Low-Temperature Cooking

Low-temperature cooking holds food at roughly 60 to 90 degrees Celsius for a prolonged time, an approach that includes sous vide cooking, slow cookers, a conventional oven set to its lowest temperature, and combi steamers, and is known in the American South by the colloquial name low and slow; cooking food at a low external temperature does not necessarily mean the food's own internal temperature ends up any lower than food cooked by conventional means. The approach has ancient roots in traditions such as the Samoan and Tongan practice of slow-cooking meat in pits for ceremonial occasions, but scientific interest began in the eighteenth century when the physicist Benjamin Thompson left a joint of meat in a drying oven overnight and was surprised to find it tender and fully cooked; the physicist Nicholas Kurti of Oxford later confirmed that Thompson's oven never exceeded 70 degrees Celsius.