Whether you’re just starting out with sous vide cooking or you’re more experienced, there’s a sous vide cookbook full of excellent recipes for you and food lovers alike. I’ll review the best sous vide cookbooks here.
The sous vide method of cooking is becoming more and more popular from the beginner home cooks to professional chefs, and from professional kitchens to the home kitchen. It takes a beginner home cook into an amazing cook in no time flat. (Trust me, I was a terrible cook before starting to use the sous vide!)
These sous vide cookbooks will give you a repertoire of sous vide recipes with the cooking process, cooking time, and temperature charts, and more.
Sous vide equipment has become more accessible with a wide range of sous vide cookers and water ovens, sous vide containers, and excellent home vacuum sealers available. I have a number of equipment reviews to check out on the site too.
With the equipment, the average person can become a savvy home chef using the cookbooks full of simple recipes. Sous vide is a preferred cooking method for precise cooking and even meal prep.
A major benefit of cooking sous vide is the cooking process makes meal preparation simple. For example, if you’re a meat lover, pick your favorite steak and sous vide a good amount of it. Go through the sous vide recipe book list and get many recipe ideas for all different steak cuts with sous vide vegetables as sides for weeknight meals, mid-week meals, healthy meals and more.
With that said, let’s get into these excellent sous vide recipe books full of mouthwatering recipes to give you many perfect meal ideas. I’ll start with the 13th Best and work my way up to the Best Overall Cookbook for sous vide.
I will list the sous vide recipe book list from “worst” to “best”. Keep in mind the lower ranked cookbooks are only considered “bad” compared to the rest in the list, not by themselves.
Table of Contents
Top 13 Best Sous Vide Cookbooks
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13. Cooking Sous Vide (By Chef Thomas N. England)
This is basically the beginner’s guide to sous vide cooking, as well as new recipes for the experienced cookers. You’ll be pleased to learn how to cook 75 delicious meals, taught to you in easy step-by-step tutorials of the sous vide technique.
From meats to vegetables to cheesecakes and more. The recipes will tell you what raw ingredients to buy, how to properly season your food, and fix any issues you might come across. It offers a good start for your adventure and is an easy read.
12. Sous Vide For Everybody: The Easy, Foolproof Cooking Technique That’s Sweeping the World (By America’s Test Kitchen)
Written by the famous America’s Test Kitchen, this sous vide book offers you clear instructions on a wide variety of meals – 75 recipes. As the name implies, this cookbook was meant to a large audience, wherever you fall on the cooking skills spectrum.
There are breakfast, lunch, and dinner recipes, as well as tasty dessert recipes. It teaches you exactly how the process works, while also being easy to follow through the instructions. It’ll give you essential temperature guides, so you’re cooking with the correct temperature no matter the type of food.
11. Make it Sous Vide! (By Meredith Laurence)
With recipes on how to make Chicken Breasts with Balsamic Sauce to the deliciously sounding Chocolate Pots de Crème, the best-selling author Meredith Laurence, also known as the Blue Jean Chef, makes sous vide look like a piece of cake.
This cookbook gives the average home cook the chance of making their own meals with everyday ingredients found at home. As a bonus, the beautiful food photography will have you salivating in anticipation of what you’re making yourself.
10. The Ultimate Guide to Cooking Sous-Vide (By Grace Lee)
You have probably heard people say “an image is worth a thousand words” – this cookbook brings it to life with its gorgeous food photos. The marvelous images help you to follow along easily and never miss a step.
You really can’t help but admire the simplicity this cookbook offers to both beginners and experts. It also includes food safety guidelines. This is a good cookbook with 36 recipes and a range of dishes to start your sous vide journey on.
9. The Effortless Sous Vide Cookbook: 140 Recipes for Crafting Restaurant-Quality Meals Every Day (By Carey Coepling)
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If you have learned the process of sous vide cooking and are ready to delve into its world, here come 140 everyday recipes right at your fingertips.
If you’re newer or even a complete beginner to sous vide cooking, this cookbook also teaches you how things work and new techniques, so you’re always up to date.There’s little information you’d need to look up online or ask a friend.
The cookbook gives you cooking times and temperatures for different kinds of food. It deserves the “effortless” in its title.
8. Sous Vide Cookbook: 120 Effortless Delicious Recipes for Crafting Restaurant: Quality Meals Every Day (By Terry H. Miller)
Here comes an original idea that you might be interested in – there’s an audiobook version of it.
There are 120 recipes for beginners and advanced cooks, including nutritional information like calories, fat, protein, and carbs content.
The food writer gives a simple approach for beginners with step-by-step guides for dozens of recipes. The writer gets into the science behind cooking sous and how to use the various cooking equipment. There are also safety tips and quick reference guides.
7. Learn Sous Vide: The No-Nonsense Beginners Guide to Cooking Sous Vide (By Derek Gaughan)
The author, Derek Gaughan, was a casual home cook himself that learned the modern cooking techniques of sous vide as a beginner. Learn Sous Vide is the best book for learning best practices to make really good food.
He’s become one of the top-selling sous vide cookbook authors. He writes in a way that reaches people on a personal level and that’s led to him being featured in The Washington Post as well.
The full color food images of each dish look delicious too, full of flavor mouthwatering meals. He covers many types of food, cooking from eggs to pork to veggies to meats to desserts.
This is one of the groundbreaking cookbooks that give you everything you need for precision cooking. You can’t go wrong with this one.
6. Modernist Cooking Made Easy: Sous Vide (By Jason Logsdon)
Modernist Cooking Made Easy covers low-temperature sous vide cooking with modernist techniques on over 85 favorite recipes.
Like many of the books before this, it covers perfect cooking techniques with precision cooker, water containers (or pot of water), standard food grade vacuum sealers, and more.
It comes with 35 Modernist Notes using modernist ingredients and techniques to create those Michelin-Starred dishes like in high-end restaurants. If you’re the type of person who likes to step outside the traditional cooking method a bit, this range of recipes for high-end meals might be for you.
5. Sous Vide at Home: The Modern Technique for Perfectly Cooked Meals (By Lisa Q. Fetterman)
![Sous Vide at Home: The Modern Technique for Perfectly Cooked Meals [A Cookbook]](https://topsousvide.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/51RGtNLCWGL._SL500_.webp)
This author is quite special – she’s the creator of the first affordable sous vide machine “Nomiku.” If you’ve ever wondered how the meals were made in restaurants, this cookbook will let you know exactly how.
This cookbook is 288 pages full of information that ensures you end up with restaurant quality meals with a minimum amount of stress at the same time. This includes over 100 top-end recipes and easy guides on how to make each one. Honestly, at this point, you’re literally learning from one of the pioneers.
4. Mastering the Art of Sous Vide Cooking: Unlock the Versatility of Precision Temperature Cooking (By Justice Stewart)
Mastering the Art of Sous Vide Cooking has delicious recipes for great dishes, but this book might not be the best for beginners. The recipes are a bit more complicated and more targeted for those who have a bit of sous vide experience.
Justice Stewart was a sous chef at Madison Square Garden, as well as a private chef to celebrities. He definitely has the experience and his cookbook has some tasty recipes.
3. Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide (By Thomas Keller)
This cookbook was written by Thomas Keller, the chef behind The French Laundry in Yountville, California. In 1996 and 1997, he was awarded The Best California Chef, among many other awards from the James Beard Foundation. Needless to say, you’re in very safe hands and on your way to success.
In these 295 pages, he offers you secret, never before published recipes used in his restaurant. It promises the highest quality meals that you would otherwise pay for at top restaurants.
2. The Complete Sous Vide Cookbook (By Chris McDonald)
Probably the absolute best sous vide cookbook, The Complete Sous Vide Cookbook by Chris McDonald. Chris McDonald is a renowned professional chef who’s bringing years of experience with sous vide to take away the stress of cooking for beginners to the experienced home chef. He covers the broad concepts down to the core recipes for chef-tested dishes.
There are over 175 hands-on recipes that utilize international ingredients to bring you dishes from around the world. You won’t find many of the exotic ingredients at home, but you should be able to get them at the supermarket.
With more than 175 recipes, that’ll also give you the ability to make a 30-day meal plan with only sous vide cooking.
1. Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking (By Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet)
And lastly, the best cookbook, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. This is the best of the best when it comes to cookbooks, winning the James Beard Award for Cookbook of the Year in 2012.
It’s massive and covers the history of cuisine over 6 volumes of books with 2,438 pages combined. It was even inducted into the Gourmand Cookbook Hall of Fame.
It includes plenty of imagery and techniques for people at home or experts in the field. The books were created by a team of chefs, scientists, writers, and editors. They explore culinary science and sous vide is only one part of it.
This is a huge cookbook set, but it’ll give you almost everything you’d ever want to know when it comes to cooking.
What is Sous Vide Cooking?
A simple explanation of sous vide would be – Sous vide uses precision temperature control with the cooking process taking place in a vacuum sealed plastic bag. The food is cooked for longer periods of time at a lower temperature, preserving its flavors, nutrients, and textures.
The process of cooking sous vide style has two main factors that differentiate it from traditional cooking methods:
- Vacuum Sealed – The ingredients are vacuum-sealed inside a plastic bag. Removing the air in the bags allow all parts of the food to be cooked by the water.
- Low Temperature – The food is cooked in a water bath that is kept at precisely controlled temperatures, these are far lower than usual cooking methods.
Depending on what is being cooked and for how long, sous vide cooking temperatures range from 54 °C – 85 °C (129 °F – 185°F). Cooking times vary from 30 mins up to 4 hours and beyond if necessary.
The method relies on specialized equipment. This includes kitchen appliances for vacuum sealing sous vide bags and a sous vide container.
Why Cook Sous Vide?
There are a host of reasons that sous vide cooking is rising in popularity.
- Flavor – Slow cooking has long been known to enhance the flavor and texture of food. Sous vide takes this a step further by sealing all those flavors in and then letting the food cook slowly. The result is mouthwatering dishes that explode with natural flavors.
- Convenience – Because the temperature of the food never exceeds the temperature of the water it cooks in, meals can be left to cook for hours without overcooking. This is great for dinner parties, because the food is ready when you are. No last-minute worries about with rushing any cooking.
- Healthy – Cooking with the sous vide method uses far fewer fats and oils than traditional methods. Sous vide cooked food retains more of the minerals and vitamins contained in the food.
- Economical – Energy consumption is low when cooking sous vide because the water never needs to be at high temperatures and the process is all thermostat controlled.
- Precision – Sous vide is a fantastic way of taking the guesswork out of cooking. Want a rare steak? Simply set the temperature to 54°C and cook for 1 to 2 hrs, the meat will hit this temperature for rare doneness and no more. Give it a quick sear and you have a steak cooked to perfection.
For more on why sous vide cooking is good, check out the top reasons to sous vide article.
I hope this helps you pick a new sous vide cookbook that’s right for you! Be sure to check out the top 11 best vacuum sealers here!
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