Tasmanian Sea Trout Marlene Dietrich - Tap Water Sous Vide

TASMANIAN SEA TROUT MARLENE DIETRICH: SOUS VIDE RECIPE

"I like boiled fish…almost any fish tastes wonderful when properly boiled…the fish must never boil."

So sayeth Marlene Dietrich in her book ABC, first published in 1961. Like the lady herself, her culinary advice is mysteriously elusive. And as good a jumping off point as any for the inscrutable world of sous vide cooking.

Sous vide (under vacuum) cooking seems to be approaching a watershed moment (unintentional lame pun noted). Still, as blogger Becky of Chef Reinvented points out, the question remains: is sous vide the spawn of Satan's bath water or a viable modernist cooking method?

In short sous vide cooking is food vacuum packed in plastic bags and immersed in a precise temperature-controlled bath to bring the food to just the desired serving temperature. This provides very tender and flavorful results. Because it never gets hotter than intended the food cooks evenly and can rest in suspended animation until ready to serve. Hence its most-favored-appliance status in celebrity chef kitchens (Paul Bocuse, Thomas Keller, Ferran Adrià, you get the idea).

For those who can accommodate a sous vide machine's space-hogging size (considerably bigger than a bread box) and don't mind the considerable cost there are plenty of options. In fact you can buy now! Outside Supreme Sous Vide Water Oven.

If you're not ready to bring that baby home worry not. The New York Times' Melissa Clark recently got Nathan Myhrvold, an author

of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking to divulge this easy-breezy tap-water sous vide method. BTW I met Nate and co-author Chris Young at the International Food Bloggers Conference. They walked me through their carrot soup recipe using an industrial juicer, professional grade blender and a centrifuge that would have be at home in the Center for Disease Control's labs. The soup was quite good.

Get this — yes, you can cook fish using tap-water! The NYT's tap-water technique for stove top sous vide is key to this Tasmanian Sea Trout Marlene Dietrich sous vide recipe. Check out this How to Cook Sous Vide Fish video from the Spectacularly Delicious test kitchens.

Why dedicate this celebrity recipe to Marlene Dietrich? Tasmanian Sea Trout Marlene Dietrich combines the flavors of the mysterious East (Shanghai Lily in Shanghai Express, 1932) with continental flair (Maria de Crevecoeur in Monte Carlo, 1957) employing seemingly sinister methods (Touch of Evil, 1958; The Devil is a Woman, 1935) for heavenly results (The Garden of Allah, 1936.)