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Sous Vide Techniques: Entire Meals
Can you cook an entire meal at the same time in a Sous Vide™ Professional?
Yes. There are different ways of doing this – with different temperatures or not.
For foods that you’d like to cook at different temperatures, you have 2 options:
Staged approach – stage it, hold it, finish it, serve it
Since food doesn’t overcook when holding at a lower temperature, one simply organizes the sequence from high to low temperatures. For example, first cook carrots and potatoes at 185°F/85°F for 45 minutes, then lower the temperature to 138°F/59°C for medium-rare beef tenderloin. Adding ice cubes helps to speed up the cool-down process.
The cook-chill-reheat approach
Pre-cook different foods, chill in an ice-bath and store in the refrigerator. Later re-heat all foods at the temperature that you’ve used for the food with the lowest temperature, which would be at 138°F/59°C for example when serving medium-rare meats. Note: an ice bath is the most efficient and safest way to chill down a vacuum sealed pouch of food. Do not put it in the refrigerator to chill down, because it can take days and warms up the rest of your fridge content.
If you like to cook food at the same temperature, but don’t want to lose the other benefits of sous vide:
Slow Cooker concept – one-pot meals and stews
A Sous Vide™ Professional can be used like a slow cooker. Simply vacuum seal your stew into a bag or fill into a container that sits in the water bath and will be cooked by the surrounding temperature-controlled liquid.