Dr. Eades’ Incredible Cooking Machine

Dr. Eades' Incredible Cooking Machine
Gregg and I have become friends with Dr. Michael Eades, who, with his wife Dr. Mary Dan Eades, are two of the very, very few practitioners out there of truly evidence-based dietary medicine. Their books include The Protein Power Lifeplan and their most recent, The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle.

Their blog, proteinpower.com, is a great compliment to the wonderful investigative work of Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, who showed, most substantively, that the American diet is based in "science," not science. It's the non-evidence-based urging of doctors and even (often-careerist) researchers that has Americans eating the high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet that actually makes them fat.

Not only do the Eades help people eat more healthily, they're about to help them do it much more tastily.

Julia Moskin writes in The New York Times of an incredible machine, the Sous Vide, that the Eades have engineered (and priced) for home use. Theirs is the $449 Sous Vide Supreme (typically $1,500 and up in restaurant sous vide machines). Moskin reports:

ONCE you sous vide, you never go back.

That, at least, is the chant of a global pantheon of chefs -- like Heston Blumenthal, Joël Robuchon, Ferran Adrià, and Tetsuya Wakuda -- who have made this low, slow cooking method the standard in the last decade.

And last month, Fritz Cloninger, a technical writer in Jersey City, joined that elite company with a pork chop and a SousVide Supreme, the first self-contained sous-vide machine for home cooks, which has just come on the market priced at $449.

"My wife thought I was crazy to get this thing, but already she doesn't want to eat anything else," Mr. Cloninger said last week. "I even made a hamburger in it this morning."

Sous vide combines the gentle, steady heat of poaching and an airtight seal, as in traditional methods of cooking in clay. "The food literally stews in its own juices: no air, no water, no evaporation," said Wesley Genovart, the chef at Degustation, a restaurant in the East Village, who has experimented with sous-viding everything from carrots to crème brûlée.

Until now, home cooks wanting to try the method have had to improvise, with solutions from low-tech (a stockpot and a handful of ice cubes) to high (a chamber sealer and an immersion circulator, generating about $1,500 in start-up costs). But there seems to be an audience, however small, for an easier and cheaper way. The first 500 SousVide Supreme machines sold out via the Internet before shipping in November, according to the manufacturers. More are on the way, available for order online now, and scheduled to reach Sur la Table warehouses in January.

For on-the-ground-in-the-kitchen experience (since I am about as domestic as my friend Dr. Helen, who once made Glenn salmon with ice crystals inside (yum!) early on when they were dating), here's Diana Hsieh writing about cooking with the Sous Vide Supreme for a week. And here is Fritz Cloninger's post on it.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 10:10 am and is filed under Amy Alkon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. | 528 views | Trackback | Print this page |

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