"What can be done is to renew. The word renew is beautiful; renew the cooking from an ethical, human behavior. Based on what we put on a dish, we build an environment, we build a society." I pulled that (awesome) quote from the Santi Santimaria interview in these pages. I am new to eGullet, and new to this string, so hello everybody. I'm living in Bangkok, opening a restaurant with a great, chef-oriented concept, all degustation menus, beautiful product etc. etc. We've been playing with sous vide a bit, especially for our Matsusaka beef, which we serve in 2-3-4 oz servings. The steaks are so heavily marbled that it would really be hard to melt the fat in the center of a steak without really overcooking the rest, and sous vide works just great. I keep it at about 51 degrees in a pot to the side of the flat top, and it holds pretty well, although a deviation of a few degrees doesn't really hurt it at all. I don't season it in the bag, and I sear it on the pickup, and bring it past rare/med rare if the customer wants it cooked more. I read the NYTimes article, and tried the watermelon thing to no avail. I don't think I have a dial for psi on my cryo machine. However, I guess that there's an awful lot that I don't know about the whole chill process ( I typically don't put more in the water bath than I'll use in service), so I ordered the Roca book from chips. I guess the point of this post is to introduce myself, but also to just float the notion that if what Chef Santimaria says has any validity, that we're cooking "from an ethical, human" standpoint, maybe we should think a little about the consequences of wrapping our food in individual heavy duty plastic bags. I like the sous vide method, but I have some reservations about it from an ecological standpoint. It's like the disposable diapers of the culinary world. Almost as bad as those foam thingys that almost all of our produce comes wrapped in... It also seems to me that one of the main points of the technique is to make up for sloppy cooking. Don't know if a carrot's properly cooked? Well, here's an algebraic formula that even a machine can use to get it right. The joy of this profession is the mindfulness that we have to bring to our stoves every day in order to continue to push ourselves towards the consistency that comes from perfect concentration. I thought the best part of the article was the bit about Robuchon and the egg. A great chef just knows.
