Sous-vide cooking of meat: A Maillarized approach

Sous-vide cooking of meats has been a game changer for most restaurants and foodies all around the world, allowing very tender textures of tough cuts and enabling a perfect control of doneness. However, sous-vide cooked meat lacks strong browning on the surface and roasted flavour notes. Chefs have traditionally use a two stage procedure to overcome this problem, with a more intense cooking method either before or after sous-vide. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the consequences on cooked meat quality parameters, such as cooking loss, water content, colour formation or flavour development. In this study we showed the consequences on these parameters of cooking lamb loins by coupling oven roasting and sous-vide cooking in two possible combinations: sous-vide followed by oven roasting (SV/O) or oven roasting before sous-vide (O/SV). The differences were not so marked, with the exception of a more intense surface browning and lower rate of oxidation to Maillard compounds in SV/O. The potential use of adding reducing sugars to sous-vide cooked meats to promote Maillard reactions is also discussed.