Sous Vide Cooking Tips from Frozen
How to Save Time and Money While Preparing Healthy, Delicious
Meals
With a few pointers and a little advanced planning, you can
leverage your time using the SousVide Supreme® to feed your family delicious
meals with minimal hands-on time.
HOW TO COOK SOUS VIDE FROM FROZEN
One of the great advantages of sous vide cooking is leveraging
your cooking time. Cooking batches of meat, fish, poultry, or vegetables at
once, then quick-chilling, and freezing them for later use means that dinner
can be ready quickly when you arrive home tired and hungry.
Just follow these easy steps:
1. Buy the economy pack of steak, chicken, or fish.
2. Portion the proteins as individual servings (or servings
suitable for your needs) into cooking pouches.
3. Add your favorite seasonings and vacuum seal.
4. There are two ways of using your freezer to save you time:
OPTION
1: COOK - CHILL - FREEZE – REHEAT*
*Note: This
method works well for meat, poultry, game, and even tougher seafood items, such
as scallops, lobster, squid, and octopus. Most fish, because of its
delicate flesh, can lose some textural quality and might become mushy, if
cooked too long or cooked, frozen, thawed, and reheated.
- Season and vacuum
seal batches of foods that cook at the same temperature and cook them all
together to save time. (Beef, lamb, and pork together at 134F/56.5C to
140F/60C; white meat chicken or turkey together at 146F/63.5C; dark meat
chicken or turkey together at 176F/80C, for instance.
- When they've
finished cooking, quick chill the pouches in an ice water bath (half
ice/half water) for at least 30 to 45 minutes.
- Label with contents
and date and freeze for up to one year.
- Reheat the cooked
food from a thawed or chilled state in the SousVide Supreme at the cooking
temperature for 45 minutes per inch of thickness for meat, poultry,
game, or tougher seafood items and thick pieces of fish.
- If reheating from
frozen, please allow an additional 15 to 30 minutes, depending
on the thickness. You can also use the warm-up time of your water oven as
the thaw period.
- Just set the
temperature and put the frozen pouch(es) of food into the bath at room
temperature. As the water oven warms up to the set temperature, the
food will gently thaw.
- Once the bath
reaches the set temperature, begin timing the reheating period.
- Sauce or sear the
food, as usual, if desired.
OPTION
2: FREEZE - COOK
- Season and vacuum
seal individual portions of meat, poultry, game, fish or seafood.
- Label with contents
and date and freeze the pouches, uncooked, for use up to 6 weeks. (Larger
items, such as roasts, can also be frozen, but they will both take longer
to thaw and longer to cook. See Time and Temperature Chart for guidance.)
- Cook from thawed or
frozen in the SousVide Supreme at the ideal (desired) cooking temperature,
adding extra minutes (about10 to 15 minutes for fish and about 30
minutes for steaks, chops, or pieces of poultry) to the cooking time
to allow for thawing in the water bath, if cooking from frozen.
- You can also use the
warm-up time of your water oven as the thaw period.
- Just set the
temperature and put the frozen pouch(es) of food into the bath at room
temperature. As the water oven warms up to the set temperature, the food
will gently thaw.
- Once the bath
reaches the set temperature, begin timing the cooking period, which will
be about 45 minutes for an inch of thickness for most foods. (Fish,
especially thinner fillets, may only need about 20 to 30 minutes.) See
the Time and Temperature Chart for cooking
instructions.
- Sauce or sear the
food, as usual, if desired.
Another helpful hint: Different
types of previously cooked pouches of food can be reheated at the
same time in the water oven, even though they might have cooked at different
temperatures originally. For instance, vegetables that were cooked at 183F/84C
can reheat in the water bath with meat that cooked (or is cooking) at 134F/56.5C.
Always select the lower of the ideal cooking temperatures to reheat different
types of food together, in this example, set the temperature to 134F/56.5C.
HOW TO COOK MEAT AND VEGETABLES TOGETHER
Beef cooks to a perfect medium-rare at 134F/56.5C and to medium
at 140F/60C, but the fiber in vegetables won’t soften and become tender until
180F/82C. And that means that meat and vegetables don’t want to be cooked at
the same temperature.
Here’s how to bring the meat and potatoes to the table,
perfectly.
- First heat the
SousVide Supreme to 185F/85C and cook the vegetables (potatoes, carrots,
onions, celery – whatever you like) for 45 minutes to 1 hour.
- Reset the SousVide
Supreme to the desired temperature for the meat you wish to cook.
- Remove several cups
of water from and add several cups of ice cubes to the bath to quickly
drop the temperature of the water.
- When it reaches the
desired temperature for the meat, drop in the vacuum-sealed pouches of,
say, steak bites and cook at the lower temperature for another hour.
- The vegetables can
hang out in the water oven to keep warm while the steak cooks.
HOW TO MARINATE FOODS
Unless you have a chamber vacuum sealer, you
will not be able to vacuum-seal liquids. However, here’s a great tip that works
well for advanced meal prep while also allowing you to cook food in a marinade
using the sous vide cooking technique.
- Put the food you wish to marinate (meat, fish, poultry, or
vegetables) into a vacuum-sealed pouch and pour in your favorite marinade.
- Remove as much air from the pouch as possible just by
pressing with your hands and seal the pouch (do not vacuum, just seal)
near its open end.
- Put the pouch into the freezer until the liquid marinade
has frozen.
- Remove the pouch from the freezer and cut the pouch open
just below the existing seal.
- Now vacuum/seal the pouch as usual and cook in the
preheated water oven. Add an extra 30 minutes to 1 hour to your cooking
time for the frozen food to thaw.
HOW TO SAVE TIME WITH GROUPING "LIKE WITH
LIKE"
- Vegetables: Since
most all vegetables can cook in the 183F/84 C to 185F/85C temperature
range and generally will be tender within 45 minutes to 1 hour, you can
fill the SousVide Supreme with pouches of several different kinds of
vegetables to usefor several days and cook them all at once. While the
prep time is hands-on, the cooking time is totally unattended. You can
cook all the vegetables you'll need for the next two or three days while
you’re at the gym working out or on a run or watching a movie or playing
tennis with your friends.
- Meat: All
red meat (beef, lamb, bison) and even ostrich and duck breast can cook
together (in separate pouches) at the same temperature, which for perfect
medium rare is 134F/56.5C. (The length of time depends on the thickness
and toughness of the cut of meat.) If you prefer your meat cooked to a
higher degree of doneness, no problem; just set the SousVide Supreme to
140F/60C for medium or 150F/65C for medium well and the meat will come out
just the way you like it, perfectly cooked from edge to edge. Season these
meats as you like, vacuum/seal them in portions suitable to your needs,
and cook them all at once for their designated period of time, which will
be based on their thickness. Simply pull out the pouches as when their
cooking time elapses, quick chill them in ice water, dry them off, label
with contents and date, and refrigerate for up to 48 hours or freeze for
up to 1 year. (See Time and Temperature Table for
recommendations.)
- Poultry: White
meat chicken or turkey and pork can cook together at 140F/60C to 146F/63C
for about 2 to 2.5 hours. You can fill the water oven with up to 8 turkey
breasts or 12 chicken breasts or 12 to 16 pork chops or 6 pork tenderloins
or some combination of these foods. When the time elapses, remove the
pouches, quick chill them in ice water, dry them off, label the with
content and date, and store in the refrigerator for up to 48 hours or
freeze them for up to a year.
- Reheat the cooked meats in the SousVide Supreme for
dinners throughout the week. (From refrigerator, reheat at 140F/60C for
30 minutes. From frozen, reheat at 140F/60C for an hour.)
- Thaw the meat and add to soups or stews.
- Use the cooked turkey or chicken breast to make turkey or
chicken salad or for sandwiches or wraps.
- Tougher cuts of meat: Cook tough cuts of meat (roasts, spare ribs, grass
fed beef, game) that may need 8 to 10 or more hours to tenderize overnight
while you sleep. You can’t get more hands-off than that!
- Multi-task cooking: Remember that even though you might be using the SousVide
Supreme for a lengthy cooking project, such as pork spare ribs, which need
to cook for 30 hours at 176F/ C, it’s not out of commission. If there is
room in the water bath, you can cook pouches of any other foods that would
cook at that temperature, such as duck, turkey, or chicken leg quarters or
reheat pouches of cooked vegetables.
- Reheating: Reheat
pouches of previously cooked vegetables while fish or tender meats cook.
The delicate flesh of fish needs only to be brought to temperature to be
perfectly cooked, moist and delicious. For a 1/2-inch filet of fish, that
may take only 20 to 40 minutes. While the fish is cooking, drop a
pre-cooked and refrigerated pouch or two of vegetables into the water oven
along side the fish to reheat at the same time. Dinner will be ready in 30
or 40 minutes; it will be nutritious and delicious; your house will not
smell like fish; and clean up will be effortless!
With just a little bit of planning, you can
turn minimal hands-on time into gourmet quality meals with amazing simplicity.
OTHER MONEY-SAVING TIPS
- Buy in bulk, on sale, and in season. Purchase more expensive foods (meat, poultry, seafood) in
family-sized packages and spend a few minutes when you get them home
seasoning and vacuum sealing in portions suitable for yourself or your
family. Watch for sales at your local grocer. More expensive cuts of meat
are often the ‘loss leader’ for grocery stores. Take advantage and buy
what’s being featured.
- Vacuum/seal individual servings of steaks, chicken breasts,
chicken leg quarters, filets of fish. Cook immediately or label with the contents and date and
store in refrigerator for up to 48 hours or in the freezer for up to 6
weeks.
- Let the sous vide process make tough, inexpensive cuts of
meat meltingly tender.
Inexpensive eye of round can become as tender as filet mignon after an 8
to 10 hour swim in the SousVide Supreme while you are at work or even
asleep!
- Select vegetables that are less expensive and plentiful
when in season at your local grocer or farmer’s market.Bring them home and wash, prep, season, and vacuum/seal
them each in their separate pouches at one time. You can refrigerate the
prepared pouches for up to 48 hours to cook on subsequent days. Or you can
cook them all immediately to enjoy some tonight and quick chill other
pouches to store in refrigerator for up to 48 hours.
