Question

a)Molecular gastronomy is the name given to a variety of cooking techniques that involve methods and equipment borrowed from chemical laboratories. One of those is cooking “sous vide” (under vacuum).   This isn’t a technique for amateurs, necessarily, but it is an interesting application of some of the ideas presented here.

Say, for the sake of discussion, some of the air was removed from a pressure cooker so that a partial vacuum is created, before cooking begins. The pressure inside the cooker would be lower than normal than that is an open pot, not higher as it is in the pressure cooker. How would the cooking process be different from cooking in an open pot? What might the advantages of that difference be? Why might cooking in this way in a restaurant draw the attention of the local health department?

Answer 1

In an open pot, the pressure will be one atmosphere and as a result, the liquid boils at100 deg.c corresponding to a pressure of 1 atm. When pressrue is reduced , the boiling temperature is reduced. the liquid boils at lower temperature than in an open pot. This leads to uniform cooking.

the disadvantages are surface browning. the taste of cooked food is going to be indifferent.

between 40 deg.F to 140 deg.F   cooking for more than 2 hours ( which is the temperature during cooking under vacuum) there is a possibiltiy of food born diseases due to the growth of pathogenic bacteria.