When my nephew, who’s working in a restaurant, visited us two years ago he was talking about the amazing results he was able to achieve using the sous vide at work. He invited me over and we tried a bunch of items on the menu and what can I say? I was hooked. It’s just top-of-the-line texture and taste 99% of the time. Even with his assistance, it took me a while to figure out how to get the most out of the sous vide immersion cooker.
The actual procedure of cooking is quite lengthy but simple and requires very little maintenance from the user. Preparing the food in the ziplock bags and preparing the water bath takes a little bit of time, but rarely more than 10 minutes. Adding these together can result in cooking times between 1-4 hours, which is why a lot of people want to prepare as much food as possible, and even multiple foods at the same time.
You can sous vide as much meat, fish, or any other food as you can put in your water bath while maintaining enough space between the bags so the water can circulate properly, ensuring that every piece is cooked evenly. Additionally, it’s ok to put more than one steak or filet in a single ziplock bag as long as the food isn’t layered, as it increases the cooking time because of the extra thickness.
How Much Food Can You Sous Vide at Once?
Because there are a variety of container sizes, there’s no magic number of steaks that can be cooked at once. Instead, there are certain guidelines that can be useful when cooking larger amounts of food.
It’s all about making sure that every single piece of food in the sous vide bath gets the attention it needs. You don’t want to force a bunch of zip-lock bags into the container only to open it up 4 hours later to find out that they’re still raw in the center.
So, as long as;
- The ziplock bags aren’t jam-packed with food
- The vessel used for the water bath is spacious enough to keep the bags separated to allow water to flow freely throughout the bath. (In a well-insulated vessel, many sous vide immersion cookers are capable of heating up to 10 gallons or 40 liters of water)
You should be fine. Additionally, under these circumstances, the cooking time shouldn’t increase either – to clarify; sous vide cooking times depend on the thickness of the meat, as long as the pieces aren’t stacked, the cooking time won’t increase.
When packing your food in ziplock bags for sous vide, make sure there’s enough room to put them in a single layer. For this reason, having a vacuum sealer is awesome, as it will allow you to pack food in a single layer in a bag and then vacuum it to make sure it’s held in place and in the “department” created around it when the air is sucked out of the bag.
Here’s the one I’m using. If you do decide to get one, make sure to research what else you can do with it as there’s more to having a vacuum sealer than simplifying the process of sous vide.
Can You Cook Multiple Foods in a Sous Vide at Once?
By now it should be clear that you actually can cook larger amounts of food in a sous vide, under the right circumstances – but what about different foods?
You can cook multiple, different foods in a sous vide at once. When cooking multiple foods, there are certain things one should keep in mind.
Don’t pack different foods in the same ziplock bag
Not only will different foods have some level of taste transfer if they’re cooked together in one and the same bag, they will also have to be removed from the water bath at different times, most likely. The taste transfer that takes place when cooking is a good enough reason to avoid packing everything in the same bag – especially if you’re using different spices.
But if you still decide to give it a try, which I won’t promote, make sure that everything requires the same temperature for the same amount of time. Otherwise, you will have to remove the bag, open it up, and take out half of the bag’s content.
Make sure all of the ingredients are supposed to be cooked at the same temperature
As obvious as it sounds, it’s still something that I really want to highlight as I’ve had a bunch of not-so-foolproof ideas myself. When placing food in the sous vide water bath, make sure that all of the foods are to be cooked at the same temperature. There is only one set temperature and the immersion cooker will regulate it throughout the process.
Placing food that requires higher or lower temperatures may result in under or over-cooking. Doing so would be kind of counterproductive, seeing as the sous vide is marketed and sold to those who seek to achieve the perfect texture when cooking.
Keep track of how long each ingredient has been cooking
You really want to keep track of both time and temperature, especially if you’re doing sous vide without an immersion cooker (as they automate the process quite a bit).
When cooking different foods in different bags, bear in mind that the ingredients may not require the same amount of time in the bath to be cooked and should therefore be removed when they’ve reached the desired texture.
Do Sous Vide Bags Need To Be Fully Submerged?
Floating bags is quite common when cooking sous vide, we’ve heard of a dozen of our readers who’ve had trouble getting their bags to stay underwater, which is vital for sous vide. The reason why your ziplock bag is floating is that there’s air trapped inside it, as you may have guessed.
However, it doesn’t have to be because you failed to remove all of the air inside the bag. The food itself contains air that can be released when it’s heated. There’s also going to be vapors forming inside the bag as water evaporates.
Your bag may also be kept afloat because the food is less dense than water.
Getting the remaining air out of the ziplock bag is an easy task if you have a vacuum sealer at your disposal, but everyone doesn’t have a vacuum sealer at home so I’ve included another method that’s almost as effective as a vacuum sealer – but not fully.
If you plan on cooking sous vide in the future, I suggest you spend an extra 30-40 bucks on a vacuum sealer. They’re not only used for sous vide either, but they’re very useful for it. This is the one I purchased on Amazon and I’m very pleased with it. It’s been used to store food when our family is out hiking and it’s been great.
To get the air out of our bag so the bag can be submerged, do the following:
- Holding the bag above the water bath, close the ziplock 95%, leaving a little path for the air to escape.
- Lower the bag slowly into the water bath, without letting any water enter through the little opening we left. The pressure from the water will push the air out of the bag.
- Continue lowering the bag until the little hole is the only thing that’s left above water then close the last gap and lift the bag up again. The bag should be free from air, however, air bubbles trapped inside the meat can still escape but will probably not be capable of keeping the bag afloat.
But what if you have vacuum sealed / drained your ziplock bags of air but they’re still floating? Then you have to anchor the bags so that they’re kept below the surface at all times. This is done by either placing a “weight” inside or outside the bag.
I’ve seen people put silver knives or spoons at the bottom of their ziplock bags to keep the bag submerged. It works but I have gone another route, I have a couple of custom made sous vide bags that I placed small weights on. These weights keep the bags underwater throughout the entire process.