Since the early days of the culinary world, chefs have sought to achieve greater consistency and exactness in their cooking. Precision cooking, while not a new concept, helps chefs achieve these results through more advanced methods of cooking that heat food to an exact temperature throughout.

From wood-burning stoves in the late 1700s to modern-day ovens, newfangled cooking gadgets, and popularized techniques, there have been many advancements over the years that have benefited precision cooking. Today we’ll look at how three of these advancements — sous vide, Cuisine Solutions, and ventless oven technology — work together to make precision cooking at scale a reality for chefs and non-chefs alike.

Sous vide
It’s hard to talk about precision cooking without acknowledging sous vide. Sous vide is a precision cooking technique that involves slow-cooking food at a constant, low temperature until it’s perfectly cooked through. French for “under vacuum,” sous vide is often (although not always) performed using vacuum-sealed or airtight containers, which are filled with the food products and placed in a water bath that’s held at a precise cooking temperature. The result is extremely tender, flavorful, nutrient-rich food that is so good it would make Gordon Ramsay blush.

Initially used as a safety measure to pasteurize foods before vacuum-sealing them, sous vide didn’t make its way to the culinary world until the early 1970s. Today it’s an established and popular precision-cooking technique that’s beloved by skilled chefs near and far. However, it wasn’t until a revolutionary company by the name of Cuisine Solutions came along that the accessibility of sous vide (or rather sous vide results) skyrocketed.

Cuisine Solutions
Cuisine Solutions, an American company that specializes in sous vide food preparation and packaging, is the undisputed authority on sous vide. Backed by a team of award-winning chefs, food scientists, and innovators, Cuisine Solutions cracked the code on ready-made sous vide. They did this by figuring out how to vacuum-seal and perfectly prepare sous to vide foods in advance, before refrigerating or flash freezing them for distribution. Up until this point, sous vide was more or less reserved for trained chefs or ambitious home cooks — its results were not yet accessible, scalable, or convenient for the masses.

From the Costcos and Starbucks of the world to five-star chefs, schools, hospitals, hotels, cruise lines, and beyond — the mouthwatering goodness of sous vide is now available via a vacuum-sealed pouch. That amazing egg and feta sandwich sold at the coffee shop around the corner? Chances are that’s sous vide egg from Cuisine Solutions — and the helpful worker behind the counter reheated that ridiculously delicious egg in mere minutes. But how? There’s not even a kitchen at that place?

Ventless oven technologies
Reheating foods from Cuisine Solutions is incredibly easy, thanks to the magic of convection and microwave ventless ovens. These ventless ovens are just that — ventless. They don’t utilize large and expensive hoods, so operators have the flexibility to put them nearly anywhere. This means that everyone from the taco truck owner to fine-dining restaurants, c-store chains, and cafeterias have access to the ventless technologies needed to bring a fully prepared, cooked, and packaged sous-vide product back to life in minutes.

Technically any convection or microwave oven can be used to reheat Cuisine Solutions sous vide products. However, there are advantages to using ventless ovens with more advanced technologies. For example, convection ovens that utilize what’s called precision impingement technology can cook and (in the case of Cuisine Solutions) reheat foods four times faster than a conventional oven, while preserving the moisture content of the prepared food. Or certain rapid-cook technologies, specifically microwave speed assist, preserve the sous vide quality through the perfectly optimized use of power and a high-velocity angular airflow.

Ready to bring precision cooking to the masses?
Learn more about the leading precision Impingement® technology that’s found in Ovention Conveyor, Shuttle®, and Matchbox® ovens. Or check out the new Ovention MiSA — the rapid cook oven that put microwave speed assist on the map. Request a demo today!