Cooking with care

Bruno Goussault, PhD, chief scientist at Cuisine Solutions, Sterling, Va., began developing the sous vide method of cooking in 1971. The director of meat purchasing for Jacque Borel’s restaurants asked Goussault for a way to cook roast beef from the hard muscles of the beef carcass. They wanted a method to retain the juices and tenderness without the use of a traditional cooking oven.

The question of how to do this presented Goussault with certain obstacles. However, those obstacles created the avenue for implementing a new approach to cooking roast beef.

“Since we didn’t have an oven, we had to use hot water from an immersion circulator as the heat transfer fluid and make use of the device’s ability to regulate the water temperature to the nearest degree,” Goussault said. “Then we had to protect the muscle from the aggression of the hot water with a flexible and waterproof conditioning, a sort of skin or plastic wrap completely adhering to the muscle.”