10 Healthy Sous Vide Snacks To Try At Home | The Tool Shed

10 Healthy Sous Vide Snacks To Try At Home

Sous vide isn’t just about preparing hearty meals, and you can also use it to whip up some lighter bites to enjoy either as a side or starter or just as a snack throughout the day. Here are ten of our favourite healthy snacks which you can cook sous vide.

Soup

Once the colder months start to kick in, there’s nothing better than a nice hot bowl of soup to warm you up.

Vegetables are much more flavoursome when cooked sous vide and once they’ve cooked for 60 minutes in your water bath, all you need to do is quick chill them, ready to be added to a broth for a hearty winter warmer.

Fennel and Orange Quinoa Salad

Salads are a great healthy snack, although they can be a bit bland at times. However, this fennel and quinoa salad is anything but boring, creating a colourful and summery dish which works well as a snack on its own or as a side to a meal.

Quinoa is a great alternative to rice or potatoes and mixed which some fresh ingredients, you can’t go wrong.

Sweet Potato Fries

A great to swap normal fries out of your diet is to replace them with these sweet potato fries.

Much healthier, they’re made even better for you when you cook them sous vide, as all of the nutrients are locked inside the vacuum pouch.

Spiced Butternut Squash with Blue Cheese and Hazelnut

Many people overlook butternut squash because it isn’t the easiest vegetable to prepare, but it can lead to some great results.

Try combining it with some hazelnuts and blue cheese to create a healthy snack which works well with almost anything.

Smoked Cauliflower Cheese

Cauliflower cheese is a real classic and can work well as a tasty and healthy side dish or snack too.

Our recipe prepares the cauliflower sous vide, before finishing it off with a smoking gun to really enhance the flavours.

English Breakfast Radish Pickled with Rice Wine Vinegar and White Soy with Wasabi Mayonnaise

In this recipe, we season radishes in vinegar, soy, castor sugar and coriander before cooking sous vide to lock in all those flavours and nutrients.

Another possible idea is to add a little bit of cider and honey in the pouch for something a bit different and to give it an extra kick, we serve up with a spicy wasabi mayonnaise!

Crispy Sous Vide Lamb Ribs with a Dip of Feta Cheese, Lemon and Tomato

If you’re serving up tapas, these crispy ribs are a delicious treat. All you need to do is season with some salt, cumin, pepper, rosemary and roasted garlic, before cooking sous vide for a couple of days, to really achieve the required tenderness.

We recommend a cheese dip in this recipe but you could also try a lime pickle, and you could also choose to mix up the sauce for a curry based version.

Sous Vide Cheshire New Potatoes Infused with Smoked Bacon Fat

We all love potatoes, but this recipe takes them to the next level, with the sous vide method achieving the perfect level of a crispy outside and fluffy inside.

You can serve them on skewers as a canapé, or just as a side with your sous vide steak or chicken breast. We also recommend trying in a seaweed butter or with a fish dish.

Baby Parsnips

A classic with a Sunday roast, parsnips are a unique veggie which taste great when cooked sous vide.

While they’re traditionally roasted in the oven, sous vide locks in the flavour which is often lost, guaranteeing perfect results every time, especially with our honey and thyme marinade.

Crispy Grouse Leg Lollies, Cooked Sous Vide with Sloe Gin and Hibiscus Jam

For a slightly more highbrow snack, how about these crispy grouse legs with sloe gin and hibiscus jam?

The legs are marinated overnight in a ketchup, sugar Worcester sauce and vinegar sauce, and seasoned with salt, juniper, thyme and pepper, before being cooked sous vide for six to eight hours.

If the marinade doesn’t sound like your thing, it can easily be swapped out for a BBQ sauce equivalent.

Post by Chris Holland

Our Chef Director Chris Holland worked as Head Chef at the prestigious Alderley Edge hotel before joining us. He has a passion for using the best produce and never compromises on quality. Author of our best selling book Sous Vide The Art of Precision Cooking, Chris is a expert on the sous vide technique.During the later part of my school days at Wardle High School Rochdale I always wanted to be a chef . I knew from the very start that my path to work was never going to be academic it was always going to be something practical and hands on.

As a young boy growing up I was inspired to cook with my Grandma who was and still is an inspiration to me . I have memories of helping make the cakes that she always had made for visitors and family alike . She made the most amazing cakes and I loved nothing more than eating the sweet raw cake batter straight from the bowl . We used to fight over who got to lick the bowl/spoon after the cakes were made. My grandma’s philosophy for cooking even on a shoe string budget was always to use fresh and seasonal ingredients either home grown or bought from the market.

School was somewhat of a drag for me as I was itching to learn to become a chef.

I started at Hopwood Hall college as a chef and instantly fell in love with it .To me it was the only real time I excelled in something and this inspired me to really get my head down and put in the hard work. College was the first time I really excelled in something and gave me the opportunity to laugh at the teachers who said I would never make something of my life!!!!

During the three years at college I also took on a part time position in a local hotel working the bar and restaurant first and then the kitchen. These were great days and gave me the opportunity to see how the industry ticks. I learnt a lot from those days both good and bad !! But I have to say I was itching to work only in the kitchen but it was a good insight into the catering world .

After completing college I moved away from Rochdale for a full time roll at one of Cheshire’s most talked about Hotel restaurants The Stanneylands Hotel. This was the school of hard knocks for me as I quickly realised that although excelling at college meant nothing in “The Real World”.

I loved every minute of the 18 hour days 6 days a week on minimum wage . Although difficult I feel that without this grounding I wouldn’t have achieved what I have today. After 18 months of hard graft I left Stanneylands and went with the Head chef to open a fine dining restaurant at Mere Golf and Country Club. The opportunity to work alongside Matthew Barrett was too good to turn down. I learnt so much from the ex-Ritz chef and working in a much slower paced role helped me develop a much better understanding of how to organise and run a kitchen. We were a very small team and teamwork was and still is the only way to go for me.

After 2 years at Mere I got the opportunity to go into The Alderley Edge Hotel as Junior Souschef. The Early days at the Edge were all about learning new styles of cuising which is invaluable in any role as a chef. I got the opportunity to grow and learn all aspects of every section which was inspiring . I was offered the opportunity at the age of 29 (2004) to take the role of head chef. For me this was when I really started to develop my own style of food.

After 9 years at the top winning Cheshire restaurant of the year , Chef of the Year and appearing on GBM amongst many highlights including cooking for many celebrities and famous people I decided to move on into development with Sousvidetools.

The main inspiration for this was to train and educate people . I always had a great passion for education but could never really see myself at a college . The job is super rewarding and I am proud to say we have become the leading light in sous-vide education in the UK . This is something I am very proud of . Food is my biggest passion and this is what keeps me interested the most . I love to travel and try out other countries cuisines. I am constantly inspired by ingredients and the pursuit of getting the best out of them without destroying their natural flavour .It is super important to me to continue to try and be at the forefront of the food scene this is what inspire me and the team to keep driving forward .

Technology is now widely used in the industry and I am super proud to say we have been a big part of spreading that message.

I am very lucky to be in the position I am and the drive to constantly improve our training and links to the next generation of young budding hospitality chefs.

TI feel that my experience over the last 25 years really enables me to get close and educate the “next generation” of chefs .

The industry which I love is really struggling to bring through new recruits and if I can help that process I will be immensely proud.

The food seen in the Uk has improved dramatically over the last ten years and I feel this will continue with the correct education. What happens next only fate will tell us...

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