About SousVide Dash

SousVide Dash is an interactive dashboard designed to help determine the optimal sous-vide cooking time for a variety of foods. By simply choosing a food, shape and dimensions, one can get an estimate of how long it will take for the food to reach temperature and how it will get there. SousVide Dash also supports tuning cooking times to specific sous-vide equipment.

Once the parameters are chosen, SousVide Dash becomes a powerful timer that tracks and graphs the estimated temperature at the surface and core of the food as it cooks sous-vide.

What SousVide Dash Does

SousVide Dash takes the place of pre-computed cooking time tables like those found at eGullet.org or douglasbaldwin.com. Computers have gotten fast enough that it is now practical to compute times like those in these tables on something as small as an iPad. This opens up tremendous new possibilities.

Instead of sticking to the limited number of combinations of foods, sizes, shapes and temperatures found in the tables, sous-vide cooks can now explore a much wider combination of options with just a few taps on their screen. It also enables equipment-specific calculations that take the performance of the bath or circulator being used into account when computing cooking times. Finally, advanced users can customize the specific parameters of the simulation to analyze scenarios not contemplated by the built-in settings.

The times computed by SousVide Dash are all estimates of the time required for heating food from initial refrigerator temperature to serving temperature. This is ideal for cases where the food is to be finished and plated for service immediately after emerging from the sous vide bath. SousVide Dash is not currently designed to model cooking for extended periods of time at final temperature as is done for tougher cuts of meat. If you plan to cook sous-vide in that manner, please ensure that you fully understand the role of pasteurization in long- cooking sous vide preparations. The books mentioned below cover this topic.

If you are in doubt, consider cooking your food in a bath 1°C warmer than the desired final temperature and cook for a little longer than advised by SousVide Dash. Almost all meats, fish, and shelfish do just fine when cooked in this way. With such a small difference between the water temperature and the desired final temperature, the suggested times are more a minimum than an absolutely optimal time.

What SousVide Dash Does Not Do

SousVide Dash is not a tutorial or an introduction to sous-vide cooking in general. It is designed for those who already understand the fundementals of sous-vide cooking and related food safety issues.

If you are looking to learn the fundementals of sous vide, we suggest the following books:

• Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide, by Thomas Keller. A comprehensive set of techniques and recipes from a sous vide pioneer and one of America's pre-eminent chefs.
• Sous Vide for the Home Cook, by Douglas Baldwin. A great introduction aimed at home cooks looking to learn the basics of sous vide.
• Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, by Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet. A massive six-volume set covering the full range of modernist techniques, including very extensive coverage of all aspects of sous vide.
• Beginning Sous Vide: Low Temperature Recipes and Techniques for Getting Started at Home, by Jason Logsdon. Another introduction targeting the home cook.