Modern sous-vide cooking
Cocción sous-vide moderna
- Date
- 1974 · confidence high
- Place
- Restaurant Troisgros, Roanne, France
- Credited to
- Georges Pralus
- Field
- Life & health
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
Chef Georges Pralus found that cooking vacuum-sealed foie gras at low temperature kept its appearance, lost little fat and gained in texture; this is how sous-vide cooking as practiced today in fine dining was born.
Wikidata attributes the item to Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford), who in 1799 had already tried cooking meat with hot air at low temperature, but that is only a distant precursor: vacuum-sealing combined with low-temperature water immersion, the sous-vide technique proper, was developed in the mid-1960s as an industrial preservation method, and Pralus refined and popularized it in the kitchen in 1974.
What it led to
- Adoption of sous-vide in high-end and later home cooking
- Industrial standardization of low-temperature vacuum cooking