As the chef-owner of The French Laundry and per se, I get most of the attention. I’d like to focus attention here on the three chefs who lead these two restaurants in their daily work.
Jonathan Benno, a 1993 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, arrived at The French Laundry in 1995 as we were making some definitive changes with the new kitchen. His ideas were instrumental in how we decided the kitchen would run. Jonathan then left to work at Restaurant Daniel and, under my old friend Tom Colicchio, at Gramercy Tavern, before returning in 2002.
Corey Lee, foregoing culinary school for stages in Michelin-starred kitchens in Europe, arrived at The French Laundry at about the same time as Jonathan returned. He and Jonathan traveled to New York in 2004 to open per se. Corey returned to California in 2005 to lead The French Laundry kitchen, while Jonathan remained as chef de cuisine of per se.
Sebastien Rouxel, the pastry chef at per se, was one of the youngest ever to earn a brevet technique de métiers, a master’s in pastry making, in France. A friend lured him to Los Angeles in 1996, but he quickly found his way to New York and a job under Eberhard Müller at Lutéce. In 1999 he became the pastry chef at The French Laundry. He’d hoped all along to return to New York, and when we opened per se, that’s what he did.
This broad description of these three instrumental people, of course, does none of them justice. If you and I were at a table sharing a meal and you asked me who they were, I would say this: that while they are the chefs of two of the most respected restaurants in the country, they are also businessmen, teachers, dishwashers, mentors, partners, colleagues, travel agents, farmers, chemists, artisans, public speakers, and friends.
Here they are in their own words on the subject of sous vide.
Not long ago, I demonstrated a per se recipe at the Culinary Institute of America. A lamb dish, it included wedges of fennel, artichoke hearts, lamb cheeks, and lamb leg, each of which had been cooked sous vide. Afterward, there were a lot of questions about so-called molecular gastronomy, a catch-all phrase for unconventional cooking, including sous vide techniques. I often get asked about molecular gastronomy by young cooks. I tell them, “When you know everything there is to know about the chemical NaCl, come back and talk to me about ‘molecular gastronomy.’” Meaning this: Before you can move into experimental territory as a cook and a chef, you have to understand the fundamentals of cooking, which begin with how to use salt (NaCl), how to make a stock, and how to cook a green vegetable.
The same applies to sous vide. It’s not a replacement for our fundamental skill set, and you can’t forget or disregard where we came from and what we’ve learned throughout the history of cooking. We still need to know and learn to perfect basic cooking techniques. If you don’t have those, you can’t use sous vide properly. A chef needs to know how to season and sear a piece of meat he intends to braise, to know how to cook it until it’s done, to know that it should cool slowly in the cooking liquid. All this knowledge is an essential foundation that allows you to move on and apply sous vide techniques properly.
But many foods are extraordinary cooked sous vide. Just the other day, I had a revelation when cooking Swiss chard ribs. I had put four ribs in a bag with olive oil, garlic, thyme, and bay and cooked them as we cook most vegetables sous vide. We all tasted them, and Thomas said, “There is too much thyme.” He was right, yet I’d used just a small sprig. If I’d cooked the chard conventionally, I would have had to put a big bundle of thyme in the cooking liquid to get that same impact. It showed me how powerful sous vide is, the force of keeping all the flavors in the bag.
Artichokes are especially great prepared sous vide. They cook through without oxidizing and retain all their flavor. To do a great barigoule, artichoke hearts cooked in stock and olive oil with aromatic vegetables, you’ve got to be a really good cook—working quickly so they don’t oxidize, knowing exactly when they’re done, stopping the cooking before they begin to fall apart.
My father is a carpenter. He’s been pounding nails for forty years, and sometimes he still hits his thumb. As experienced chefs, we still hit our thumbs too. All of us are striving to get better, always learning, always paying attention. A carpenter’s joins can always be tighter. A barigoule can always be better. So my ultimate interest in sous vide is to find ways to make food better.
Thirty years ago, my mom used to make a big pot of beef stew. She’d let the stew cool and then package portions of it with her Seal-a-Meal device. On a busy day, she’d take a bag out of the freezer in the morning to thaw, and when she got home, she’d pop it into boiling water while she cooked the egg noodles. Even when she had been on the run all day, we still got a hot meal of beef stew and noodles. My mom was on the cutting edge of sous vide cooking!
That use of sous vide was about convenience. The way we prepare our food at per se has little to do with convenience. It is about precision, about learning and moving forward. As cooks, we’re always trying to improve our food, to look at it in new ways, and sous vide helps us do that. That’s part of the excitement of sous vide. Of course, as a chef in charge of forty people in a sprawling kitchen, I like the fact that the artichokes are always cooked consistently, no matter who’s cooking them. I can’t tell you how important that is to me in my work. For me, as a chef, sous vide is important for precision, for consistency, and for safety.
I was uncomfortable with sous vide at first, though I didn’t quite realize why. It was an interesting addition to our cooking repertoire, but I didn’t have the knowledge to evaluate it completely. Sous vide is different from roasting, braising, sautéing, poaching, and other types of cooking: it doesn’t require you to use your senses the way traditional cooking techniques do. When you seal something in a bag and put it in water, you’re not smelling it as it cooks, or tasting it, or listening to the sizzle as it roasts or sautés. Cooking is one of the few things in life that requires the use of all your senses. It should please all your senses as well. A technique that took most of those things away was strange for me, and this is one of the main criticisms I hear about sous vide. But as I worked with it, I began to realize I wasn’t really giving up the use of my senses as a cook.
To understand sous vide, you must take a broader view of it, one in which sous vide is a single element of a much larger process—because the results are so great. While it’s true that you don’t get to smell the beef if it’s braising in a bag rather than in the oven, you’re still butchering it and seasoning it; you may be searing it and you are adding other flavors before it goes into the bag; and, after it comes out of the bag, you’re often roasting or searing it or glazing it for the finished plate. So you’re still engaging all your senses. I don’t think sous vide will prove to be a passing trend—nor will it replace anything that’s already here.
Sous vide produces different results from traditional methods, so it’s important to know when to use sous vide and when to rely on a traditional method. Essentially, you decide which kind of heat to use according to what you want the final result to be. If you have a cut that requires braising, you have to think about how you want the final braise to be. Do you want to use both wet and dry heat to produce something that’s really broken down so that it’s almost meltingly tender? Then you braise traditionally. Or do you want the meat to retain more texture and structure, to keep the flavor in the bag—and in the cooking liquid? Sous vide will give you that. If you’re cooking fish, do you want it to have a very delicate texture and a pure flavor? Cook it sous vide. Or do you want to give it complex roasted flavors and a crispy skin? Use direct high heat. While all cuts and especially certain fish behave differently cooked sous vide, generally sous vide offers huge advantages in retaining moisture and structure, giving these proteins the desired tenderness without overcooking them.
Say you want to use beef tendons as a garnish for a dish. You’ll want to dice them, so they need to retain their shape after cooking. Sous vide will do this, and give a better yield, than conventional cooking. But if you want to use them in a sauce, so they should be virtually melted, cook them traditionally.
With vegetables, “big-pot blanching” is undeniably a great method. If you want to serve, for example, baby turnips with their tops, you can’t cook them sous vide, because the tops will turn brown. Big-pot-blanch them and you retain the vivid green tops. But if you want to enrich the turnips and introduce additional flavors—say foie gras fat and mint—sous vide is the best way to accomplish this goal. It all depends on what you’re looking for.
At home, sous vide is about convenience and ease—and, perhaps, allowing a less experienced cook to achieve really great results in terms of temperature, flavor, and overall quality of a finished dish. In a restaurant serving fine food, sous vide is used to achieve specific results—despite the fact that the process may add more steps to the cooking and requires more time, more equipment, and more expense.
While cooking sous vide gives you extraordinary results, the excitement for me is in everything that happens before and after the food is out of the bag, when you use all your senses. I might cook a pork belly sous vide, at a much lower temperature than conventionally, so that it becomes tender, but not falling-apart tender, so it retains its structure and is sliceable. Then what garnish should I prepare for it? Should I cut a piece of the fat off and fry that as part of the garnish? Should I glaze the meat? Sauté the skin until crispy? Cut it long like an aiguillette, like a slice of bacon, and serve it with a poached egg? That’s where the excitement is for me.
My favorite thing to cook is risotto. Working with the rice is a real pleasure. And yet I sometimes bring in sous vide even here, to create a great garnish for the rice that I enjoy so much. For an oxtail garnish, I could cook the meat traditionally and get a meltingly tender finished result that I’d fold into the rice. If I cook the oxtail sous vide, though, the meat retains its structure and I can dice it, glaze it, and sprinkle it on top of the rice. It’s visually distinct and results in a different finished dish.
So, yes, there is a gap in the pleasures of cooking when you use sous vide, but it’s bridged by the fact that the results are so fine—and, ultimately, you don’t give up any of the soulful delights that make cooking truly satisfying.
We began using sous vide techniques in the pastry kitchen when we opened per se in 2004. This has dramatically changed the way we prepare and serve desserts, from making custards to cooking fruit, and from compressing melon to how we portion and store our food.
People often think that sous vide cooking is used only for mass-produced food or airline food, but that’s no longer accurate. Remember, the freezer was once a modern tool, and in France, it was first looked upon with skepticism in the pâtisserie. Sous vide also is a modern tool, one we use for many different reasons. For many basic preparations, it has replaced the traditional methods.
For example, we rarely make custards on the stovetop anymore. We have figured out how to make custards sous vide exactly the way we like them; because sous vide allows us to control most variables, the custards are of the ideal consistency every time. Moreover, they keep for a week when properly stored because we have effectively pasteurized the custard and heated it to a point where the bacteria that cause spoilage have been substantially reduced. In addition, because the custard remains in a sealed bag, no additional bacteria have a chance to get into it.
Using sous vide doesn’t eliminate the need to understand the fundamentals of custard making. Cooks still must know how the various ingredients work together, what temperatures affect the custard, how varying quantities of yolk or fat give you differing results, and so on. Without a solid grasp of the fundamentals of the pastry kitchen, you won’t be able to take full advantage of sous vide techniques.
Nor does knowing the fundamentals of pâtisserie allow you to replace everything with sous vide. You can’t make a cake sous vide, for instance, and many preparations in the sweet kitchen still require high heat. But for those dessert preparations that benefit from the low-temperature, anaerobic environment that defines sous vide, we never hesitate to use it.
In fact, one of the great, underappreciated benefits of sous vide is that anaerobic environment. We use many fruits and vegetables in our desserts. However, fruits and vegetables begin to oxidize or discolor as soon as you cut them. When we remove oxygen from the environment, we substantially slow these undesirable effects. Bananas, which discolor rapidly upon being cut, are a great example. We use two modern inventions to ensure that the banana stays very white after it’s cut in the preparation of our banana sherbet. First we freeze them—bananas freeze very well. Once they are frozen and we’ve cut them up and put them into the sous vide bag with the other sherbet ingredients, they do not begin to oxidize noticeably. Then we seal the bag, which removes the oxygen, and cook the fruit in a custard; it remains very bright. This is all but impossible to achieve on the stovetop.
Fruits and vegetables are superb cooked sous vide, becoming tender without losing their vibrant color and flavor. Cherries become vivid and dramatically translucent when cooked sous vide. As for vegetables, one that I like to use in desserts is cucumber—it’s refreshing and provides a good transition from the savory part of the meal to the sweeter desserts. Cucumber compressed sous vide is tender, bright, and has a very pure flavor.
Many of the effects of sous vide can be achieved through traditional methods, but these require more attention and time tending them, and there are many variables in a busy kitchen with chefs of differing experience working the stoves. Sous vide eliminates many of these variables and results in a consistent finished product, which is what a restaurant kitchen strives for.
Finally, there are practical matters unique to restaurant cooking to which we apply sous vide—namely, in making and storing various preparations in specific portion sizes that allow for more efficient service and reduce waste. But what I like to say most to cooks who want to use sous vide techniques—and these are ideas that we all stress repeatedly—is that you must have a solid grasp of the fundamentals of pâtisserie before you can take advantage of sous vide, and that sous vide is not a replacement for anything but, rather, a modern tool that we are very lucky to be able to use.
