The Return of Sous Vide
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Chef Daniel Humm swears sous vide is the best way to cook perfectly crisp apples. And the slow-cooking technique is his preferred method for preparing the turbot on his menu at Eleven Madison Park.
Sous vide — French for “under vacuum,” which refers to food sealed in an airtight bag and cooked in a constant temperature water bath — began changing the taste and consistency of food decades ago in France.
Mr. Humm insists the technique has been as valuable as his knife skills. “The biggest challenge of every restaurant is to be consistent, and sous vide just helps you to achieve that,” he said. “Water is a great medium to cook in, and by cooking it that way, you are getting a great product.”
So he and other sous vide aficionados across the city are happy to have their sous vide machines back after the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene began halting their use about two years ago. While chefs tout its benefits — tender, flavor-packed dishes — done wrong, sous vide can leave food ripe for bacterial growth. That’s why the technique is illegal without a city-approved plan for using the method.
“We monitor every single step and keep the documents,” Mr. Humm, who was approved to use sous vide at Eleven Madison Park earlier this year, said.
Since the citywide crackdown, which gained national attention, industry experts and high-profile chefs — such as Mr. Humm, Per Se’s Thomas Keller and Momofuku Ssäm’s David Chang — have all worked closely with the health department to win back permission to cook using sous vide. So far, eight city restaurants, including Eleven Madison Park, Per Se, and Le Cirque, have been approved to use the technique in the kitchen for everything from meat and vegetables to pickling and preserving. And several more local eateries are in the process of having their plans reviewed by the health department, officials there said, noting that they have received some 50 phone calls inquiring about sous vide cooking. “It was kind of a new process that was being used more widely among top chefs,” a health department associate commissioner responsible for food safety, Elliot Marcus, said. “Once we did learn about it, we began working with the industry on how to make it work best.”
Along with soliciting the advice of industry experts, the department has held several demonstrations on proper sous vide use and sent Mr. Marcus and two employees to a two-day training seminar held at chef David Bouley’s TriBeCa test kitchen last year.
Invented in France about 30 years ago as an industrial cooking technique to bring better quality to large-scale meals needed by hotels, airlines, and banquet halls, sous vide was introduced to upscale European kitchens soon after, and then began making its way to America. The technique’s popularity was one of the reasons for the crackdown that led to 60 local eating establishments receiving warnings to stop using sous vide equipment. Chefs trained in sous vide, aware of the hazards of improper use, had been joined by those who are not, creating a potentially dangerous environment. Among the places shut down by the health department were delis that sometimes used the technique in hopes of a getting a greater shelf life for their foods, health department officials said.
“I think some changes had to be made,” the chef at Blue Hill restaurant in Greenwich Village, who has been approved by the city health department to use sous vide, Dan Barber, said. “I was trained under a guy who scared the bejeezus out of me about this. He made sure you had the mentality you were working in hospital-like conditions and that’s how you become well versed in process.”
This collective sentiment led restaurants to seek the help of industry experts such as the French Culinary Institute and Cuisine Solutions, a Virginia food laboratory that has been studying, teaching, and making sous vide foods for industrial consumption since 1990. They began holding lengthy meetings with health department officials, educating them on the safe and dangerous applications of sous vide cooking. “We turned to them and told them either all of the top chefs are going to stop doing sous vide or start doing it behind your back,” the corporate chef and global vice president of sales at Cuisine Solutions, Gerard Bertholon, said.
For now, the health department works with restaurants on an individual basis to set up safe food handling plans for sous vide. But it is in the process of creating a set of guidelines it hopes to introduce to the city Board of Health before the end of the year, Mr. Marcus said.
Among other sous vide requirements, restaurants must currently write into their food safety plans a meticulous daily log for safe food handling, including recording temperatures several times throughout the day; throwing away sous vide cooked food after 72 hours in a refrigerator and 28 days in a freezer, and making sure staff members hold themselves accountable from the minute food enters their restaurant to the minute it leaves the kitchen.
A former pastry chef at wd-50 (who helped that restaurant and Mr. Chang’s Momofuku Ssäm Bar implement their sous vide safety plan), Christina Tosi, advises that restaurants devise a conservative, and very specific, plan to expedite city approval. She said she is in favor of the health department measures, adding: “It’s part of the evolution of restaurants and especially food safety.”