Customer Reviews

Sous Vide for the Home Cook cookbook

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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.

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.

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.

Sous vide cooking is based on temperature so that food is safe to eat. Mr. Baldwin has put the science into the art of cooking. This book starts with an introduction on the basics, has a comprehensive chart of temperatures and times and concludes with a discussion on equipment and a detailed chapter on safety. In between are recipes for beef, pork, lamb, game, turkey, duck, eggs, fish, vegetables, fruits, legumes, and desserts. Everything that an average home cook like myself would need to prepare meals that taste like they were prepared by a chef!

Pros
- Ease of use. Following the step-by-step instructions makes it nearly impossible for the dish not to come out perfect! Even if you overcook the meat by up to an hour, it still tastes awesome (this said from experience).
- Safety issues are covered throughout the book and the book concludes with a comprehensive chapter devoted to the subject.
- Easy to use chart of temperatures and times. This is essential for planning.
- Recipes for everything. The recipes in every category are fantastic! The research and effort that Mr. Baldwin put into combining the correct ingredients and preparing the dish using the precise temperatures and times is evident in these delicious recipes.
- Size of book. This book is just the right size to use in the kitchen. It's not too large or too small.

Con
- While I appreciate all the recipes needed for a meal being in one book (a big plus for a beginner like myself), it would be great if there were "meal guides" to suggest a combination of recipes for full meals.

I love this type of cooking and this cookbook makes it easy and enjoyable. Mr. Baldwin even has you-tube videos. These are particularly useful if you use the resealable heavy-duty freezer pouches. I highly recommend this book, especially for the average home cook who is just starting to cook the sous vide way.

I must admit the book did not live up to my expectations. While I expected this to be more of a book about cooking Sous Vide with some recipes than a cookbook with some information about cooking Sous Vide, the great majority of the book is recipes. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and I do look forward to trying many of the recipes in this book, but there are bits of information that seems to be missing from this book which makes the book unusable to me without outside information.

To cook meat Sous Vide, you need to know how thick the meat is, what temperature you want to cook to, how long it takes to get to that temperature, how long it takes to pasteurize once at that temperature, and occasionally how long to keep cooking after pasteurization for touch cuts so that they become more tender. I expected this book to cover all of these topics sufficiently, but it does not.

The initial Time and Temperature section covers a great many meats, but the times given are absolutely useless since the time will depend not just on meat and target temperature, but also thickness of cut, and no thickness is given. I also would have loved a larger treatment of why different temperatures are best for certain items. Why is the only option given for a chicken breast Medium? Is there some reason not to cook a chicken breast medium-rare?

The food safety charts do take into consideration thickness of the meat, but only give 140F for fish and poultry, and 130F and 140F for meat. You also have to brave parsing very difficult mathematical formula to realize these figures are assuming initial temperature of 40F, and additional charts for frozen meat would've been appreciated. As well, the times given are a lumping together of initial time to temperature and time to pasteurization while I would've liked the book to separate the two. Some meats don't really need to be pasteurized presuming they haven't been tenderized and the external surface is seared. So how long do I cook my two inch thick Porterhouse if I don't care about pasteurization? Unless you are an advanced enough mathematician to be able to understand the very dense calculus given, and I presume most home cooks aren't, this book doesn't tell you.

The book continually points you back to the author's website for more information, but the reason I bought this book was because I wanted more information than is on that website. The website is very good, and while it is disappointing that the book has less information than the website on some topics, the book is still overall very good and a must-own of you are a home cook interested in Sous Vide.

In "sous vide for the home cook" Baldwin interprets a broad spectrum of information to present highly usable tables for safe time-temperature cooking and storage practices associated with sous vide cooking. His recommendations are noteworthy for the thorough--but not obtrusive--consideration of scientific underpinnings as well as his personal experience and enthusiasm for the subject. The book includes (e.g., seasoning) tips to avoid gastronomical mistakes unique to this method. This is a should-must-have, affordable guide for the beginner and a handy reference as one continues to develop proficiency with sous vide cooking.

My printed out version of Doug's web pages on sous-vide safety have been invaluable over the years I have used them. I'm happy to buy his book simply to send him some money for the time he has invested in that effort even if there wasn't a single recipe. But there are. As others have pointed out it isn't like Keller's "fancy" book of sous-vide recipes but if you want to do it right you need this information.

A great reference for those cooking sous vide. Also suplemented by Douglas' great website. You may or may not like the recipes - haven't tried any.

I've recently gotten into Sous Vide cooking, and I tried to learn what I needed to know from various places on the web...first off, the information is out there, but I looked at this scheme and that scheme, and I finally decided to make my own immersion circulator, and while I was building it, I decided to change to a sous vide controller with a separate immersion heater/circulator, if needed. But I had to invent the design because I just hadn't found those web pages or youtube videos yet.

If I'd had this book, well, I'd have felt way less like I was foundering around. Basics of everything I've learned have been in this book. Plus there are recipes that my wife thinks she'd like. And there are safety tables at the end. And some web references, which are still pretty good.

I wasted days relearning things that others already knew. I recommend this book highly.

We added this to our gift of a food sealer to our father who is a confirmed foodie. He started reading the book at the dinner table and went home and began sealing. He was thrilled with the guidance from this book. Super fast shipping too.