Sous vide at the bar: A little tech for your tipple

Sous vide can be a gamechanger in a bartender’s repertoire, adding a powerful punch to colour and flavour

Glasses whiskey bourbon with ices in glass and almonds on old wooden table background | Getty Images/iStockphoto

The flurry of bottles, shake of cocktail mixers and shimmering high-pours are the every-eve zeitgeist behind a bustling bar. But Pankaj Balachandran of the beverage consultancy Bar-Back Collective, New Delhi, does something unfamiliar: while fusing a citrus maple mushroom with a whiskey sour, he pulls out a vacuum-sealed plastic pouch of darkly swirled infusions, opens it and decants the liquid into a glass.

Sous vide at a bar? Literally meaning ‘under vacuum,’ a sous vide is a set-up that resembles a mini chemistry lab, popularly used with steak cuts and salmon fillets. Usually, an ingredient is placed in a plastic bag, or a jar, which is then put into a temperature-controlled water-bath to slowly and evenly cook the constituents. With drinks, it’s a different transformation; the colours of the infusion become richer, hinting at the flavour richness to be tasted later.

Yangdup Lama of Gurugram speakeasy Cocktails And Dreams nods to sous vide techniques, explaining while the trend is sprouting very slowly in India, it shouldn’t take away from the beauty of the age-old process of patiently waiting for infusions to happen naturally. “With the sous vide, there’s added anticipation around how your drink may turn out,” he comments, “It adds a nice story to what goes in your glass.”

An example of a sous vide done with an app

The set-up itself looks rather high tech. The water bath’s temperature is controlled by the sous vide water immersion calculator. Some calculators, which sport a small monitor with adjustable temperature settings, come with a power cord for infusions which take a few hours. Recent updates include a software that can programme both the temperature calculator and the time. Perfect for busy bartenders.

Time saved is a huge pull-factor for bartenders considering sous vide. While manual infusions take up to weeks to perfect, the sous vide method only drinks up a few hours. For lighter cordials and syrups, temperature is regulated at around 50°C. Naturally, denser ingredients like cinnamon and coconut require the heat to be upped to around 68°C and the time is extended. Go too far and you’ll hit the roughly 80°C boiling point of alcohol, cooking it and even popping the bag.

Pankaj Balachandran, of Bar-Back Collective, New Delhi | Photo: Nagara Gopal

The mushrooms and beetroot, Balachandran points out, are edible leftovers from the kitchen but upcycled into a fabulous drink. “We use leftover citrus peel, citrus juice and mushroom trimmings from the kitchen to make the same. We also use the same mushroom after sous vide to dehydrate and powder it to mix with beetroot powder and use it as a garnish.”

The technique can be applied to endless permutations of specifically craft cocktails.

Sous vide, simplified

• Who says you can’t turn your home into the hottest speakeasy in town? The key to a sous vide is to replicate the vacuum conditions as well as the controlled temperature. Some home-friendly models are sold for around ₹8,000 to ₹15,000, but if that’s too much of a reach, these methods will achieve a similar preservation effect.
• For the vacuum: Improvise using a zip-top bag and a plastic straw; just place your food in the bag and zip it almost all the way, stick the straw in the opening, and suck all the air out. Pull the straw out and quickly finish zipping the bag so no air has a chance to sneak in.
• For the controlled temperature: Electric rice cookers can be used — under supervised conditions, of course. The ‘hold warm’ setting can retain the desired temperature, with a thermometer for monitoring. This process will take a little trial-and-error but it’s worth it. An alternative is to use an insulated cooler but this will require a lot more checks on the temperature.

Industry-standard sous vide machines, along with a vacuum sealer and seal packs, often come at a combined cost of ₹30,000. Bars adapting the sous vide into their own arsenal include Uno Mas and Xico in Mumbai and Public Affair in Delhi’s Khan Market.

Chill factor

Food and Beverage Manager at Novotel Shamshabad, Tulshi Naik, bats for bar set-ups to have their own, adding enjoying a fresh sous vide drink requires a certain atmosphere to elevate the experience. “It’s for laid-back settings where one can enjoy the patience and the engagement with their bartender and with the creation of their drink. It’s definitely not for a club where you don’t really take the time to enjoy the drink.”

This is probably why a select handful of speakeasy bars around the country do sous vide cocktails. Tulshi prepares an intoxicatingly spicy bourbon infused with cinnamon, which transports the drinker to wintry nights by a fire.

Using a sous vide isn’t always a cakewalk. Getting it right, flavour-wise, is essential; the priority of preserving flavours in our drinks is based on an understanding of balance, says Pankaj Arora of beverage trainers Tulleeho, New Delhi. He’s seen the trend make its own epicentres in Rajasthan and in Delhi.

So while waiting at the bar for your vanilla old-fashioned or your cryo-concentrated coffee martini, check off having a robot be half your bartender. Thanks to sous vide, the vanilla in that old-fashioned exudes a sensual waft of softness while the coffee in the martini packs an energising caffeine punch. Clearly there’s a strong case to be made for this movement — once you go sous vide, you can’t go back.