Five-Star Food for 400: It All Starts in the Bag

It's also an effective way for a chef to consistently turn out the same quality dish, day after day. "If I tell [the line cook] to cook the salmon sous vide at 130 degrees for 45 minutes, it will come out moist and perfectly cooked all the way through every time," says chef Michel Richard, who has five of the machines at his Citronelle restaurant in Georgetown.

At the Armory, the chefs' use of sous vide entrees meant a huge savings in time. Instead of having to be cooked from scratch for 400 people, the food needed only to be taken out of the bags, reheated and transported in insulated containers to the Armory, which doesn't have kitchen facilities.

The entrees were donated by Cuisine Solutions, an Alexandria-based firm that has been a pioneer in sous vide production in the United States. (As interest in sous vide has grown, the company's stock has shot up from $1 per share in 2004 to $7.45 as of Monday.)

Stanislas Vilgrain, the chief executive of Cuisine Solutions, along with two of the company's top executives, helped prepare the food served at the Armory. Richard rounded up several of his fellow chefs to assist, and the cooking was done at D.C. Central Kitchen, a nonprofit organization that helps feed the homeless and is providing three meals a day to the evacuees until they are resettled.

Among the downtown chefs helping Richard with the food were Roberto Donna of Galileo, Todd Gray of Equinox and Kaz Okochi of Kaz Sushi Bistro. Mark Furstenberg of Breadline donated all the bread.

Of course, chefs being chefs, it wasn't quite enough just to reheat the food. They had to tinker a little while it was still at D.C. Central Kitchen, adding sautéed onions and cream to the pasta sauce or some roasted red pepper pesto and Parmesan cheese to the polenta.

While the other chefs worked, Richard made a quick dessert from scratch. Using ingredients donated to the kitchen, he swiftly filled a dozen or more frozen pie crusts with canned fruit, then added a custard filling he and Donna made from six quarts of heavy cream, five dozen eggs and 15 pounds of ricotta cheese.

As the pies baked, Richard talked about sous vide. Initially, he admitted, he wasn't much of a fan. "When I first heard about it, I thought, 'Aw, just another stupid machine.' "

But now he's a convert. At Citronelle, he uses sous vide machines to make virtually all the entrees on his menu, including short ribs braised for 72 hours until they're buttery soft, or pheasant that's slow-poached to keep it plump and moist.

"In a way," he says, "it's cooking like your grandma did -- slowly, slowly."

Gray, the chef-owner of Equinox, has one sous vide machine and another one on order. He believes the process will have far-reaching implications for chefs.

"It's going to change how we cook, how we organize our day, even the amount of space we need in the kitchen. With sous vide, you don't need as many pots and pans," he says.