Salmon cooked in a beer cooler isn’t for everyone. It turns out, for example, that it’s not for me. But that doesn’t make J. Kenji López-Alt’s method for cooking salmon (or meat) sous vide any less ingenious. Sous vide—a technique in which food is vacuum-sealed and cooked in a water bath at a precise temperature—usually requires either an expensive circulator to hold water at a constant temperature, or a large pot, a thermometer, and a lot of patience. For those of us with neither patience nor a water circulator, López-Alt devised a method that takes advantage of the heat-retaining qualities of a beer cooler: you add hot water to a cooler, put the salmon (or meat) into a Ziploc bag and squeeze all the air out, seal it, and put the bag into the water to cook.
López-Alt, who graduated from MIT and is a former test cook and editor for Cook’s Illustrated magazine, is obsessive in his investigation of classic cooking techniques and recipes. He’ll repeat the same cooking experiment over and over again, changing different variables until he figures out the best and easiest way to cook whatever he’s making. And the emphasis is on simplicity as much as perfection: López-Alt is always trying to eliminate unnecessary steps.
By J. Kenji López-Alt (Norton)
