Healthy cooking with sous vide

There are dozens of reasons why cooking with a sous vide stick is better. Just think of the perfect cooking and tenderness, better flavours, but also the ease of use and how you achieve the best results time after time with sous-vide. We could chat about it for hours. But we won’t do that this time. Today we are going to talk extensively about the health benefits that cooking with sous vide has to offer.

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

How can sous vide help to 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 compared to a meal that you eat out. When you prepare your meal at home, you also know exactly what is in your food. You buy the ingredients yourself and therefore have control over the quality and sustainability of what you get. This allows you to ensure the healthiest meat, fish and vegetables. This prevents allergies and sensitivities to certain ingredients. That saves your body a lot of unnecessary stress.

healthier cooking

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 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, everything 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 keeps the nutritional value much better and makes healthy cooking a breeze.

Using sous vide makes our food easier to digest

Many of the vegetables we eat are more easily digested by our body when they are no longer completely raw, but just sufficiently cooked. The yarn breaks down the cell walls so that your body can digest it more easily. Animal proteins, so meat and to a slightly lesser extent fish, contain collagen. Due to the sous vide cooking process, the collagen in the food will be converted 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 maintaining a healthy body.

Scientific studies have 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 and intestinal wall, for example in case of problems due to stomach acid or leaky gut syndrome.

With sous vide you use less fat

If you cook with sous vide, you use less fat. The explanation for that is simple. The food is not cooked in the pan, so you don’t need to use butter or oil to prevent the ingredient from sticking to the pan. Don’t get us wrong, we are by no means anti-fat. In fact, we love the good fats. Because nothing beats the taste of butter or a good olive oil, right? That is 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 in the pan.

But it is a fact. With sous vide, the amount of fat we need is just much, much less than if we were to cook the same steak completely in the pan. With 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 come up 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, you can’t 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.

You can also choose to sterilize the surface of the meat before you vacuum pack it. You can do this by immersing it in boiling hot water for about thirty seconds or by briefly putting the meat on in the pan. After the sous vide cooking, you can bake the meat. This not only provides that beautiful color and texture to the dish, 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 New Year’s resolutions, they often don’t last. The reason is often that it is too difficult to fit the good intentions into our lives. Busy job, little time, children; there are plenty of reasons why it is difficult to put a healthy meal on the table over and over again. Sous vide can also help you with this. With sous vide it is perfectly possible to prepare multiple portions of the same dish at the same time. You can cook several vacuumed pieces of meat or vegetables at the same time in the sous vide bath. They will all have the same perfect cooking.

Once the dish is ready, you can refrigerate it, after which you can keep it in the fridge for a few days or you can freeze it. Your sous vide dishes can be stored in the freezer for up to three months. You can read more about this topic in one of our previous blogs about refrigerating sous vide dishes . Before using, thaw the dish in the refrigerator. If necessary, you can immediately reheat the sealed dish in the sous vide bath or bake it briefly in the pan. You heat up with the sous vide 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? Check out these sous vide Christmas recipes !