Arrive Magazine - March/April, 2007

meals to be cooked sous vide on the train from Paris to Strasburg in 1982.

In America, the technique wasn’t as easily accepted at the white tablecloth restaurants. Instead, it went industrial. Cuisine Solutions, for example, where Goussault is a chief scientist, provides sous vide food for companies such as Continental and Amtrak. Between 60 and 80 percent of the dishes on Acela’s first-class menu, including bouillabaisse, halibut and meat loaf (which comes with corn and mashed potatoes), has been previously cooked and sealed in plastic by Cuisine Solutions. Corporate chef Timothy Costello says Amtrak has been using sous vide since before he arrived on the scene in 1999. Those lamb shanks that were on Acela last spring? A recipe developed by Costello that Cuisine Solutions prepared sous vide.

“It’s worked for our needs,” Costello says. “Now everybody wants to do sous vide, and we’ve been doing it for 10 years.”

The technique got a foot in the swinging door of the high-end restaurant kitchen once Pralus and Goussault started offering classes to chefs like David Bouley of Bouley in Manhattan. (According to chefs I’ve spoken with, the two men have different styles of teaching sous vide: Pralus focuses on recipes; Goussault teaches the technique.)

VACUUMING, MODERN-STYLE

By 2005, sous vide started to get a lot more press, including a New York Times piece, “Under Pressure,” by Amanda Hesser. The New York City Health Department took note. The government is concerned about botulism, which can survive in the anaerobic environment that sous vide provides. Restaurants in New York that use sous vide must now have a certified safety plan, says Sara Markt, a spokeswoman for the department. As of press time, Blue Hill and Per Se were certified, but Markt says anyone who works with the department will eventually be able to cook sous vide.

Chef Pino Maffeo, who has been using sous vide at Restaurant L in Boston, says it’s not a technique to be taken lightly.

“If you don’t know what you’re doing you could kill somebody,” he says. He learned to cook from a friend’s father who owned a sous vide company in France, and

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