Complying with Frank Deis' request:
Jenise -- I ordered a copy of Under Pressure after reading what you've said about it. It wasn't hard to push me over the brink since I have all of Thomas Keller's OTHER cookbooks. The comments on Amazon gave me a hint that "regular" cooks could do at least some of the recipes (especially the meat based stuff). I'd like to ask if you would set up separate topic and let us know what specifically you have bought and found useful and what recipes you used with those things? It would help a lot if I didn't have to experiment with buying this and that.
I have tried, several years ago, to do a kind of sous vide with no equipment whatever. I bought poulets (which as you know are small chickens but bigger than Cornish Game Hens) and put them in plastic bags and tried to watch the temperature of a simmering pot. The results were not spectacular.
At any rate this looks like it will be fun -- but messages get lost in this huge topic and it would work better outside. FWIW I have also bought some of the chemicals for molecular cuisine after buying a cookbook "North" by the chef of a restaurant in Reykjavik. Once again he convinced me that these things were both doable and interesting. But I haven't really done any of it yet.
I bought Under Pressure before I bought an immersion circulator. I did have a Food Saver, which I did not yet know would be good/thick enough for immersion cookery, and an endless supply of Zip Loc bags, so I thought maybe I could toy around with some lame versions of sous vide techniques on my pro range with the low simmer setting without making the bigger investment (I was not yet aware that I could buy a good, purpose-built immersion circulator (inspired by Nathan Mhyrvold for as little as $200). I was fascinated enough by the concept, though, and further tempted by several pieces of meat I've had in restaurants that I know were prepared this way, in particular a boneless breast of Cornish game hen that had been poached in pure butter and then grilled off for a crispy skin. It was at the same time the purest and most intensely flavored piece of poultry I've ever eaten. And the texture!
But I never got around to toying with anything. I read the first chapter and realized I needed more equipment, and no way was I going to spend $700-1000 on a giant all-in-one sous vide appliance like a friend of mine did.
Another year went by before I found out about the Sansaire, a relatively compact device about the size of a magnum bottle of wine. I picked it up from Sur La Table around Christmas time when I had a $20 off coupon and promise of free shipping for anything over $150 burning a hole in my pocket. The Sansaire has a giant clip on the back and is flat-bottomed so you can turn any tall pot into a tank. There's nothing about it I don't like, so would happily recommend it. Though I'd initially planned to buy a large rectangle of a square plastic bin to use because that's what I've seen in professional kitchens, I have used it with both an 8 quart stainless steel cooking pot (not a Dutch oven, but taller) and also a 16-20 quart pot, I can't offhand remember it's volume, that's maybe one inch taller than my 8 quart but a whole lot wider. It was the latter size I needed for the pork loin I sous vided on Friday night, as it was about 13-14 inches in length. Between those two vessels, I don't need to buy any new bins.
The only other device one needs is a vacuum sealer. Per Thomas Keller, the minimum desirable thickness of plastic is 3 mil and guess what, the Food Saver brand bags are 3 mil! That was reassuring, as the bags I used at the Bellingham Tech Culinary kitchen a few weeks ago were more substantial as was, of course, their vacuum sealer. At home, small bags of smaller pieces of meat have done well in 1-3 hour sessions--I've never had a blow-out--but I'll admit I was a little nervous about the durability of a Food Saver bag for a large piece of meat over 8 hours or so, so for Friday night's pork I did check once or twice to make sure the bag had not sprung any leaks, and it hadn't.
Frank, the book, although a coffee table book in terms of size and production quality, is really a useful manual for sous vide cooking. The recipes and accompanying photographs are inspiring and the tables in the back of the book, by ingredient, eminently useful for helping one design an approach to whatever it is you want to do. Tommy left nothing out.
