Sous vide

Sous vide emerged from a collision of industrial food preservation and haute cuisine—two domains that rarely spoke to each other. In 1974, Georges Pralus faced a problem at Restaurant Troisgros in Roanne, France: foie gras lost nearly 50% of its weight during traditional cooking. The delicate liver shed fat catastrophically. Pralus wrapped it in plastic, sealed out the air, and cooked it in a water bath. Weight loss dropped to 5%. A technique born from the economics of expensive ingredients became a transformation of the cooking process itself.

But Pralus was not alone in this discovery. Bruno Goussault, working independently in 1971, had been investigating how to improve the tenderness of roast beef for industrial food service. His insight was the marriage of vacuum sealing with precise low-temperature cooking—controlling the water bath to within fractions of a degree allowed proteins to denature without contracting, producing textures impossible with conventional methods. When Pralus and Goussault eventually collaborated with Cryovac, a plastic manufacturer, the technique acquired both the materials and the scientific framework to scale.

The prehistory runs even deeper. A retired U.S. Army colonel named Ambrose McGuckian had developed essentially the same technique in 1964 for hospital food in South Carolina. Working with W.R. Grace's Cryovac division, McGuckian cooked meat and vegetables in sealed plastic pouches immersed in water baths to improve flavor for institutional meals. He called it the "A.G.S. System" after the hospitals in Anderson, Greenville, and Spartanburg where he deployed it. The technique worked. It was ignored. Industrial food service and fine dining occupied different universes.

The French chefs succeeded where the American colonel had been forgotten because they operated in a context that valorized cooking technique. France's culinary establishment could transform a practical solution into a prestigious method. Michelin stars created incentives for innovation that hospital cafeterias lacked. The same physical process—vacuum sealing, water bath, temperature control—became either invisible efficiency or celebrated artistry depending on the context of adoption.

Path dependence delayed broader adoption for decades. Home cooks lacked precision temperature controllers until the 2000s. Restaurant kitchens were optimized for high-heat cooking. Only when affordable immersion circulators reached consumers in the 2010s did sous vide finally escape the professional kitchen. The technique had been possible since industrial vacuum sealing existed; it became widespread when the tools became accessible and the cultural moment—obsession with cooking technique—arrived.