre-made dry rub and then I added some fresh orange slices into each bag. I was pleasantly surprised at how much of the orange flavor came through when I started to dig into the moist and tender chicken. But this ability to introduce flavors is not restricted to food alone. You can also use a sous vide to create your own infused olive oils, vinegars, alcohols, and syrups. And that's just to name a few!

A good sous vide will likely run somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 - $300. As you can see from the accompanying photograph I personally like the Anova Precision Cooker. But there are a number of really good options on the market, and this technology is always evolving. I would recommend doing some research on your own to determine the best sous vide for you. So the question you have to ask yourself is, to sous vide, or not sous vide!