Sous Vide

To cook sous vide, food is placed in a sealable bag and cooked in a water bath. A sous vide is great for chefs and for us because it uses really precise temperature control to maintain flavour and nutrients, but they are also really useful in a domestic setting if you want to experiment with making your own syrups. We use ours for cooking harder fruits, such as rhubarb, apples and pears – as it breaks them down and enables you to juice or centrifuge them more easily without damaging the flavour, but also mostly for cooking the foraged berries we buy – a lot are poisonous unless you cook them. Raw rowan tree berries are poisonous as they contain parasorbic acid, but if they are cooked well, the parasorbic acid turns to sorbic acid, which is not poisonous to consume. A water bath cooks the fruit without adding a lot of heat, enabling us to retain its freshness but still cook them at a high enough temperature to kill the poison.