In the past, I’ve toyed with different forms of cooking, including sous vide (pronounced soo vee) and pressure cooking. I inherently love to experiment and learn, so playing in the kitchen has always been a way for me to experiment.
For those that don’t know, sous vide is a form of slow precision cooking. The french word sous vide means under vacuum. The theory of cooking is (at least the way I understand it – correct me if I’m wrong), food is considered raw until it’s brought up to a specific temperature, at which point it can be considered cooked, after which it’s overcooked.
When you cook food the traditional way (i.e. on the stove or in the oven) it can be quite hard to cook the food to the optimal temperature, since your stove or oven is set to a much higher temperature than what you want your food to be at, you can easily overcook it. An easy cheat is if you vacuum pack your food along with the spices, put it in a water bath, and keep the temperature at a consistent temperature the same at which you want your food to ultimately reach.
The meat – spiced and vacuum packed 
In the water bath
One of the cons of sous vide is that it takes really long to get most foods to optimal temperature this way. Cooking a hard boiled egg can take 2 hours for it to be perfect, cooking a brisket will usually take between 36-48 hours or more.
On the flip side of slow slow cooking, there’s pressure cooking. You cook the food in a sealed pressured environment, which doesn’t let any of the steam out and gets the food inside to a higher temperature much faster. So cooking a brisket in a pressure cooker can take an hour or so. Obviously, you won’t get the same flavor and tenderness you get from sous vide.
Then there’s smoking…