Test Kitchen tips: Sous-vide at home

In the professional kitchen, we cook sous-vide by encasing food in airtight plastic using chamber vacuum sealers (hence the name sous-vide, literally ‘under pressure’) and then cooking them in precision-controlled water baths using a tool called an immersion circulator. Though these are now becoming available for home use, they are still quite expensive. ... Rather than cooking the food using an immersion circulator, you can achieve similar results using a large picnic cooler and a probe thermometer.