No Butter Sous Vide: What did they mean by this?

No Butter Sous Vide: What did they mean by this? - Man Wearing White Dress Shirt With Black Necktie

I just watched an experiment on youtube, where they compare 2 steaks, side by side, the first one with added butter during sous vide (as many people do), the second one without butter.

It seems the second steak, without butter, was far better, and I have since read other sources suggesting to sous-vide without butter or oil for best results.

However, what should you do when searing? Should you also avoid butter there, or is butter OK, when searing? What about oil?

What about the advice, often mentioned, that if you put in herbs during sous-vide, you should add some oil in order to get the essential oils out of the herbs?

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNtqr8x_u7I



Best Answer

The (alleged) problem with extra fat during SV is that, flavor molecules will dissolve in fat and subsequently be discarded. The claim is that, this causes the loss of flavor.

For searing it’s fine to use butter or other fat.




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Should you sous vide with butter?

Here at Sous Vide Tools we often like to add a small amount of butter to the bag and find that for best results, flavoured butter works really well to add a little something extra during the cooking process. Our preference is to place butter into the bag itself, rather than on top of the product.

What does sous vide mean literally?

French, literally, under vacuum.

How do you make sous vide butter?

Preparation
  • Preparation. Place the butter in a vacuum bag, vacuum it and set the sous vide device to 85 degrees. Let the water become warm and place the bag in the water for 35 minutes.
  • Finish. Take the butter out of the water after 35 minutes. You will now see 3 layers in the bag.


  • How did sous viding come about?

    The method was adopted by Georges Pralus, a French chef, in 1974 for the Restaurant Troisgros (of Pierre and Michel Troisgros) in Roanne, France. He discovered that when foie gras was cooked in this manner, it kept its original appearance, did not lose excess amounts of fat, and had better texture.



    Sous Vide BUTTER EXPERIMENT - Should You Use BUTTER when cooking Sous Vide?




    Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

    Images: Craig Adderley, Craig Adderley, Daniela Constantini, Markus Spiske