It’s been a hard day at the gym and you need to get the protein into the body to grow. The best and cheapest way to do this – chicken breast. Chicken breast the staple for gym rats, health afficionado, paleo, carnivore. We have invented all ways to cook the chicken breast so it is paleatable to us and not turn out bland or dry – cutting into thin slices, pounding, adding seasoning, dipping into sauce and deep frying.
However, the fundamental problem remains – chicken is horrifying to handle and the breast is just too dam thick! Everytime we cook as a whole breast the chicken ends up being too dry on the outside or not moist on the inside. We cringe at every bite of chicken breast, comforted in the fact that it is essential to growing muscle. Kind of like going to the dentist is neccessary to have clean teeth. A neccessary evil.
What if there was another to cook chicken breast? One that does not add any fats, minimalises chicken juice handling, and ensures that the chicken is tender. Sous Vide has entered the room.
Sous vide is a fairly recent invention (this is why your noona might not have taught you it). It all started in the mid 1960s and started gaining popularity in the 1990s with equipment. Still – the equipment was fairly expensive and finding information about sous vide back in the day was fairly hard.
However, with China being the world’s factory and the obliquity of the internet – Sous vide information has never been more available, and cooking with it never been so cheap!
Normal cooking is the application of heat from one external source (usually burner, induction) and the heat is not regulated. That is, we do not maintain a constant temperature. It starts cold, warms up and then gets too hot! That is why we need to adjust the heat settings. What this causes is the outside of the chicken to be cooked first and the inside then to be left raw.
Now we don’t want to eat any raw chicken so we need to let that heat travel to the middle. But the outside is ALREADY COOKED! So we end up cooking the outside of the breast even more and hence it becomes dry.
Sous vide cooking is characterized by low-temperature cooking, a longer period of cooking than conventional cooking, a container (such as a plastic bag) that separates the food from its heating environment, and pressurized enclosure using full or partial vacuum.
The use of temperatures much lower than those used for conventional cooking is an essential feature of sous vide, resulting in much higher succulence at these lower temperatures, as cell walls in plant-based food do not burst. In the case of meat cooking, tough collagen in connective tissue can be hydrolysed into gelatin, without heating the meat’s proteins high enough that they denature to a degree that the texture toughens and moisture is wrung out of the meat.
Highly recommend getting a sous vide machine. You can get one here for as little as $219 at amazon Anova Sous Vide Cooker. You probably eat chicken every week so for less than 1 dollar a day you can get juicy chicken breast!
5 Percent a day 