The average adult eats almost 2000 pounds of food a year, so it is essential that we all learn how to prepare it properly it. Why waste so much of your life eating if you don’t truly enjoy it? Well, one reason people give is that some foods can taste great but be difficult to prepare or require so much oil and salt that it becomes unhealthy. For many people, it simply isn’t possible to always eat food that is delicious, quick and easy to make, while also being good for you.
There is one kitchen gadget, however, which makes all of this possible”: a sous vide machine. The disadvantage of a sous vide cooker is that they can be a bit on the pricier side and take a long time to cook the food, but the method is easy to perform and the result is consistently delicious, cheap, and healthy food. Over time, the costs saved on buying and preparing food will pay for the machine and the other benefits mean that it is well worth the investment.
The sous vide method is also an incredibly versatile option. You can cook meat such as beef, lamb, or pork, as well as eggs and fish. All vegetables will taste better using sous vide, coming out sweet and crispy. This means that entire meals, three times a day, can be made using little more than a sous vide machine. It’s hard to find such great bang for your buck.
What is Sous Vide Cooking?
Sous vide is a method of cooking food for a long time at a low temperature, in order to get the absolute best results out of the food. The ingredients are placed into a vacuum sealable, plastic zip lock bag and then immersed in water which is at a temperature of around 131 to 140 °F for meat and slightly higher when cooking vegetables. This allows the entire piece of food to be cooked evenly. Traditional cooking methods, such as ovens and saucepans, will have to slightly overcook the outside in order to cook the inside. Sous vide is a way around this that creates the most succulent and delicious home cooked food.
Make Even Cheap Food Taste Great
Although sous vide might seem like a fancy and expensive method, it can actually save money. This is because a sous vide machine will tenderize meat, meaning that you can buy a cheap and tough cut and it will still have a luxury and premium restaurant quality taste. So if you are on a budget but love your food too much to cut back on quality, then investing in sous vide could be a financially savvy long term strategy.
Fillet and T-bone steaks are some of the most expensive cuts you can buy, meaning that most people leave them for a special occasion. They are very lean and tender, however, meaning that this is a meal which can be both delicious and healthy. A sous vide machine allows you to buy the cheaper options, that tend to be dry, chewy, and tough when cooked in a pan. A sous vide machine, conversely, retains all the moisture, allowing for juicy and tender steaks every time. This allows for restaurant quality, delicious food even when buying the most affordable produce you can find in your local grocery store.
Easy and Consistently Good Results
The second major benefit of using a sous vide machine is that it allows even the most amateur or inexperienced chef to achieve good results. Unlike other cooking methods, there is very little that can go wrong. This means that you will be consistent in offering this delicious food to guests at dinner parties.
Even if you have never used a sous vide cooker before, it couldn’t be simpler. The food rarely needs preparing, so there is no cutting or seasoning involved. Simply pop the meat, fish, vegetables, or anything else into the ziplock bag and immerse it in the water. It might take a couple of attempts to get the temperature and cooking times right, but once you do, you’ll get the same fantastic results every time.
A Healthier Option
Using a sous vide method makes food so tender and delicious. This is because the vacuum seal means that none of the flavor, aroma, or moisture is lost during the cooking method as it would be in a pan or oven. Therefore, there is no need to add extra oil or salt to rehydrate and flavor the food. The end result is that the food is a lot healthier than if you had used a different method of cooking.
Salt is linked to high blood pressure and decreased kidney function. Despite this, the average person consumes more than six times the recommended amount of sodium chloride. This is understandable, when most food is bland tasting and loses much of its flavor and aroma during the cooking process. With the vacuum seal bags used in sous vide cooking, you will find that you no longer feel the need to add lots of salt to everything. This means that, without even trying, you will be improving your health and lowering your risk of heart and kidney damage.
If you love food, then you need to invest in a sous vide machine. It will allow to create food which is healthy, cheap, easy, and delicious: four qualities of a dish that you may have thought are impossible to all simultaneously coexist. Most people believe that at least one of those factors must be traded off for another, but with sous vide, this really isn’t the case.
Furthermore, these results are consistently achieved without much effort. There really are so many incredible benefits of using a sous vide cooker that you just don’t get from other more popular and traditional cooking methods. So invest the money now and you’ll quickly see that it was worth switching to this lesser though, but miraculous form of cooking.
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