The Broigus of Jim Braux

Dear Tamar:

I’ve been ordered by higher authorities to eat more lean protein. Gross. But I’ll try anything begrudgingly for a few weeks. Should I buy a sous vide wand to get the juiciest chicken breast? Or stick with careful pan frying? What I do know is that 50% of the time I cook it, it is way too dry.

Regards,

Jim Braux

Dear Jim Braux,

I’ll never forget a car ride I took almost twenty years ago with a farmer-philosopher named Fred Kirschenmann. I had three such conversations with Fred. The two others were unforgettable because at each, Fred gave me guidance that changed my life. In a sentence each: at a Stone Barns picnic, sitting in the sun, Fred told me that his whole career could be described as his saying “yes” when opportunities arose; at a hotel bar at a food distribution conference in Chicago, he told me that it was alright not to know.

The car ride happened between the two. I’d picked Fred up somewhere in New York City and driven him to Pocantico Hills—to Stone Barns. Our conversation had turned to cell phones—why Fred didn’t have one. In reply to my question, Fred had looked quizzical, amused, resigned, and said: “The law of unintended consequences.” He’d been holding my phone, a flip phone, looking at it with critical intimacy and some suspicion. The phone had looked heavier in his hand.

I think of that facial expression often. Fred’s reservations stuck with me. I assumed them, never fully embracing digital life, proceeding for the last two decades with one hand on the rail. I think about the law of unintended consequences often. I did earlier this week in connection with meteorologic hyperbole re. winter storms. I did in connection with your question about a sous vide wand.

My sense—take note of the word “sense”—is that many cooking conveniences have unintended consequences. I think of egg cookers and microwaves and Instapots: all of which make cooking easier and faster, while getting in the way of a cook developing the adaptability required to become a better cook, or cooking anywhere, or cooking in the device’s absence. I don’t know how much tap-dancing I need to do to clarify that I appreciate that time-saving devices are good at saving time—when you expect them to, during a work week, at home. I only maintain that in a rental house, or when the device breaks, or during the Zombie apocalypse, a match, tinder and I would get a good meal on the table faster.

Kitchen gadgetry aside, I can’t get behind simmering the solution to a health concern in a plastic bag. Even if sous vide bags are BPA-free and food safe and used at restaurants, and a dozen other great things, I think that if you can avoid them, you should. Discarded single use plastic will have health impacts for someone, someday.

Can you avoid sous vide without paying the price of dry chicken breasts, though? You can. With no dried-chicken fee levied. Poach the breasts—sous vide without plastic or wand. The technique I use is described beautifully here. I’m convinced it’s a Chinese method. But it’s likely that I’m wrong: that the technique isn’t Chinese; that I saw someone do it, or dreamt I had. Origin story aside: it involves submerging a chicken breast in boiling water, covering the pot, then turning off the burner and letting the meat cook in the cooling water. It is tried and true. The lean meat cooks gently without seizing up, as it often does in the pan. I once inadvertently used the technique on a whole chicken, at a friend’s stove in Italy, where I got the burners all wrong. I haven’t tried replicating it on my American stove with American chickens, but it worked magic that once.

Dear cook, I’m worried I’ve sounded preachy and judgmental. I want you to get your protein. I don’t want it to be gross. I just don’t want you to make an unnecessary trade of one kind of sickness for another. There’s usually a third way. Here, it is a serendipitous one. It’s free and it’s ancient: a pot, salt, and boiling (only briefly!) water.