I found a very good article at Slate on the re-emergence of sous vide, or slow cooking. It's such a good read that I won't belabor it here, other than to emphasize what Sara Dickerman said about the idea of cooking something at its finished temperature to eliminate the possibility of over-cooking. This is especially important when poaching fish or chicken.
Why hasn't sous vide cooking been more prominent until recently? Sara has some good points:
Initially, American chefs may have avoided sous vide because they had concerns about food safety, but I suspect a more significant reason for this delay was aesthetic. For a couple of decades now, we have been carrying on a romance with the fire-bitten flavors and textures produced by high-heat roasting, pan-searing, and grilling. Because we Americans are so closely associated with the bad aspects of the food industry—mushy white breads, microwaveable pap, skinless boneless chicken breasts—high-minded American chefs have felt more of a need to distance themselves from the food industry than Europeans. Burnished, crackly food was the obvious alternative. In the late '80s and '90s, restaurant menus were rife with crusts, be they horseradish, potato, cornmeal, or just the dark amber veneer of a well-seared piece of meat. Barbara Kafka, who had written the definitive microwave cookbook, wrote a very popular book on roasting that advocated daringly high oven temperatures. Photographs in magazines like Saveur further fetishized the crust, lingering on the caramelized pan juices, for example, pooled beneath a glorious roast. And we shouldn't overlook dentistry: Food scientist and texture specialist Malcolm Bourne also argues that as more Americans kept their teeth longer in life, they chose to eat more challenging foods: "A lot of [the] crunchier, tougher food on the marketplace has been a result of a revolution in the dental industry."
Good stuff. Check it out if you have the time.
