Sous vide books, recipes, and other resources
The guides and resources that have helped me get started with sous vide (and some that have been less helpful).
This is the final post in a five-post series about the sous vide cooking method:
- Sous vide pros & cons
- How I use sous vide
- How to try sous vide without special equipment
- Sous vide equipment
- Sous vide books, recipes, and other resources (this post)
Sous vide books
First, a tip
I check out cookbooks from the library before buying them. This has saved me a lot of money, and shelf space. About half of the cookbooks I'm excited about turn out to not be right for my needs once I have them in my hands.
A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking, by Douglas E. Baldwin
Several times through the week, I've said I would have a sous vide food safety resource for you. This is it! I consider this guide a must-read.
This isn't strictly a book, it's more of an online booklet, but it packs so much important and useful information that it carries the weight of a book. Douglas Baldwin has been maintaining his Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking for years. It's available for free online, and it is a kind gift to the world. He breaks down the risk from the most common pathogens, does the math for you on pasteurization, and makes it all clear. The guide isn't just about food safety: it also includes solid guidance for basic sous vide techniques, and some starter recipes.
He has also published a larger, physical book with many more recipes, Sous Vide for the Home Cook, but I haven't read it. I should probably order it in gratitude for the free guide.
Sous Vide at Home, by Lisa Q. Fetterman
This is the only sous vide-specific cookbook that I've actually purchased after getting it from the library. I haven't tried any of the recipes yet, because my goal in finding a cookbook was more about having something to expand my thinking about sous vide, rather than a desire for specific recipes. The recipes here look promising and varied, and reading them has given me that dose of inspiration I wanted.
The Food Lab, J. Kenji López-Alt
This is not a book about sous vide, but rather a detailed general cooking reference that includes some discussion of sous vide. López-Alt is responsible for much of the detailed sous vide experiments and content at Serious Eats.
Under Pressure, by Thomas Keller
This book is quite silly! This is one of the ones I did not purchase after getting it from the library, so this is a recommendation to not bother with this book, except as a curiosity.
It was written in 2008, when sous vide was still mainly associated with the advanced molecular gastronomy world of high-end restaurants like Keller's French Laundry and Per Se. Equipment for the home cook was only barely starting to appear on the market, and was still expensive. The recipes in the book are exactly those used in Keller's restaurants, and are hilariously impractical for home use. This is a coffee table book, not a cookbook. Serious Eats has a great review, where they tried to actually make recipes from the book.
Sous vide recipe websites and apps
Confession time: I have tried a sous vide recipe exactly zero times. I'm not counting basic time & temperature guidelines, I use those all the time, and I've certainly been helped quite a bit by looking at sous vide recipes to get an idea of how things can work. Instead, my m.o. has been to take a non-sous vide recipe I already like and tweak it to use sous vide, as I detailed in my post about how I use sous vide earlier this week, and that approach has kept me plenty busy.
That said, here's where to find recipes developed with sous vide in mind:
Serious Eats
You may have noticed I've linked to the sous vide guides on Serious Eats several times this week; it's one of my go-to resources to figure out ideal times and temperatures. J. Kenji López-Alt ran a whole series of experiments showing how different meats come out at different temperatures; they're a huge help in figuring out how to get exactly what you want. They also have recipes developed for sous vide.
The Breville app
If you own a Breville Joule, you can get access to the Breville app, which has cooking guides very similar to what you'll find on the Serious Eats website, showing what meat texture and color you can expect at varying temperatures. I think that when ChefSteps was developing the Joule (ChefSteps was acquired by Breville), they may have been working with J. Kenji López-Alt and Serious Eats. It also includes recipes developed by ChefSteps, their own Breville kitchens, and a few other sources.
Anova Culinary app
Anova has an app that has many recipes, but it requires a subscription. It seems similar to the Breville app, with cooking guides and recipes. Unlike the Breville app, you don't need to own an Anova tool to get access, you just need to pay the subscription.
Online sous vide communities
In my experience, the online sous vide communities tend to be about 80% posts saying "I cooked this steak," 10% new people getting treated with scorn, and 10% other.
As I mentioned when I posted about how I use sous vide, I'm personally not interested in beef or large cuts of meat, and that's what these groups are almost totally focused on. They tend to be busy comparing cocks talking about the size of their cuts of beef, 18-hour cooks, and what kind of torch they're using to sear it. I'm glad they've found each other, but that's not what I'm needing!
The steak show tends to drown out much other discussion, but there can be some helpful info to be found in the groups by using search tools or spending some time scrolling through. I've found the sous vide Reddit to be less of a rancid cesspool than the Facebook groups.
Wanna be my community? If after reading my personal sous vide pros and cons and how I use sous vide, you feel like you and I are on a similar sous vide wavelength, let's be pals. Let's learn together!
Thank you
That wraps up Sous Vide Week! This week has been a somewhat ridiculous indulgence in infodumping, and if you aren't into sous vide, I'm grateful for your patience as I've been Colin Robinsoning everybody. Thank you.
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