Ep. 191: Sous Vide Cooking

it feels like everyone's searching for the secret to living longer these days better health sharper minds stronger bodies this is the John T and the dog podcast I'm Dr. Marcus Rani and I'm joined by someone who understands performance and resilience better than most international cricketer John T Rose in this show we explore the science of longevity from how our bodies age to the everyday habits that help us stay strong sharp and resilient as the years go by catch full episodes on the IBM podcast YouTube channel and on all audio streaming platforms hello everyone and welcome to Simplified yet another episode where we make you wiser actually make you look wiser without actually making it wiser we can also make you a wiser but uh no I don't know where I'm going welcome to Simplified and uh this is me with uh the ever smiling despite the quality of my terrible jokes uh co-host Tony say hi Tony yeah no if I'm hi everyone if I'm smiling at this time it is because your jokes are really good I think we should tell our listeners ever since uh we've been trying to find a rhythm for Simplified during the lockdown and I finally decided it's best to do it early in the morning we are at our crankiest and uh and the rest of the household hasn't gotten to us and tried to record it before the week so we're actually recording at uh 8 a.m on the 29th november and uh well it's been uh it's normal because uh you saw just you're reasonably fresh in the day and your mind is not yet uh polluted with impure thoughts and actually you're doing all the polluting right so you're trying best to sort of pollute your co-host mind with impure thoughts yeah and your teeth are not yet brushed okay just mine so fresh off the cup of coffee what are you telling us to do about I'm going to talk about something that uh that I've traveled in for a change I know a fair bit of uh from from that experience right so most of the time when we do simplified uh episodes it's uh basically we read up on stuff and we do it but here I can tell you that I'm a uh battlefield hero so there's this joke about uh before I go into the topic I have to tell you there is this joke about this uh guy who is invited to a lecture uh you know colleague and something and uh it's uh you know it's it's his wife asked him what are you going to lecture on so he's embarrassed to tell the real topic so he says it's about uh flying uh in airplanes and uh so the topic really is sex so he's been asked to be about talking sex and so after some days someone meets his wife on the road and says you know your husband's talk was very nice and he was really you know he elaborated a good deal about it you know he told a lot of things that people didn't know and so on so she expressed uh incredulity he says how can he he's been there he's done it only twice the first time he threw up and the second time he's had to offer i must tell you that uh the only new listener i've added to simplified after i've come in is my dad so i think we've lost him also at this point yeah but like i was saying right in the last episode i'm back home and it's nice i think one of the joys of being in your 30s is actually like having conversations appear with your dad and sharing a drink and stuff like that so we'll have to not talk about simplified for a while but okay so uh i'm going to talk about a technique of cooking called uh suvi so i don't know if yeah so i know how many of uh you dear listeners have heard of uh suvi it's it's it's fairly rich you know it's become a popular these days and uh i'll go i'll go into the technique straight and tell you what it is it is also known as low temperature long time cooking what you do is you take uh the food you want to cook it's usually meat low temperature long time cooking is it yeah it's just like uh when you like break open an egg on the bonnet of your car in india yeah you can actually do that in kerala i think you can yeah i have actually broken an egg right before we started recording so it's done by the time so yeah the suvi is that you put the meat uh it works vegetables as well but the food you want to cook you put it in a plastic bag you take the air out so suvi means under vacuum in french you take the air off and so the plastic bag that you've uh put the food in it's clinging to the bag very closely right and then you put it in a water bath which is typically between 55 and uh 65 degrees celsius and you keep you cook you keep it in that bath for a few hours and uh it actually cooks the meat through okay that's what happens and so i've got so um a couple of things first your water bath needs to be maintained at a very constant temperature for this to work so it can't be like 100 degrees for like 10 minutes and like 40 degrees for the other 40 minutes it doesn't work like that it has to be at uh typically if you're cooking chicken it would be something like 63 degrees and it would be 63 plus or minus only one degree and your food will be at that temperature for typically one to two hours okay so you have natural equipment for this yeah you just need so uh in the old days uh you would have uh one of the id controllers and you know so the heater with a sensor and uh it keeps measuring the temperature and if the set temperature is different from the uh the temperature that is sensed then it keeps heating and when it what is the device it's got a pid uh controller so i mean the old days that was what was used and then they sort of packaged it all into what they call a sous-vide cookers sous-vide immersion uh cooker so it's basically like an immersion rod you must have used it when you're in the engineering process you can go a bucket of water okay i didn't know you were doing sous-vide butts like that i mean okay good the only difference here is it has to be at that end so it's so if you want to cook chicken you'll cook it at 63 degrees for two hours and your the immersion heater that you have would heat the water to 63 and it would also keep sensing the temperature so the moment it reaches 63 it stops uh heating yeah and the moment it goes down to 62 it starts heating again so it's always between 62 and 63 okay you really have to cook chicken for two hours yeah so that's the that's the whole uh you know the interesting bit on why sous-vide works so i'm just going to how it works so cooking is all about transforming proteins and structures in whatever you're cooking and uh you know we we can't eat too many things uncooked they do need those uh those proteins to transform and cooking does that so it's it's uh in most of the like a tiger or you know some other animal which is eating meat would not cook they would do all the breaking down inside their digestive system but humans evolved after they we apparently discovered fire more than a million years ago and since that discovered uh how to harness fire so to get to be we all we all originated as hunter gatherers and they're all uh they had to basically uh you know do something they had to do something and the problem is that uh when you when you roast meat on a fire or do something like that the uh the flesh of the animal any flesh is not a very good conductor so if you need to raise the temperature outside of to a very great extent before the inside gets cooked so you usually get meat which is charred on the outside and kind of perfect on the inside right right and it's difficult to get uh that thing you have to be up so that's a taste here so if you if you had a really good roasted piece of meat it would be you know very nice and charred and very different hard on the outside but moment you take a bite it's soft and succulent inside and all of it is cooked so it is very bad and it's difficult so you have to be a really good cook and you really need to know how uh you know how the whole process works and you don't have to do it so suvi takes a guesswork so what suvi does is it it doesn't it keeps you know the meat at the temperature it's supposed to be uh in the interior and it keeps it for a long enough time that the whole piece of meat eventually gets to that temperature so all the proteins that you wanted to transform have transformed okay by the only thing that you don't have is the crisping and the browning outside it's also called a maillard reaction it's a you know it's a process where you know some caramelization of the sugars and the protein and everything happens it's a complex reaction and it gives us a lot of flavor so humans are sort of evolutionarily uh sort of conditioned to find flavor in the browning of the meat so if you find so that maillard reaction what suvi cooks do is they cook the meat entirely and they just brown it on a pan they just just make a pan very hot just sort of char it on the outside or brown it on the outside sear it they call it and uh they serve it now because the meat has already been cooked through it doesn't matter uh that your uh searing is not perfect uh it's just for uh yeah just for the flavor and uh uh sort of cooked uh you know cooking too it takes the guesswork out of uh so it's more science than art yeah it's more science than art and it's surprisingly uh recent so there was this interesting character called uh count rumsford who figured this out way back in the late 1700s okay and what what rumsford did was he tried cooking potatoes with uh in air so and he found that even if you heated it to a lower temperature than uh previously thought necessary the potatoes turned out fairly well cooked and it was out uh flavors and uh after that it was forgotten till many years later uh michelin star chef decided that uh you know he had to figure out some easier way to make the perfect sort of meat and that guy's name was uh george prallis and uh he was a chef in a very iconic uh michelin star restaurant called restaurant croigro how you pronounce it in france and uh he found that uh there's you know there's something called four gras yeah goose liver yeah goose liver so when goose liver is cooked in this manner it keeps its original appearance it doesn't lose excess amounts of fat and texture and uh he you know being a uh being a mission star chef expected to be perfect and he sort of he developed this to take i i think get his uh underlings to do the cooking and take the day off and that's how he started it right and he worked with another guy named bruno gusso and bruno gusso was a uh you know food scientist who was uh working with a company called cuisine solutions and these guys they you know they thought of this technique and then they did a lot of research on different kinds of meats and kinds of vegetables and then they came up with um a lot of recipes like what uh temperature you should keep for example i think beef is generally cooked at 52 degrees it's it's uh for a certain amount of it's it's it's you know your doneness is a function of that temperature and it's so fine i don't know the temperature exactly uh because i haven't cooked it but uh 52 is uh i think rare 53 will be medium and 54 will be better it'll be it'll be that close this kind of cooking is anywhere rare yeah just uh one quick diversion if i may on michelin stars do you know how they came about and what they stand for oh yeah i've read about it so michelin uh was the tire manufacturer yeah and they wanted to compile a book of restaurants where you they want people to drive around exactly people draw around they wanted to recommend restaurants to them yeah and i think that's how it started yeah yeah they wanted to drive around so tires get worn and more michelin's get bought so basically one star means a very good restaurant in the category two stars means excellent cooking worth a detour and three michelin stars means exceptional cuisine worth a special journey so they basically wanted people to get in their car and drive around that's the reason of this so you were telling us about uh cooking meat yeah so these two guys they they worked on the development of suvi and uh they that uh spot on somewhere in the late 2000 that decade so it's after 2000 that it really seemed to have caught up before or after heston blumenthal yeah so heston blumenthal was one of the famous guys who used uh uh used suvi and most of these most of these guys they don't talk about their uh cooking techniques and heston blumenthal take and uh companies uh came out with the equipment earlier it was quite expensive it was a few hundred dollars which is expensive even for americans so it remained a very niche thing but now you can get i bought a suvi immersion heater for 99 dollars right so it's not not very what does the vacuum do it uh so you put it in a plastic bag and you want the plastic film to cling to the meat okay so if there is air in it air doesn't allow the it's not a good conductor okay so it you know it'll take forever for the meat to reach that temperature and it might not even reach that temperature right you want the entire piece of meat to achieve the same temperature as the water bar oh okay so in this particular cooking even the inside of the meat is the same temperature as the outside that's why it's completely cooked through okay so it's uh and you know so you can also for example uh when you cook uh chicken curries right so most indians the basic idea of a curry is you have uh spice spices basically in some carrier maybe coconut milk maybe uh onions and tomatoes whatever that's really specific in in kerala and the coast where you and i come from it's mostly uh coconut uh ground coconut coconut milk because you can you add a lot of spices into it right or different spices give you different flavors it'll be chili it'll be pepper it'll be cardamom cloves and then you put the meat into it and you boil it right and uh the meat sort of cooks because you're boiling it in uh you know it requires the temperature it also releases a lot of its juices which flavor the curry itself and that's how we eat but um the special taste of chicken chicken is for some reason very sensitive to temperature so if you overcook chicken it tends to become a little rubbery so what I do is I sous vide the chicken and add it separately it's very succulent and it's very delicious so you make the gravy and you add this and it's a great hack so all these things became popular as equipment started becoming easily available and available at a fairly decent price basically penetration of Amazon on cooking techniques one is this and the other is air frying so sous vide and air frying in the normal course they wouldn't have really wouldn't have taken off because it's expensive equipment and it is very niche use cases so you eat fried food once in a normal you can very easily fry why would you want to buy an air fry same with sous vide there are other ways of cooking it and it's not that you most of us you don't have that quantity of meat but when you see it on Amazon and it's just one swipe away and you don't have to go to it even I spike through price from $19.99 take on the money so that's there are some sort of there are some dangers in this I'll just run through a few attempts it's generally safe there's no problem with sous vide the problem is fish is the recommended so fish is if you cook fish it's very easy to over cook fish and the recommended temperatures for cooking fish are below 50 degrees and there are several parasites that don't die most parasites they die after 52 so 52 and above is the temperature used for beef or pork or lamb or chicken all of these are above 52 most of them are in the early 60s so if you cook through for the recommended period of time so for a few hours and everything is at that temperature all the parasites are in the dead but fish the recommended temperatures are lower than 50 and if you don't cook it for long enough the parasites would be living so that's one danger they say I don't cook fish on sous vide so I don't know and the second danger is there are these botulism spores so botulism is a very dangerous disease it will paralyze you so all the the organism is dead at the temperature but the spores survive so if you make sous vide and keep it for a long time it could come back to life because it has the medium so these are two things that you have to one is don't store it for too long it's consumed within a couple of days and second is make sure that you eat it more than 52 for at least an hour but for chicken it's safe there's no salmon it's amazing like chicken breast which usually takes to become very fibrous it's just not delicious so yeah that was so we started with sex and end with delicious breasts so I think yeah that was the whole thing so yeah stay safe stay delicious and stay simplified stay simplified bye bye