• A Study on the Sous Vide

A Study on the Sous Vide

Sous vide means vacuum in French. Sous vide is a cooking method which can have the accurate temperature control of the vacuum sealed food. Compared with the traditional cooking methods, the accurate temperature control of sous vide makes food cooked exactly to the right degree and have good tastes. The food vacuum sealers not only well keep the flavor and nutrition of food, but also prolong the shelf lives of goods. In recent years, sous vide has been widely used in the foreign food industries as well as households, but individuals in China has seldom heard about sous vide. The researches have been conducted in this field are only a few.
 
You can process the sous vide food in two ways. One is cooking the sous vide food through using the sous vide cookers and then eat it. The other is cooking the sous vide food by using the sous vide cookers, refrigerating the food, and cooking it later when you want to have it. The two methods of processing the sous vide food have different processing principles. The procedures of the former one are: prepackaging, vacuum sealing, heating or pasteurizing, finishing and serving the dishes, and the procedures of the latter one are: prepackaging, vacuum sealing, heating or pasteurizing, fast cooling, refrigerating, reheating, finishing and serving the dishes.

With the improvement of people's living standards and the accelerated pace of people's life, people have had less and less time which they can spend cooking food in kitchens, and the food convenient for people to eat has become the first choice for contemporary consumers. The original intention of sous vide is to provide safe food which is full of nutrition and also convenient for people to eat for each individual, based on the premise of guaranteeing the safety of the food. Therefore, convenient and health food become welcomed by the working-class families, the single persons as well as the elderly. In the near future, the food industry, the food retail industry, the restaurants, armed forces, hospitals, schools, the transporting systems including the airline, railway and sea transportation systems may become the potential markets for the sous vide cooking method.
 
Sous vide has been rapidly developing in the foreign countries, and it is used to process a variety of food such as poultry, livestock, aquatic and vegetables, while the applications of sous vide in China has just started, and there are only a few studies about it in China.