Sous Vide, All the Time, Part 1

You too can enjoy this delicious sous vide egg, but only if you have ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD.

Where would we be without vacuums? Millions of carpets would be dirty, cocks would go unpumped, and everyone would have to go without sous vide! As recently as last week, I hated sous vide. I even hated the WORD, despite the fact that it's French. Believe it or not, it's possible to hate French words. Especially "croissant," but only when pretentious assholes try to overpronounce it and it comes out of their mouth sounding like "CWAH- SOHN," like they're clearing their throats. Douchebags.

I hated sous vide mostly because of the Sous Vide Supreme. One morning I caught the infomercial. Some idiot was trying to convince everyone how awesome the Sous Vide Supreme was. "Have you ever had a better steak?" he was saying. "Cook it for eight hours. Then sauté it in a cast iron pan with butter and herbs. Then blowtorch it." Cook a fucking flank steak for EIGHT HOURS, then COOK IT AGAIN? What could possibly be less convenient? I was, however, impressed by the verisimilitude of the guy doing the cooking: With his fauxhawk and tats, he looked like a very realistic version of what Hollywood thinks a young, cutting-edge chef looks like. It turns out the walking fauxhawk was Richard Blais.

Then I realized that I was beginning to sound like a reactionary old geezer, so I decided to give sous vide a whirl. Scott Heimendinger, mastermind of the Seattle Food Geek blog, loaned me his prototype sous vide temperature controller for a week. And for that week I used sous vide to cook EVERYTHING I ATE.

I started with eggs. Scott recommended a temperature of 63.5 degrees C for one hour. I popped a couple eggs into the water bath and then played Castlevania for an hour. At the end of that time I cracked one of the eggs. It was crazy: The white resembled porcelain, delicate and barely coddled, but not slimy. The yolk was runny. I cracked this sous vide egg over a toasted English muffin, drizzled it with white truffle oil and finished it with fleur de sel, and had an accompanying spinach salad with a balsamic vinaigrette. That was fucking killer.

I took the other egg out after 1 hour 45 minutes. Strangely, the white was the same cloudy white nimbus as the one-hour egg, but the yolk was more solid, as if it had been soft boiled. I'm sure some jerk on the internet has explained the chemistry behind how an egg in sous vide cooks from the inside out, but I'm too busy looking at porn, so you'll just have to do your own damn research.

Emboldened by my success, I threw a whole bunch of other stuff into the bath; but if you want to find out what random junk ended up stewing in its own juices for 72 hours, you'll have to tune in on Friday for part two of this awesome exposé.