Make 100 easy, perfectly cooked meals using today's hot appliance: the sous vide! As affordable sous vide machines become widely available, an appliance once used only in fine-dining restaurants or on competitive cooking shows has entered home cooks' kitchens. Using a vacuum-sealed bag and temperature-controlled, circulating water, it cooks food gradually, making it easy, foolproof, and convenient for weeknight cooking. This comprehensive but compact introduction teaches you everything you need to know about sous vide preparation, including cooking times, and provides 100 inspired recipes for meat, poultry, seafood, vegetables, and desserts that go beyond the basics.

From the earliest days of European settlement in the South, as in many rural economies around the globe, cured pork became a main source of sustenance, and the cheaper, lower-on-the-hog cuts--notably, bacon--became some of the most important traditional southern foodstuffs. In this cookbook, Fred Thompson captures a humble ingredient's regional culinary history and outsized contributions to the table. Delicious, of course, straight out of the skillet, bacon is also special in its ability to lend a unique savory smokiness to an enormous range of other foods. Today, for regular eaters and high-flying southern chefs alike, bacon has achieved a culinary profile so popular as to approach baconmania. But Thompson sagely notes that bacon will survive the silliness. Describing the many kinds of bacon that are available, Thompson provides key choices for cooking and seasoning appropriately. The book's fifty-six recipes invariably highlight and maximize that beloved bacon factor, so appreciated throughout the South and beyond (by Thompson's count, fifty different styles of bacon exist worldwide). Dishes range from southern regional to international, from appetizers to main courses, and even to a very southern beverage. Also included are Thompson's do-it-yourself recipes for making bacon from fresh pork belly in five different styles.