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Cooking With Judy: Is Your Crockpot Your Secret Cooking Weapon? Maybe Try A Sous Vide

When the crockpot was first introduced in 1971, it was a boon to both housewives and working women.

What a concept! Cook dinner unattended while you work or sleep.

Now enter sous vide (French for "under vacuum" and pronounced soo-VEED). Once used exclusively in fancy restaurants, sous vide equipment is now available at reasonable prices for the home chef. You simply vacuum seal the food and immerse it in a water bath, cooking slowly at a low temperature for an extended period of time.

"Sous vide is a lot easier than you might expect," said Jacob Cohen, 25, who was introduced to the concept by a co-worker, John Wong.

"He gives me all his recipes," Cohen said. "He had made a sous vide tri-tip – he made sliders – and it was one of the best foods I ever had, unbelievable. I couldn't stop raving about it, so my parents gave me an Anova for Hanukkah."

Cohen, who lives in the Bay area, likes to drive down to his grandparents' house, (Eileen and Henry Cohen formerly of Fullerton, now residing in Villa Park) and cook dinner.

"Last time I brought sous vide tri-tip with me. I knew they would like it," Jacob Cohen said. "It's great for big dinners. It takes the stress away. The meat cooks for 24 hours and it's perfect when you're ready to serve it."

The temperature and timing depend on what you are cooking.

"Brisket is excellent and goes at 140 degrees for 24 to 48 hours. Any steak like New York strip or ribeye works well at 131 degrees for 24 hours," Cohen said. "The time is totally up to you and can be shortened to as low as six to eight hours if you don't have time. My coworkers also cook salmon, pulled pork, chicken, and even hamburgers using the sous vide, which I'm excited to try soon."

I have seen some people on TV cooking shows making sous vide without the fancy equipment.

"I don't think I'd recommend it," Cohen cautioned. "The sous vide probe is not that expensive. It really controls the temperature.

"If you want to skimp on something, you could do it without the vacuum sealer if you put the meat in a Ziploc bag and get all the air out," he added. "The most critical thing is the temperature control. That's the real bonus of having sous vide perfectly cooked steak.

"Food safety requires that meat keeps over 129 degrees, so it's food safe at 130, 131. The meat is actually quite warm when you take it out, and it's perfectly cooked in the middle because it's been cooking so long," Cohen said. "One important step: For steak, you need to very quickly sear it. After it's cooked it looks like it's been boiled in a bag, not very appetizing. You can put it on the grill for 30 seconds on each side or broil it or put it in a pizza oven for a few seconds. You just want to sear it quickly.

"When you traditionally grill a steak or pan-sear it, the outside will be crusty and really well done and the middle will be pink or rare or won't be even cooked," Cohen said. "With sous vide it's perfectly cooked throughout."

Cohen likes chimichurri and horseradish sauce with steak.

"I also like to use some of the stock from the sous vide bag for a side of rice or couscous or some sort of grain," he added. "The stock is great for cooking – a really well-rendered kind of extract from the meat."

Fullerton's Judy Bart Kancigor is the author of "Cooking Jewish" and "The Perfect Passover Cookbook." Her website is cookingjewish.Com.

SOUS VIDE TRI-TIP

Ingredients:

• 4 pounds tri-tip

• Salt and pepper

• 2 whole cloves garlic

• 2 sprigs rosemary

Method

Generously salt and pepper tri-tip. Put tri-tip, rosemary and garlic in a vacuum-seal bag and seal, removing all air. Sous vide at 131 degrees for 24 hours. Remove tri-tip from bag and sear on all sides quickly (30 seconds each) in hot pan or oven under maximum broil heat to make a crust.

For the Chimichurri:

• 1 bunch cilantro

• 1 serrano chili (seeds removed, optional)

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

• 1 tablespoon vinegar

• 1 teaspoon sugar

• 1 teaspoon salt

Blend until desired consistency. Cohen prefers almost smooth.

Originally Published: March 27, 2025 at 10:35 AM PDT

Kitchen Hacks: What Would You Cook If You Had A Sous-Vide This Large?

We've seen no shortage of temperature controlled immersion cooking devices, called Sous-Vide, around here. But this one probably has the capacity of all of them combined! Flickr user [RogueGormet] isn't writing about the build, but his Large Form Water Oven build photo set speaks for itself.

We'd wager that the donor vessel is a 16-gallon chest cooler. He cut the lid into two sections, sealing off the insulated cavity with High Density Polyethylene (the stuff those white cutting boards are made out of). This gives him a place to mount the heating element, with a box for the PID controller riding on top. A submersible pump keeps the liquid moving to help regulate the cooking temperature throughout.

What do you put in one of these? Right off the top of our heads we'd think he had something like a pig roast planned. But it could just as easily be a Turkey, or other large hunk of meat. What would you use it for?

If you don't need quite as much capacity you might make some alterations to your slow cooker for your own immersion cooking.

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