Beef in a Bag...

As if Contemporary Cuisine hasn't been interesting enough, the last couple of days have been dedicated to sous-vide cooking. I will let the link speak in detail for me about the process, but we're essentially vacuum-compressing food in bags and cooking it submerged in water at very regulated temperatures.

IT IS AWESOME!

We're one of the few Cordon Bleu schools that have access to the equipment to do this cooking technique (the setup we're using costs upwards of $6000). And the things you can do with this equipment...well...you could cook a piece of beef perfectly but have it look like it's completely raw. I know that seems far from applicable in a usual restaurant...but hopefully you get the idea of what is possible with this technology. You can play with your food...so to speak.

Anyway...we threw all kinds of vacuum-sealed bags of vegetables into perfectly-regulated, 185-degree water to cook (mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, celery, fennel, etc).

What's awesome is you just throw whatever flavors you want in those vegetables right in the bag. You want butter? Toss in butter! You want to herb-infuse those tomatoes? Put basil in that bag! Want to pickle something, but you only have 20 minutes? A little of your favorite vinegar in the bag, toss it in the "hot tub," and you're golden.

HOW COOL IS THAT!? (**flails arms in excitement**)

And that's just vegetables! Let's talk meat...

Chef put an entire Brisket in a bag and cooked it at a constant 131 degrees for almost 24 hours. We then took that brisket, cubed it and seared it off to give it the appearance we wanted on the plate. You could cut that brisket with a PLASTIC SPOON! I mean, just ridiculous!

Another plus-- there's no juice lost in this cooking process. Anything that seeps out of the meat in the cooking process is poured right out of the bag into whatever sauce you're making. You think you've had a good brown sauce...then you have one with all the flavors from a sous-vide bag. Yowza.

The Herbed (thyme and rosemary) Sirloin was one of the better steaks I've ever had...at least until I had some of the coffee-encrusted variant (that involved cheese and cocoa...tasty I promise) a classmate got to make today. Man that was good.

Again-- you can cut this steak with a PLASTIC SPOON! If you've had a steak like that...you let me know where ASAP. Just amazing plates of food.

Tomorrow we start using seafood with this technique so be sure to check back. I've got the PITT Zoo post to do sometime here too...