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Was your entree Cryovacked? Sous vide cooking

Watermelon with the texture of steak ... fried mayonnaise ... possible with sous vide cooking, which is cooking food packed in vacuum-pack bags slowly ...

Sous Vide has been around since the late 1960's, when food-grade plastic films and vacuum packing were mastered by French and American engineers and later manufactured under the aegis of the Cryovac division of the W. R. Grace Company.

Bruno Goussault is a scientist and economist who introduced sous vide cooking ...

A few weeks ago at Per Se, Thomas Keller's four-star restaurant in New York City, a waiter set a salad of diced watermelon and hearts of peach palm in front of me. "This is watermelon that has been Cryovacked," he explained. "It's something new we're doing. I think you will like it."
. . .
"Cryovacking" is an industry term for putting food in a plastic bag and vacuum-packing it. Sometimes the food is then cooked in the bag. Other times, the pressure of the packing process is used to infuse flavors into ingredients.
. . .
Dufresne, the chef at the innovative Manhattan restaurant WD-50, calls Goussault's contribution to cooking "monumental." The advancements he has made are on par with the invention of the food processor and the gas stove, Thomas Keller says, and they will be around forever. "With the Cuisinart," Keller says, "there was no one that came with it. You got the book inside. With sous vide, the technology is so complex and there are so many variables. The thing that comes with sous vide is Bruno."
. . .
Goussault discovered that keeping the temperature as low as possible and later cooling the food in several stages yielded a wildly different -- and tastier -- result.

"Under Pressure," by Amanda Hesser, NYT, August 14, 2005

Bakerina, however, says that "It has been almost 30 years since my stepdad was foolhardy enough to buy my mother a Daisy Seal-a-Meal for Christmas, almost 30 years since we took a pass at making big batches of stew, vacuum-sealing them, freezing them and reheating them in boiling-water bags, only to decide that the results weren't worth the added time, the cost of the Seal-a-Meal bags or the increased amount of plastic in our garbage, 30 years since we said goodbye to all that...."

Links

Citronelle, 3000 M Street NW, Washington, DC, 202-625-2150
Cuisine Solutions
PolyScience
"Not so fast...Slow cooking the sous vide way," by Bruce Cole, Saute Wednesday, June 9, 2004
"The Slowest Food: Why American chefs have taken up sous-vide cooking," by Sara Dickerman, slate, July 20, 2005
"Chicken breasts sous-vide with port-marsala sauce," by thepassionatecook, May 13, 2004 ("The sous-vide technique allowed the fillets to cook in their own juices, revealing perfectly moist and tender, melt-in-the-mouth chicken pieces and the sauce was a revelation - were it not for the skin that I left on the chicken breasts, this would have contained virtually no fat and yet been incredibly tasty... you must really try this!")