Cooking meat sous vide. You can cook anything sous vide, except ice cream maybe. For that you use liquid nitrogen.In the United States, pretty nearly everything and everyone came originally from somewhere else. Even our indigenous peoples trekked in from elsewhere in long-ago times. In cooking, the foods, the techniques, and the presentations often come wrapped in foreign terms. Thanks to Julia Child and others of her generation and subsequent generations, many of these words have become familiar to American diners, but there always seem to be new ones.
It doesn’t help that the foreign words are frequently mispronounced by the American TV foodies and chefs who use them. Nevertheless, with time some of the words find their way into fairly common usage. These days, everyone talks about things prepared as confit, for example. Most people who are seriously interested in food and its preparation would recognize the term mise en place. But food and cooking are so international these days that there are always words you haven't heard before, even if you discover that you have already seen the technique in practice.
My foodie word of the day is sous vide. When this term cropped up repeatedly in a New York Times article about the foodie pig du jour, the curly-haired, high-fat Mangalitsa pig of Hungary, I felt I needed to educated myself. I discovered that sous vide is a French (what else?) technique for sealing food in a vacuum-packed plastic pouch and cooking it slowly in water just below the boiling point. This way the food keeps its shape but becomes incredibly tender, moist, and imbued with whatever flavorings the chef used. Apparently, that's the thing to do with this rare and high-priced pork. It turns out that I had seen this technique used on Iron Chef America, but I don't recall ever hearing the term sous vide. On TV they called it "immersion cooking" No surprise, really. It's a lot easier to pronouce than sous vide. In fact, on Iron Chef America they cook all sorts of things sous vide, just because they can. It's the new confit.
It's a technology thing, of course. Some high-end cooking has gotten very technical indeed. It is called molecular gastronomy by the in-the-know crowd. Did you know that you can wrap food in an edible paper that has a picture printed on it? I don't know why you would, but it can be done, and I'm sure you would have to pay top dollar for it. And then there is lecithin, an emulsifier that is used to make foam to use as a garnish. Foams have become so familiar that cutting-edge cooks probably don't use them anymore. It's just so yesterday. Or you could mix some tasty fluid with sodium alginate and drip it into a bath of calcium chloride, which produces little spheres that are often called "caviar." Halibut steaks cooked sous vide garnished with wasabi foam and carrot caviar-- doesn't that sound toothsome? Another mad science cooking technique involves the use of liquid nitrogen, but you'd better know what you're doing, because it can be dangerous. For example, you can put pureed fruit (a coulis, to those in the know) in a balloon, then bathe the balloon carefully in liquid nitrogen, which freezes the contents. When you peel off the balloon, you have a frozen fruit sphere. Of course, you could probably freeze the stuff in your freezer in some sort of mold, but that wouldn't be as dramatic.
But I digress. If you can afford pork from a Mangalitsa pig, you can cook it sous vide and end up with something very delicious, although you can probably roast this high-end pork in the oven and get something very delicious, too. Or if you can't find the pork, which you probably can't, you can cook eggs sous vide, which is supposed to be a very basic application of the technique. It makes the neatest looking poached eggs you ever did see, although it is a bit expensive. Bon appetit!
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