Healthier cooking with sous vide

There are dozens of reasons why cooking with a sous vide stick is better. Just think of the perfect doneness and tenderness, better flavors, but also the ease of use and how you can achieve the best results with sous vide every time. We could go on about it for hours. But we're not going to do that this time. Today we're going to talk extensively about the health benefits that cooking with sous vide has to offer us.

Because today our health is more important than ever. It seems like everyone is busy looking for a better balance, making responsible choices and consuming healthy and responsible food.  Not surprising of course, because our health influences our quality of life.  A wise Greek man known as Hippocrates is said to have once written the following: “Let food be thy medicine”. What he meant by this was: food can make you healthy, but food can also make you sick. More and more scientific studies are concluding that our intestines have a major influence on our physical and mental health. Healthy cooking is therefore vital to staying healthy for a long time.  

How can sous vide help you cook healthier?

With sous vide, everyone can cook healthier at home. First of all, of course, because cooking at home is much healthier. If you cook at home, you eat fewer carbohydrates, eat less fat and use much less salt than you would when eating out.  When you prepare your own meal at home, you know exactly what is in your food. You buy the ingredients yourself and therefore have control over the quality and sustainability of what you bring into your home. You can ensure the healthiest meat, fish and vegetables. Allergies and sensitivities to certain ingredients can be prevented. That saves your body a lot of unnecessary stress.

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But of course cooking with sous vide has even more health benefits

Sous vide preserves nutrients and vitamins. There are a few things that can cause vitamins and nutrients to be lost. Exposure to heat, water, and oxygen will affect the final amount of vitamins in your meal.  Overcooked or overcooked foods are less healthy and sometimes even very unhealthy, for example in the case of burnt food.  With sous vide, none of this matters. In the sealed and therefore completely airtight packaging, all the good and healthy is preserved. With sous vide, the dish is cooked at a much lower temperature than would happen with boiling, steaming or baking. This preserves the nutritional value much better and makes healthy cooking a piece of cake.

Using sous vide makes our food easier to digest

Many of the vegetables we eat are more easily digested by our body if they are no longer completely raw, but just cooked enough. Cooking breaks down the cell walls, making it easier for your body to digest. Animal proteins, such as meat and to a lesser extent fish, contain collagen. The sous vide cooking process will convert the collagen in the food into gelatin. The gelatin is ultimately easier for our body to absorb. The collagen we mentioned earlier is a body's own protein. Collagen plays an extremely important role in having and keeping a healthy body.  

Scientific research has shown that collagen is important for healthy skin, strong bones and flexible tendons. This protein is also important for keeping cartilage supple and even our teeth benefit from sufficient collagen. In addition, collagen can help to restore the stomach wall and intestinal wall, for example in the case of problems caused by stomach acid or leaky gut syndrome.

With sous vide you use less fat

When you cook with sous vide, you use less fat. The explanation for this is simple. The food is not cooked in the pan, so you do not need to use butter or oil to prevent the ingredient from sticking to the pan.   Don't get us wrong, we are not anti-fat at all. In fact, we love the good fats. Because nothing beats the taste of butter or a good olive oil, right? That's why we always use some fat in the pan, so that we can properly fry our perfect sous vide cooked steak without the risk of it sticking to the pan.

But it is a fact. With sous vide, the amount of fat we need is simply much, much less than if we were to cook that same steak directly in the pan.  In a healthy lifestyle it is important to deal with fats in a responsible way. Sous vide can help you use less fat when cooking.

Sous vide improves food safety

Sous vide and food safety. We see this topic pass by regularly. Because with sous vide you cook the food at a low temperature. As long as you use the minimum cooking times and the minimum temperature, nothing can go wrong. When you let meat (beef, lamb or pork) float in the sous vide bath at a temperature of at least 55 degrees Celsius and in the case of chicken at least 60 degrees, you are actually pasteurizing the meat. Harmful bacteria don't stand a chance.

Optionally, you can choose to grill the surface of the meat before you vacuum packed sterilize it briefly. You can do this by immersing it in boiling hot water for about thirty seconds or by briefly frying the meat in the pan. After cooking sous vide, you can bake the meat. This not only gives the dish that beautiful color and texture, but it also kills any bacteria.

Sous vide makes it easier to prepare larger quantities of healthy food in advance

As with many of our good intentions, they often don't last long. The reason is often that it is too difficult to fit the good intentions into our lives. Busy job, little time, children; there are enough reasons why it is difficult to put a healthy meal on the table again and again. Sous vide can help you with this too.  With sous vide it is perfectly possible to prepare multiple portions of the same dish at the same time. You can cook multiple vacuumed pieces of meat or vegetables at the same time in the sous vide bath. They will all have the same perfect doneness.

Once the dish is ready, you can cool it down and store it in the fridge for a few days or you can freeze it. In the freezer, your sous vide dishes can be stored for up to three months. In one of our previous blogs about the cooling sous vide dishes you can read more about this topic. Before use, defrost the dish in the refrigerator. If necessary, you can reheat the sealed dish directly in the sous vide bath or bake it briefly in the pan. Reheating with the sous vide is done at the temperature at which the dish was initially cooked, otherwise 54 degrees Celsius is always a safe choice. Do you want to surprise your family this Christmas? Then take a look at this sous vide christmas recipes!