Both pressure cooking and sous vide-style cooking have been around for a long time. Sous vide is a low-temperature, long-time method of cooking that has seen a rise in popularity during the last 5 years.
While the method of cooking food for a long time at low temperatures has been seen before, the simple appliance used to automate and regulate the process is, in fact, relatively new.
Not being familiar with sous vide cooking will raise questions. One of the questions regarding sous vide that I’ve been getting a lot lately is;
What’s the difference between pressure cookers and sous vide circulators/cookers? Pressure cookers increase the boiling point of water which reduces the cooking time significantly while sous vide circulators are designed to cook food at low temperatures for hours. Pressure cookers can make tough cuts tender but also overcook them easily. Sous vide sticks regulate temperature as needed which results in tender meat.
In this article, we’ll explain the difference between pressure cooking and sous vide-style cooking. In addition to that, we’ll also talk about the different areas where they excel and which one you should buy depending on your needs.
How Do Pressure Cookers and Sous Vide Work?
Looking at these two you’ll see that they are very different from one another, in fact, I think you could say that they are on two separate ends of the spectrum.
To better understand what they can be used for, what separates them and which one you may benefit from purchasing, we’ll take a closer look at each appliance and the mechanics behind it.
Pressure Cookers
Electric pressure cookers have four major components;
- The pot: The vessel which holds all the ingredients.
- The heating element: Recent generations of pressure cookers come with an internal heating element and are electric. Older pressure cookers were placed on the stove to generate heat.
- The lid: The lid is one of the most important components as it seals shut to trap the pressure inside the pot.
- The safety valve: The safety valve keeps the pressure cooker from exploding by letting out excess pressure when the pot’s inner pressure exceeds safe levels.
Combined, these parts make up the body of the appliance. While most electric pressure cookers are equipped with more parts than the ones I’ve mentioned, these are the essentials. Without them, the pressure cooker would not work as intended.
So how do these parts, in combination, work in practice?
The ingredients are placed in the pot with sufficient amounts of a liquid of your choice, preferably water. The lid is then placed on the pot – but won’t seal shut just yet.
Now, when the cooker is started and starts heating up, the liquid inside the cooker will start to vaporize, producing steam. At this point, the pressure cooker’s lid will be under enough pressure to seal shut completely.
Because the cooker is locked shut, the steam will have nowhere to escape – increasing the pressure inside the cooker.
The increased pressure inside the cooker means more atmospheric pressure, which, in turn, changes the boiling point of water. Traditionally, water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius.
But in an environment such as the one a sealed pressure cooker provides (about 15psi or 1 bar above the pressure at sea level) water will boil at temperatures as high as 250 degrees Fahrenheit or 121 degrees Celsius.
In addition to the increased temperature, the increased pressure also forces the liquids, juices, and heat to penetrate the ingredients resulting in reduced cooking times.
It may sound dangerous to trap pressure inside a sealed vessel, and it is. The pressure cooker has been labeled as hazardous before – but they aren’t anymore. Today’s pressure cookers come armed with advanced safety measures.
They regulate temperatures and pressure with the help of sensors and release any excess pressure through the “venting hole” to keep pressure levels safe.
Once finished cooking, the pressure cooker must release pressure – which can be done two days. The first method is a quick release, where the venting hole is opened to release the pressure.
The second method is to just let the pressure cooker sit until it has depressurized completely – it isn’t nearly as quick it is very useful.
When I’m cooking meat I use the quick release to make sure the meat doesn’t overcook. The second method is extremely helpful when cooking things that foam, such as beans or grains.
If I were to open the venting hole on a pressurized cooker full of foam, it would shoot sizzling hot foam all over the place.
My two cents on the pressure cooker? It’s a versatile appliance that has earned its place in my kitchen arsenal. I’m using it more than the slow cooker just because it suits my spontaneous lifestyle.
It has certainly been nice to have a pressure cooker now that I’ve had less time to spend in the kitchen. It’s easy and I’ve been able to teach the entire family how to use it.
With that said, I still use all of my kitchen appliances and love them all.
Now I’ve talked about the pressure cooker for way too long, let’s shift our focus over to sous vide immersion circulators and the principles they run by.
Sous Vide Immersion Circulators/Machines
Restaurants have been using sous vide cooking for a long time to cook food to perfect doneness. Other methods of cooking will require much more skill to recreate the texture that you’ll get from sous vide.
Often, only a small portion of a piece of meat is cooked to the perfect doneness. With sous vide, this isn’t the case. You’ll get the texture you want all the way out to the edges. That’s something I really like about sous vide.
It was only recently that the appliances used to sous vide on a commercial level were made more user-friendly and sold at a price more suitable for the average household. That’s when I decided to start cooking sous vide style.
Sous Vide Cooking requires a minimum of three components:
- The immersion circulator: Sous vide “sticks” like the Anovo Precision Cooker regulates temperature to ensure that the ingredients are cooked at the perfect temperature throughout the entire procedure. The immersion circulator circulates the water to make sure that any ingredient is consistently cooked.
- The container: You need a container to hold the bath that you’ll use for sous vide cooking. Your sous vide stick can be mounted on most pots.
- The sealable bags: When cooking sous vide, the ingredients are placed in sealable bags which are then placed in the bath and removed once the cooker has finished cooking.
Other than immersion circulators, there are Sous Vide water ovens. These are fully-contained water baths and are significantly larger and pricier than sous vide sticks. For someone who’s trying to get into sous vide cooking, I would seriously recommend getting a sous vide stick over a water oven.
Sous vide cooking is a quite simple procedure that requires very little maintenance from the user.
I’ll show you how it’s done, step-by-step.
The first thing to do is to pack the ingredients, including any herb of your choice, in a sealable bag and seal it shut before submerging it in a container filled with water.
The immersion circulator is then placed in the bath so that the heating element is immersed in water. The control panel should, however, stay out of water.
With the sous vide stick placed in the bath, proceed to plug it into an outlet to power it.
Lastly, set the temperature and time according to the recipe’s demands (temperatures often range between 105 to 160 degrees Fahrenheit).
The immersion circulator will now heat and circulate the water to ensure the ingredients are evenly cooked. Keeping the temperature at the precise level is crucial when it comes to getting food to the perfect texture.
Because immersion circulators are able to keep the temperature at a steady level and regulate accordingly, cooking to the perfect doneness becomes an easy task.
Once finished, the bags can be removed from the water bath – you can now choose to serve them as they are or finish them off by searing or grilling them for an even juicier finish.
Can You Cook Sous Vide In a Pressure Cooker?
Now that we’ve gone through how they work, you may have understood that pressure cooking is a speedy procedure useful when cooking tougher cuts of meat while sous vide is a long procedure where temperatures are held low to ensure the ingredients don’t overcook.
Doesn’t sound like they are very similar, does it? They aren’t.
Pressure cookers reach high temperatures quickly and are used to speed up the cooking process, this would pretty much render the idea of sous vide cooking useless. Take into consideration that sous vide has to be kept at just the right temperature from start to finish – this can be quite hard using a pressure cooker (which also regulates temperature and pressure autonomously) because temperatures fluctuate a lot.
When we’re talking about pressure cookers we often turn to the Instant Pot. The Instant Pot has become one of the most popular kitchen appliances and seeing as it can do pretty much, I think it’s fair to say that it has earned its place.
However, I have yet to see an Instant Pot that offers the right tools for sous vide cooking, at least not as they come.
What do I mean by that?
Well, when it comes to pressure cookers – there may be other alternatives that provide the option to cook sous vide, or at least something similar to it, and when it comes to Instant Pots there’s a solution provided by the makers of the Instant Pot.
Because the instant Pot doesn’t offer the proper tools required for sous vide, the team behind the Instant Pot have created their own immersion circulator, you can find it on Amazon.
However, this isn’t as much of a 2-in-1-solution as I had hoped for, it still requires the user to purchase the immersion circulator and/or the Instant Pot in order to get the best of both worlds.
The second alternative, which my friends are vouching for (and I’m still getting to know) is the Fissler Multi Pot which comes with a ridiculously large number of options; 18 different cooking programs.
I have no idea if Fissler’s ideology is to pack as much value as possible into one product and pray that we become dependent but they have surely packed a bunch of settings into one appliance.
But to the point; one of the options provided by the Fissler Multi Pot is actually “sous vide” cooking.
If you were hoping to find a way to both pressure cook and sous vide using the same appliance, then this is it.
Check the listing on Amazon to find out more about the Fissler.
What Are the Benefits of Using a Pressure Cooker?
Well, what are the benefits of using one or the other? Which one will you benefit from most? Considering these two methods of cooking and the devices used for them are far from alike, you’ll have to pick the one that suits your needs the best.
Pressure cookers are the quickest of the two, capable of cooking a meal in 30 minutes or less – depending on the ingredients used, tougher cuts of meat may need more time. This is, of course, something to take into consideration when picking which appliance to get.
Using the pressure cooker has saved me a lot of time over the years. If you’re looking for a way to throw all ingredients into a pot and set it to cook then the pressure cooker is the better alternative.
While both are simple and require very little maintenance (this is only true for electronic pressure cookers – stovetop pressure cookers require a lot of supervision because they don’t regulate pressure like electronic cookers do) the pressure cooker is just more convenient than most tools used for sous vide cooking.
More specifically, if you purchase an Instant Pot or any other Multicooker you’ll be able to enjoy a wide variety of different features.
Immersion circulators, on the other hand, rarely do more than their primary job.
In our household, the pressure cooker and the immersion circulator are both used frequently but you can definitely see a correlation between how often we use the sous vide and how much spare time we’ve got.
Verdict: If you’re looking for a quick way to prepare thousands of different dishes, ranging from one portion to larger batches – then the pressure cooker is for you. Cooking meat to the perfect texture may take a little bit of practice using the pressure cooker but you’ll get there.
What Are the Benefits of Using a Sous Vide?
With a sous vide immersion circulator you’ll be able to set temperature and time – the heating element will then communicate with sensors to adapt whenever the temperature changes. By regulating temperature automatically and instantly, the circulator can keep ingredients from overcooking.
Aside from the choice of ingredient and spices, doneness and texture are the best ways to make a dish taste great, according to me. There’s nothing worse than eating a dry cut of meat – right? With the sous vide you’ll be able to replicate chefs at top-tier restaurants.
Our guests are often impressed when we serve food cooked with the sous vide circulator. Eggs, chicken, lamb, beef, vegetables, you name it.
Compared to the pressure cooker, the sous vide isn’t as quick – the entire purpose of cooking sous vide is to cook the dish at low temperatures for a long period of time.
Verdict
If you’re looking for a way to cook the juiciest pieces of meat (or any other ingredient) you’ve ever cooked, then the immersion circulator is a good pick.
For larger batches of food and multi-ingredient dishes, I would pick the pressure cooker.