I am interested in trying cooking with Sous-Vide, but do you have to cook in a plastic bag? I don’t like the taste as much cooking in plastic.
It has to be in a vacuum bag, which doesn’t transmit any taste to the meat at all, as far as I can tell. Vacuum bags have to withstand both freezing and hot water temperatures without breaking down or even losing their seal, so are both thicker gauge and chemically tougher than most plastics.
More info:
http://nomnompaleo.com/post/12463202060/cooking-sous-vide-plastic-safety
“...there are some bags on the market that are indeed safe for sous vide purposes, and pose no problems from a BPA or EA perspective. The key is to stick with vacuum bags that are free of BPA, phthalates, and other plasticizers. It’s the plasticizers — chemical additives like phthalates that increase the pliability and fluidity of the plastic — that contain EA.
“I was able to confirm, for example, that Jarden’s FoodSaver bags are made from polyethylene glycol and nylon, and don’t contain BPA, phthalates, or other plasticizers with EA-leaching additives.
“The temperatures of sous vide are also low (polyethylene doesn’t begin softening until 195F), although I would imagine that a very small amount of polyethylene would still make it onto the surface of your food through diffusion. Polyethylene, however, is considered biologically inert, and scientists have been unable to detect any toxicity in animal tests (unlike BPA). It passes the Ames test and other studies of damage to DNA, and doesn’t have a similarity to estrogen.”
(The article continues with some debate.)