[Escape Artist]

Originally Posted by Boomer

For a long time, Mr. Boomer had been telling me we should try sous vide.

But, I kept saying, “BLECH!. Why would we want to float sealed-up hunks of meat around in water while we pretend it is cooking. Sounds, to me, like a recipe for food poisoning. And, besides, it probably comes out looking weird.”

Well, to illustrate just how far my influence sometimes reaches, a few weeks ago, one of those sous vide contraptions appeared on our doorstep. Seems like ATK had an irresistible deal.

So far, it has been beef tenderloin, salmon, chicken, and on New Year’s Day, the best pork tenderloin ever. . .

We got the pork tenderloin at a butcher shop. (I don’t know why those things always come packed in twos — even at that butcher shop.)

Anyway, the butcher trimmed off that creepy silverskin — or whatever it’s called. We bought the pair, froze one, and off to sous vide went the other.

Oh my! It was the best pork tenderloin ever. Too often pork is tough — perhaps having easily succumbed to overcooking by elder-boomers who grew up being warned about the risk of trichinosis. . .

And pork tenderloin is so lean, that it can often cross over into overcooking even when you don’t mean for that to happen.

This pork tenderloin was so tender, it could be easily cut with a fork. It had the perfect amount of pink inside and had been made pretty with a searing in the cast iron skillet.

We found a recipe for a sauce — with a couple of mustards, tarragon, cream, the drippings from the searing in olive oil, and some other stuff I can’t remember right now. (We used half-and-half instead of cream. That’s wicked enough. But you don’t need much of this sauce to put the finishing touch on the perfectly cooked pork tenderloin.)

Anyway, I am now a convert to sous vide. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I should never have mocked this cooking method.

But now, we are in a quandary. If we serve pork tenderloin to company, will our fellow elder-boomers think we are trying to kill them with trichinosis when they see pink pork?

Has anyone else here used sous vide?

Boomer

PS: I just noticed a delivery of a vacuum sealer. Looks like we are really getting into this. That’s OK. Sometimes, Mr. Boomer is absolutely right.

A friend of mine told me about this method of cooking meat several months ago. It seemed it was a bit laborious. It takes several hours right? But he swears by it and said a lot of the fancy NYC restaurants use this method for tender meats.