![Sous Vide at Home: The Modern Technique for Perfectly Cooked Meals [A Cookbook]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/514TB5chbmL._SX342_SY445_.jpg)
![Sous Vide at Home: The Modern Technique for Perfectly Cooked Meals [A Cookbook]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81ivlU3pJZL._AC_UL116_SR116,116_.jpg)
Until I had acquainted myself with Sous Vide at Home, I viewed sous vide as one of those cooking techniques that is ideally suited to three or twelve dishes that have almost no currency because they were never cooked before the invention of sous vide equipment. The technique is ideally suited to cooking eggs, poultry, fish, and red meat to a specific temperature - on at which it is safe to eat but where internal proteins have not all contracted to squeeze all the delicious moisture and fat out of the food, leaving it grainy, tough, and dry.
Hollandaise sauce, poached salmon, and pefectly seared steaks are the obvious entries for a book on the subject; and they are found here.
Author Lisa Fetterman has gone beyond the obvious in revealing the unique potential of the technology. She offers Stout-Glazed short ribs where slow cooking "melts the gelatin" in the meat, melding it with stout for a finger-licking presentation. There's chicken liver mousse presented with figs and sourdough bread. The author goes out of the way to describe how to seal your mousse with duck fat and present it as freshly made two days later. Then there's a version of poached carrots with dill yogurt dressing, that raises new ideas about how one might use sous vide in other poaching methods. It stimulates the imagination: how might I reinvent poached pears? Never mind, that's here, too.
These are really good recipes that demonstrate both a powerful grasp of the advantages of this cooking medium and a sophistication in methods for combining a basic food with other foods that might complement it.
Other sous vide cookbooks are better oriented to imparting an understanding the fundamental sous-vide rules: times and temperatures for various fare. This one is more oriented to cooking a specific recipe. So it is better suited to a home cook than to a person who is trying to adapt sous vide to cook their own recipes in a more commercial setting.
The book is thick, beautifully produced, and richly illustrated. I do wish my eyes were forty years younger, as I can only just read the recipes in bright daylight, the font being small and filamentatious. There is a quirky (wide but not tall) page layout that would be beautiful had it not forced the choice of tiny font size.
I bought the spiral bound version form; and I will confess that I regret it.
1) The rings are not of sufficient diameter to gracefully allow the book to be paged through without the pages getting jammed and torn as one pages through it - unless one pays attention as one turns each page.
2) The production quality of the heavily inked pages is so high that I could never cook with the book open for fear of splattering the the artwork. This obviates the reason for buying a spiral bound book.
3) The book designer did not leave ample room for binding the spiral pages, leaving an insufficient margin between the spine and the paragraphs beside it.
Overall, this is a luxurious cookbook that just happens to be about sous-vide. It's the kind of thing that tempts one to spend one's free time through a long series of summer and fall weekends just cooking all the recipes in order to explore a new food frontier.
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