Customer Reviews

Cooking Sous Vide: A Guide for the Home Cook

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The book offers only general information as mentioned in previous reviews. The last fifth of the publication is reserved for recipes that are quite generic in instruction. Cook times for different thicknesses of proteins are not given, something that should be taken into consideration using the sous vide method. Douglas Baldwin's free publication "A Practical Guide to Sous Vide" is a much better start for the beginner.

This is a very shallow treatment of an interesting and complex topic. There's a lot of good information on the web, particularly the monumental sous vide thread on eGullet. I had hoped for better information here, but there's not much meat in its less than 70 pages, padded out with very generous line spacing. Disappointing.

This is a short paperback with very few very simple recipes. I was quite disappointed in the amount of information and the level of sophistication of the recipes. Unfortunately there are not a lot of other books around at the moment on this subject. Thomas Kellers book is much more informative, but the recipes are quite complex and time consuming.

I attended a Sous Vide class at an upscale cooking store. This method of cooking is very interesting. I liked the class, but the supplies for the cooking, and the textbook, as presented, cost over $1,000. That's high if you're sure you want to do this, and outlandish if you want to only try it. I searched Amazon and found this book. It is short and to the point!! The author describes the methods, equipment, and recipes while giving the reader choices in equipment. I'm looking forward to trying Sous Vide at an affordable level.

This book doesn't have a ton of new information in it (but you have to expect that from a short book) but it is the only resource I know that takes all the information I've seen around the internet and combines it in one place. If you have a few weeks to research sous vide on your own then go ahead and do that but if you want to get up to speed in a few hours and have a reference by your side in your kitchen then this book is great.

While this book doesn't have a lot of recipes (the back of the book does say "a dozen recipes" which is exactly what it has) the time and temperature charts are invaluable for me. Having a single reference to pull the values from is such a time saver. I don't have to google "sous vide X", click through the first 3 results, read the recipes and pick one of the times in those recipes, I can just look it up in the book. The tips it provided were also really nice and gave me some information I didn't know before. So while it's definitely not a "recipe book", I thought it was a pretty good "cook book" for the home cook starting out with sous vide especially compared to other sous vide books that are 2 to 3 times the price.

I didn't know anything about sous vide cooking and was struggling to find everything online in one place but after reading this book I feel like I have enough knowledge to give it a shot. I could see how someone with a lot of sous vide experience might not get a lot out of it but for a newbie like me it was perfect. I thought the recipes really helped to show how sous vide can be used in different ways and the cooking charts are great.

I'd highly recommend it to any newbies like myself trying to learn how sous vide works.

As a manufacturer of SousVideMagic, I know there is a need of this kind of sous vide book for the home sous vide users.
It is very comprehensive and covers very well the essence of sous vide cooking.
Recipes are very easy to understand and practical to do for the first time sous vide cooks.
Highly recommended and the price is right!
Frank

I read about this type of cooking in the NY Times and was intrigued. Before I invested in buying equipment I decided to get more information. I thought this book, which was mentioned in the article, might be worth it. It really didn't provide any additional information. It was not worth the purchase price.

This book has no information on how the home cook can actually cook sous-vide without having the expensive immersion systems. the cheapest on Amazon happens to bemanufactured by the guy that wrote the introduction. Maybe it was a conflict of interest to advise how you could assmemble a home made tool. there is information via Google on some ideas of how to do this. The other costly item would be a vacuum sealer. The Food saver may have some use but it may not seal bags with marinades in them.
A previous review mentioned that there is more and better information available on Google than can be found in this book.

Amazon does have a "home" sous-vide. There is unit available from Amazon from the aftforementioned Mr. Eades who wrote the introduct the is about 450 plus any shipping.

That is an expensive investment if you just want to "play " around with sous-vide cooking safely as the requted cooking tempatures are unforgiving and as little as 5 deg centigrade can make the difference between tender and a tough piece of meat. The temperatures also have to high enough so that you do not flirt with anaerobic food poisoning.