Kaido,
1) kitchen overlord indeed!
2) ever think of trying to get your own tv show?
or at least your own youtube channel?
3) sous vide to reheat?
why not use microwave? it's faster, no?
1. Haha!
2. I've recently switched from IT to BEC career-wise & should have some more free time available. I'm toying with the idea of doing a Youtube channel. There's a tremendous amount of wonderful content on the interwebs, but I also feel like there's a tremendous barrier for people to cook, especially (1) people who aren't fluent in cooking & see it as a barrier, and (2) setting up a system where it's convenient, fun, and approachable, and isn't an arduous task. There's actually a lot of psychology that goes into cooking, and having to come up with ideas, supplies, and then do the work, every day for every meal, can be an incredibly difficult process to deal with if you don't have a really good system setup to support you. When you have a solid system in place, it really shifts your perspective & helps remove the difficulties associated with cooking for yourself & your family, like,
a lot. But it's hard to see that if you don't have that stuff already installed in your life & can't even fathom that it could easy & even enjoyable! Which is why people who become food nerds become food nerds...once you get a strong system setup & the fun "clicks", the world of cooking is suddenly enticing, motivating, and something to look forward to rather than something to dread. Kind of hard to explain until you experience it for yourself!
3. Yes & yes. Microwaves are faster. I picked up a new-gen inverter microwave with a Genius sensor not too long ago after my old microwave died & it's really fantastic (Panasonic). Most microwaves have a pre-set wattage & just cycle the power on & off quickly to simulate different power levels, whereas inverter models can actually modulate the power to the wattage desired. So a 1200w inverter microwave can actually output 600w at 50% power, not just flash 1200w in on/off cycles. Plus the Genius sensor basically checks for steam, so the "sensor reheat" function actually works. Most of my meals are frozen & get reheated in the microwave, so this is a really important pair of features for me because I reheat food out of meal-prep trays so often. I also use a Hotlogic Mini & a RoadPro, both of which are portable ovens for your car, but as I'm not driving nearly as much these days due to COVID, it's mostly been microwave-based, and sometimes freshly-made depending on my schedule (I spend way too much time online lol).
My current meal-prep approach is to cook one meal to freeze/store per day. It's a simple approach that utilizes a small slice of time (I usually target 20 minutes right after work as part of my daily chore time) & the power of compounding interest (let's say each batch makes half a dozen servings, 30 days x 6 = 180 servings a month, which creates a massive variety with very low effort involved). So this way I can utilize my deep freezer & have meals ready to go every day that I can pop into my giant insulated lunchbox to eat so that (1) I have food all day long, (2) it's delicious, (3) I have a variety to choose from & don't get sick, and (4) I stay in shape thanks to macros. Pretty much I just sit down & use my meal-planning system once a week for a few minutes with my family to pick what to eat & map out a prep schedule for the week, then go shopping the next day, then just follow whatever checklist (recipe) is scheduled for the day.
Sous-vide is actually a pretty nice way to reheat when you have a system that allows you to effortlessly plan ahead. For example, you can do some frozen burritos for a couple hours in the bath like this guy did:
I tried that a couple years ago & the food actually came out really good! Just stick it in the warm bath & then crispy up under the broiler or in a skillet. Lifehacker actually went into a deep-dive with sous-vide hot pockets:
Greetings and salutations, and welcome back to another exciting installment of Will It Sous Vide?, the weekly column where you tell me what to cook with my Anova.
skillet.lifehacker.com
The first two questions that arise are:
1. Well, what if you want food NOW?
2. Why even bother?
For me, developing a personal meal-planning system was largely about gaining an awareness of my situation:
1 - I have to eat, or I'll die
2 - I prefer to have good food, and like it to be convenient, and if it could fit my macros so I automatically stay in shape, even better, and also be budget-friendly, great!
3 - It's not like the requirement to eat is going away. 3 meals a day means 21 meals a week means 93 meals a month (in a 31-day month). Plus snacks, drinks, etc.
4 - Food is mood. I STRONGLY believe this. By that I mean, food influences mood. Like probably 90% of how you feel is how you eat. The problem is, there's a time delay between when you eat & how you feel, usually by a few hours, so becoming aware of just how much food drives my mood, and thus my behavior, took me a really long time to figure out. This was a pretty heavy realization because I always just went where the winds of emotions took me, i.e. being tired or having brain fog or feeling meh or not wanting to do anything. Turns out, food is the primary driver for energy & influences your mood
tremendously, but because of both that time disconnect & how reactive we tend to be regarding food without a solid meal-prep system in place, it's just kind of invisible to us & our lives are invisibly run by this operational mechanic without our clear knowledge. The bottom line is that if I want to feel good, and if I want to have energy all 16 waking hours of the day from start to finish, I had to get serious about feeding myself properly. The game is only rocket science until you understand the heart of how things work. I wrote up a tutorial on that here:
So:
1) Macros = winning
2) Meal-prep system = how to put the idea of controlling your energy & mood into actual action, and how to do so in a very low-effort way with high-yield results
Dealing with food can be a bear, so our brains tend to say "seems hard, I quit" & shut off at the idea. The nice thing about putting a meal-prep system to work is that your only real interface is using a checklist system to do meal planning, going shopping, and then doing a bit of work every day to support your goals (or cooking once a week, or once a month, or if you have the time & interest, cooking live for every meal...or buying packaged meals, or doing macros, or whatever goal you have in mind!). So this is why sous-vide as a reheat system works...if you're stuck eating 3 meals a day, 21 meals a week, 1,095 meals a year, then doing some planning ahead means you can make things really easy on yourself by setting things up for your benefit ahead of time. So if you know you have to eat dinner today, and you want to eat around 5pm, and you get home at 3pm, you can simply drop a vac-sealed burrito into the SV bath & then broil it up. Although I discovered the magic of cheese-crusting burritos not too long ago & boy is THAT amazing! (especially when combined with SV!)
https://www.reddit.com/r/castiron/comments/edbta7/cheesecrusted_breakfast_burritos/
So that's where the Anova Precision Oven comes into play: you get all of the benefits of sous-vide, without the bag! Open it up, drop in a couple burritos & SV them bagless, then have the gadget auto-switch to baking to crisp them up. It's as close to having the oven from Back to the Future II as I can imagine! No rubbery microwave results with frozen middles, no complex cooking processes, just a magic oven that has stellar results with very little effort! For people who are interested in technology, the Precision Oven is going to be a literal game-changer for high-performance, convenient at-home cooking!