Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Modernist Cuisine

NY Times Talks Sous Vide (Again)

In 2009, the New York Times published an article about something called sous vide, a cooking technique that had food tinkerers and culinary explorers using lab equipment and other hacks to bring – what up to that point been a pro trick – into the consumer kitchen. Those were early days for the precision cooking method, in part because it was well over a year before Nathan Myhrvold and Chris Young would publish their seminal work, Modernist Cuisine, a five-volume, 50-pound heap of books that helped to kickstart the sous vide revolution.

Flash forward almost seven years and sous vide is back in The Grey Lady, only now the cooking method is on the precipice of becoming mainstream.

One expert cited in the 2009 piece was the same Chris Young, who at the time was the culinary research manager for Intellectual Ventures. In this week’s piece by Times columnist Brian X. Chen, Young doesn’t appear, but his new company, ChefSteps, is featured prominently. That’s because Young and other early evangelists of sous vide have been able to ride the wave of the growing popularity of the cooking method while also helping to fuel its rise through consumer education and consumer friendly sous vide circulators (ChefSteps just released its sous vide circulator called the Joule).

Another cooking wizard at the forefront of the sous vide movement is J. Kenji López-Alt, who went from being an architecture major who started working in restaurants during summer breaks from college to become one of the Internet’s go-to authorities on sous vide. López-Alt writes the popular The Food Lab column for food site Serious Eats, and last year published a NY Times best-selling book by the same name.

In Chen’s article, López-Alt and ChefSteps’ Grant Crilly (who, like Young, is also an Intellectual Ventures/Modernist Cuisine expat) talk about sous vide’s growing popularity, and address what has become the main hurdle to wider adoption of sous vide: long cooking times.

According to López-Alt, using sous vide may take more time, but consumers can adjust if they just spend a little time planning what they want to eat on any given night.

“Most people, when they think about dinner, say, ‘What can I get at the grocery store now and get going tonight?’” he said. “It requires a lot more forethought.”

Crilly makes a similar argument and says the results will be worth it.

“Cook it slow, unlock all that really beautiful flavor, and you’ve got a really nice piece of meat,” he said.

Comparing the two posts shows how far sous vide has come and how far it still has to go. To be sure, sous vide is becoming much more commonplace in the consumer kitchen, but will require a little patience from consumers if it’s ever to go truly mainstream.

Interview: Chef Chris Young, Co-Founder of ChefSteps

Ashley recently chatted with Chef Chris Young, famed chef-scientist, co-author of Modernist Cuisine and co-founder of ChefSteps, a technology company working to help people cook better.

Ashley Daigneault: How has cooking evolved over the last few decades and what role do you think technology is playing in those changes?

Chef Chris Young: Well that really depends on how you define cooking – in the commercial kitchen, technology drove the modernist movement in the late 90s and 2000s, where chefs were leveraging technology and a scientific understanding of cooking to create novel dishes, things that people never ate before. Technology drove innovation in the kitchen.

Some of that has trickled down to the consumer level, but a small amount. Sous vide is a good example of this – a device really borrowed from the laboratory from professional chefs. The other way technology has changed is not in cooking but in eating is the rise of mobile devices and apps – the ones that help you find a restaurant, choose the food you want to eat – technology has made it easier than ever to NOT cook. Between meal delivery service, Uber delivering food, Yelp-type apps, in the last decade, technology has done more to disconnect us from cooking.

Ashley Daigneault: What innovations happening around the kitchen have the best chance of becoming mainstream?

Chef Chris Young: The microwave is the last big technology that became a mainstream consumer product. It came out around 1968 and then in the 90s they were finally in every kitchen; mainstream has a long lead time. You’re talking two or three decades. Now we’re seeing the rise of gadget cooking, like sous vide cooking – but the interesting thing there isn’t the water bath or the immersion circulator, but the way mobile phones, content and community are making it easier for people to connect and cook.

The devices that succeed are ones that are more responsive to humans; we’re still going to eat hot food – what will change is how we interact with the devices doing the heating. You should be able to say – I want to cook this certain thing, this certain way and I’d like to eat it at this time – and that would trigger a whole series of actions behind the scenes in your appliances. Human interaction will be more in charge.

Ashley Daigneault: ChefSteps introduced its first hardware product – the Joule sous vide cooker. Why did you decide to create a physical product, a cooking device?

Chef Chris Young: We’ve always been focused on listening to our community. When ChefSteps was founded in 2012, we took the spirit from Modernist Cuisine and demonstrated that people were hungry for info on how cooking works. We initially started with YouTube videos and interacting with viewers and built a website to aggregate the content. And we continued to listen – what did the community want from us?

We found that our community was passionate about cooking. Even for people who were really good at cooking, the tools in the kitchen were pretty painful. The typically didn’t help them be creative or help them innovate. We could solve problems by giving people tools that were better, helping them be more successful and creative in the kitchen. And this has always been our mission: to help them to choose to cook better food at home instead of eating out.

Ashley Daigneault: What were the challenges in bringing a device to market?

Chef Chris Young: It’s expensive to do hardware right – but we wanted to do it right. We looked at the tools out there but we saw that sous vide cooking hasn’t changed much since 2003 other than price. Since ChefSteps creates the content, we can show people how to cook the foods they want, the way they want and connect it to a device that heats and stirs the water and makes that happen.

Good direction will get more people cooking – people feel more in control, and more importantly, by leveraging mobile apps, we can learn. Our community gives us feedback about what they like about our tools vs what they don’t so we can make changes in software and not make folks buy new devices every time we learn new things. Ultimately, the drive is about getting people to cook and at some point you have to move beyond the phone to cook the food.

Ashley Daigneault: As a chef, do you think technology can make people better cooks?

Chef Chris Young: Absolutely. There’s this viewpoint that things were better the way our grandmother did things, but that’s not really true. For one, food poisoning was rampant as there were no safety standards. Technology has definitely made that better. We have access to better ingredients than ever before, food is healthier now than ever before. Actually, it’s pretty damn amazing what’s possible.

Ashley Daigneault: What’s your go-to gadget or product in the kitchen that you can’t live without?

Chef Chris Young: The thing that has done more to make me a better cook – a digital thermometer. It’s really allowed us to have consistency and control and make sure we were giving people the best possible food. Humans are really good at certain activities – but measurement is NOT one of them. Give me a simple digital thermometer, a scale, a good knife and a decent pan – I can pretty much cook everything.