When it’s hot in the summer, cooking outdoors on the grill can be a lifesaver, so I am always on the look out for or dreaming up new recipes for grilling. I just posted one for salmon up on the SousVide Supreme blog that would be delicious, even if you don’t have a means to cook sous vide, so I thought I’d share. Granted no other cooking method will guarantee the buttery, succulent, rare to medium rare texture that you can achieve with a water oven set at 116F, but it will still be good eats.
Just grill the salmon, top with the aioli (recipe on the SousVide Supreme blog) and enjoy!
Hi Dr. Eades,
In an effort to move towards more traditional foods (local, orgainc, sprouted things, ferments, etc.), I started digging and researching. To my surprise, several sources lead me in your/your husband’s direction (which is how I found your blog).
My question is regarding the SousVide cooking technique. I get the benefits, but doesn’t it bother you that you are sealing a bunch of fats in a petroleum product and heating it? I know there exists “food grade” plastic, but the FDA also blesses Teflon, BPA-lined canned foods, GMOs and a host of other items that have been show to cause negative health effects.
It seems that while the modern scientific community wants to “zig”, you two (and others) are “zagging”. This is why I find it odd that you would be okay with cooking in a plastic bag.
I would like to know your thoughts on this matter(and/or if you have science to back it up too). Perhaps in an effort to make “sousvide” a little more traditional, you could cook your food in natural sausage casings? Just a thought (I don’t know if they are water tight).
Thanks for all the research you two have done over the years! I tried the Protein Power Plan back in ’99/2000 for a few months (with some success), but as a senior in high school at the time, I quickly got lazy since all my friends ate and drank crap constantly. I just re-ordered the books from Amazon and am going back on it 11 years later.
Cheers,
Alex S.
I love to cook and have found your food posts inspiring. Thank you!
COMMENT from MD EADES: Thanks for all the kind words and glad you have found your way back to healthful eating! As to the plastic issue, we wish there were some way to avoid it — and maybe one will arise — but as of this moment there isn’t a better solution. Natural casings, I think, would be water permeable, so it wouldn’t be much different than putting the food directly into the water, which would amount to boiling or braising–which you could do, of course, in a temperature controlled water bath–but that would result in loss of nutrients into the water.
To set our own minds at peace with this facet of the sous vide cooking process, however, we had our own cooking pouches manufactured to exacting standards that including being sure they were free of BPA, phthalates, and lead and that the pouch material didn’t break down and wind up in the food when heated and held at sous vide cooking temperatures for hours and hours. Is that the perfect final solution? We hope not and we’ll continue to explore what might be better.
There are some things that you can do in the SousVide Supreme, for instance, that don’t require vacuum sealing in plastic. For instance, you can pasteurize or cook eggs in their shells directly in the water (since they come already packaged in their own handy natural cooking pouch); you can turn it into a bain Marie to bake cakes or custards in heat safe cookware or make yogurt or cheese in heat-safe glass jars; you can cook soups or stews in heat-safe glass casseroles (turning it into a very precise slow cooker. And, we’re continuing to search for more things!