Sous Vide for the Home Cook cookbook [Paperback]

Douglas Baldwin (Author), Michael Eades (Foreword), Mary Dan Eades (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 12, 2010

Containing over 200 recipes to make everyday meals gourmet, Sous Vide for the Home Cook and a temperature controlled water bath will forever change the way you cook, eat, and entertain. Sous vide, the slow cooking method that set the standard among gourmet chefs, is simplified for the home cook in these easy and delicious recipes. This book also includes extensively researched time and temperature tables, how-to basics, and learn-by-doing cooking instructions. A welcome addition to the home cook'Äôs library, it has recipes for beef, pork, lamb, game, chicken, turkey, duck, fish, vegetables, fruits, sauces, and even yogurt and ice cream bases.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Sous Vide (April 12, 2010)
• ISBN-10: 0984493603
• ISBN-13: 978-0984493609
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #16,598 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great introductory resource, July 7, 2010

By 

Hugh B. Anderson (St. Louis) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sous Vide for the Home Cook cookbook (Paperback)

Sous vide cooking, once the province of the elite chefs of the world, is quickly becoming a reality for many home cooks thanks to both the introduction of sous vide appliances and to the resourcefulness of foodie geeks who have devised methods of simulating sous vide cooking in vessels ranging from crockpots to beer coolers. However, having pieced together or purchased a sous vide device, the final obstacle for many a home cook is locating reliable recipes for what is, in essence, an entirely new method of cooking. Sure, it is possible to cobble together a ragged list of recipes and loose formulations of times and temperatures through much Googling and forum reading, but nowhere is there as comprehensive a starting point as can be found here.

That said, here are some of the pros and cons of this cookbook as I see it:

Pros

-First and foremost in many people's minds is food safety. The author literally "wrote the webpage" on food safety for sous vide cooking, and all of that information has been distilled into this book.

-A comprehensive chart of cooking times and temperatures for most cuts of beef, pork, lamb, chicken, duck, venison, fish, and shellfish, plus times for eggs, vegetables, beans, and fruit.

-An introductory chapter that walks through cooking several different types of food, along with the reasoning behind the methods.

-Recipes that help one think out of the standard sous vide box, including custard/ice cream bases, chocolate and caramel sauces, and even yogurt

Con

-Home cooks experienced with sous vide cooking will likely not find anything new techniquewise. Most of the meats are cooked very simply, with little more than salt and pepper, followed by recipes for various sauces to add once the meat is done. While the sauces are decent, saucing to me is the easiest step, and I can turn to any one of my cookbooks for ideas in that regard.

All told, I'm very happy with this cookbook. It has already served as a great lauching pad for exploring this new-fangled (in terms of technology) yet backward-looking (in terms of time-most recipes take advance planning) method of cooking.

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Practical Beginning, September 24, 2010

By 

Corgi Lover "Dylby" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sous Vide for the Home Cook cookbook (Paperback)

This book is an excellent introduction to sous vide cooking. It has the science info, it has the safety info and it has very useful cooking times and temperatures for many different proteins, fruits and vegetables. These things alone make the book invaluable.

The recipes I've tried work, sometimes quite well. But the approach here is not that of a chef. Mr. Baldwin most of the time takes a "let's cook the main ingredient first and after it's done we'll sauce it and give it its individuality." For example you'll find several chicken recipes where the chicken is cooked exactly the same way, and then you create a sauce and put it on it for flavor in the finished dish. This happens with a lot of the red meat recipes, too. I look forward to a sous vide cookbook that has moderately involved recipes where multiple ingredients are combined in the vacuum pouch and they are cooked all together to totally infuse the flavors into the primary ingredient, not just a cook the protein and then paint it with sauce approach. You'll find what I'm talking about in Thomas Keller's UNDER PRESSURE. But that book is mostly to the other extreme with recipes the home cook won't or can't deal with in their complexity, but some are simple and wonderful.

Let me reiterate that the science, safety, cooking time and temperature information make this book invaluable for the imaginative home cook.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE introductory book for sous vide cooking, August 14, 2011

By 

Robert Jueneman (Taos, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sous Vide for the Home Cook cookbook (Paperback)

I have been doing sous vide cooking at home for about five years, and I own virtually every book on the subject that has ever been printed, including the huge Modernist Cuisine set, as well as those by Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal, Grant Achatz, Thomas Keller, Robuchon, Joan Roca, Harold McGee, Kamozawa & Talbot, and Jeff Potter. I love them all, and consult them frequently, and I almost never turn on the oven any more, or even the grill. But the book that I am most likely to grab when I want to fix some thing sous vide that is quick and easy is Douglas Baldwin's "Sous Vide for the Home Cook."

Most of those other authors are world famous chefs with multiple Michelin stars. Their recipes are delicious, but elaborate, and it would help if you had two or three assistants to prep for you.

Douglas, on the other hand, is an applied mathematician who quite literally "wrote the book" on food safety and sous vide cooking, after researching hundreds of scholarly articles on microbiology. He then put his knowledge of mathematics to use and calculated the time and temperature tables that are fundamental to the science of sous vide. If the time and temperature recommendations in the front of the book are too simplistic for you, see his inestimable "Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking" at [...], which should be required reading for all students of sous vide, and is used in courses from Harvard to New Zealand.

In many respects, the most valuable part of the book for the beginner is the Appendix, where he discusses the various types of sous vide water baths and their calibration; plastic pouches and sealers; and food safety, including pasteurization times for meat and poultry. If you are just getting into sous vide, read that section first.

Now it is true that many of his recipes are rather basic, and consist of cooking the fish, meat, or whatever, and then adding a sauce. In part, that is because most home sous vide cooks are probably using something like a FoodSaver rather than a chamber vacuum to seal their food, and therefore coping with liquids would be difficult. It is also true that the book doesn't have any pictures that show plated dishes -- if you want pretty pictures, buy some of the other fancy books, for five to thirty times the price!

Likewise, if you are looking for a technical manual that will explain how to fine tune an external PID controller and other esoterica, this isn't it, although he touches on the subject. (See [...]f, which I co-authored, if you are really interested.)

I would quibble a bit with some of his temperature recommendations, particularly vegetables - I find that corn on the cob is much better at 140F for 30 minutes than the 185F he recommends. But on the other hand, I think that most of the temperatures in Thomas Keller's "Under pressure" are significantly too high, at least to my taste. Chacun à son gout!

Very highly recommended, especially for the home cook that is the intended audience.