Perfectly cooked?

What do many of the current line-up of superchefs have in common?

I’m thinking here of a piece of fish cooked by Graham Neville, of Dublin's Number Forty One; a tranche of venison cooked by Mickael Viljanen of The Greenhouse, or a loin of rabbit cooked by David Hurley of Gregan’s Castle. All these dishes, that I’ve been lucky enough to try this year, had in one thing in common: they were cooked at very low temperature.

It’s hot to cook cool right now.

At a talk given in the Tannery Cookery School, Mickael Viljanen confessed to never turning the oven up beyond 90ºC. But, he explained, to achieve this delicate tightrope between something being à point, or just dangerously undercooked, you need a little bit of gadgetry.

Cooking this cool needs a temperature probe that can stand the heat of the oven. It needs to have a coated cable which lets you pierce your meat, fish or fowl at the beginning of cooking, and then just leave the probe in there in the oven, while the beast cooks.

Lucky enough for us, in Bantry we have a superb kitchen shop, www.cookware.ie, and within a very short time thanks to Maria and Andrew in this estimable establishment, we were equipped with the necessary tool, and so set about learning how to cook at low temperature.

Meat was the easiest thing to cook on low. We just cooked it for longer, and as soon as the temperature probe beeped, out it came to rest. Sometimes we would finish it off with a blast under the grill to crisp the outside, or we glazed it first in a slightly hot pan. This well hung rib of beef from O’Flynn’s of Cork cooked to perfection. We had success cooking pork this way too.

Chicken, as in the whole roast, was a disaster. The probe seemed to get very confused, and we over-cooked the bird, reverting to the old press-it-and-see, pierce it, does it run red?

It didn’t: we had passed the point of no return, and the dinner was dry.

The most fun we had was cooking with fish. John found a fascinating video on the New York Times, and we followed it with both salmon and with hake. It involved a home-kit of sous vide where we put the fish in a ziplock bag, and held the bag in warm tap water. Sounds unappetising, doesn’t it? But the result was silky fish flesh that we glazed in a warmish pan to take away that anaemic colour of just-cooked fish.

Owning an oven-proof temperature probe has certainly changed the way we cook.

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2012/01/17/dining/100000001265554/in-the-kitchen-with-nathan-myhrvold.html