sous vide opens the way to quality and safety onboard

Gerard Bertholon is Cuisine Solutions’ Chief Strategy Officer and will be at the WTCE Taste of Travel exploring the growing popularity of sous vide at Cuisine Solutions we specialise in sous vide cooking, a technique that is becoming increasingly popular for some obvious reasons. In French sous vide means ‘under vacuum’. It's a technique that involves cooking at precise low temperatures and over time to achieve perfect textures and moisture levels.

Most conventional ovens control temperatures by 10- or 20-degree variations but in sous vide we can adjust to cook by one-degree variations. This allows us, for example, to cook some proteins for 20 hours and still keep them medium rare.

Sous vide cooking techniques can really improve not only the quality but the safety of products. The process pasteurises the food so by the end all vegetive forms of bacteria, listeria and salmonella are destroyed.

The quality is good too because when you cook at a lower temperature, you end up with products that are juicier and tastier. You can still sear the proteins before cooking to develop the Maillard reaction, and this adds more flavour and aroma to the sous vide cooking process and finished product.

Consistent Results

The attributes of sous vide are good for airlines because they bring a consistency that has been known to professionals for a while. Until recently, sous vide was a technique only used by professional chefs. Now it is moving out into the catering sector and even to home cooking where sous vide has become the fastest growing cooking trend in the US right now. It is popular because it allows people to batch cook healthy and delicious food easily.

Plant-based dishes

Sous vide also allows us to be creative and enhance the quality of plant-based foods, whose popularity is growing. I’m in charge of global research and development and the culinary team that trains our customers on how to use our products.

We have four plants in the US, one in Thailand and one in France, which gives us the ability to give solutions and sell the same product all over the world, which is exactly what airlines want: one solution, not just in one country but all over the world.

I want people to really think about the ingredients they use and make good choices. I look forward to discussing all this at WTCE. • cuisinesolutions.com