- Seal the bag. You now have your food inside a
completely airless bag.
A note about nomenclature: While the term “sous-vide”
technically refers to the vacuum-sealing portion of the
cooking process, in common usage these days, it’s come to
mean the act of cooking food in a temperature-controlled
water bath—so that’s how I’m going to use it, even though
my cooler method actually makes no use of a vacuum at all.
Deal with it.
So does the beer cooler method really work? I pitted my
beer cooler/freezer bag method (total cost: $21.90) against a
SousVide Supreme/FoodSaver combo (total cost: $569.98),
comparing their performance in four categories:
The ability to cook proteins to a precise temperature all
the way from the edges to the center.
- The ability to hold cooked foods at serving