Chicken cooked sous vide in ponzu with our spicy asian tomato relish – Delicious fusion asian cooking that works as well for weeknight eating as for entertaining guests.

We recently completed our low-tech sous vide setup, and it is by far the best way of doing meat and poultry.  You need a heating element, a thermostat with a switch, and a fish tank submergible water pump, and some MacGyver skills.

If you are new to the world of Sous Vide – Don’t run away! You can do it in your own kitchen (albeit with slightly more effort), all you need are ziplock bags and an accurate thermometer.

A sous vide setup is a water bath that you keep at a constant temprature, and you use this to cook food slowly and precisely.

You can do this yourself without a professional setup. Use the heaviest cast iron pot you can find, fill it with water, and, using your thermometer, bring it up on your stovetop to the desired temperature (between 60-62C in this case).

You will notice that this is considerably more difficult on an electric stovetop, as the heating element takes long to heat up, and continues to produce heat after being turned off. Removing the pot from the element reduces this problem slightly.

You will also notice that the heated metal of your pot continues to heat the water after you switch off the gas/remove from the plate, so you need to plan for the overshoot. I would recommend doing a test run to get the feel of things before starting on a meal for loads of guests that you want to impress.

Stir regularly (every 2-3 minutes at least), and when you turn on the heat, keep it on for very short intervals – you can always switch it on again and cook for longer, but once you overshoot properly the meat dries out and you can’t recover from that.

If you do overshoot, remove the meat from the sous vide immediately and wait for the water to come back down to the correct temperature before re-adding it.