Sous vide and confit are types of slow cooking, one old-fashioned and one modern. But what’s the difference and is sous vide widely used in the world of pâté? Keep reading this helpful article to get the down-low on those questions!

So…what’s the difference between confit and sous vide cooking?

Confit and sous vide are slow cooking methods, popularly used for meat. With confit, the meat is slow cooked in fat, typically lard, duck or goose fat. With sous vide, the meat is sealed in a plastic or silicon bag (sometimes a glass jar) and cooked under water at temperatures of 120°F to 180°F, depending on the recipe and tastes of the chef. Confit is primarily used for poultry and pork whereas sous vide is much more versatile. You can sous vide any meat—including perfectly cooked steaks—plus vegetables, grains, beans and more.

Now you know the basic differences, let’s look at more details on what sous vide and confit cooking are, what foods you can use in each of these cooking methods and if you can use sous vide to cook pâté en terrine. Ready? Let’s get started!

What is confit cooking?

Confit cooking is a method for slow cooking and preserving meat in animal fat. Meats used in confit are typically poultry and sometimes pork. Fats used in confit are duck or goose fat or lard.

In French, confit means to preserve. However, we use the French word in English too; confit describes the cooking method and the final preserved product.

When you confit fatty birds such as duck and goose, they’re fatty enough that they can be cooked in their own fat. Leaner birds need additional fat.  

According to Anne Willan, in her 1981 book, Regional French Cooking, “Goose is normally cooked in goose fat, which can be bought in tins, duck in duck fat and pork in lard. However, lard can be used for everything, or fat left from previous confits can be reused after straining, although after three or four cycles it becomes too salty.”

The basic confit process is:

• Marinate the meat for eight hours to three days with salt and other aromatics.
• Put the meat, additional fat (as necessary) and a bit of water, stock or wine in a pot that’s small enough so the meat fits snugly.
• Cook low and slow for a few hours until the fat is clear and the meat sinks to the bottom.
• Store the meat in glass jars and cover entirely with fat to keep the air out.
• Eat your preserved confit when you’re hungry.

During the slow cooking, the water in the meat and skin evaporates and the gelatinous bits from the skin and bones separate from the cooking fat. The meat retains its flavour during this cooking process.

Confit has been used to preserve meat for hundreds of years; it’s a preservation process that works even without refrigeration or canning methods.

[For more information on confit cooking, check out my epic article, Confit: Preserving Yummy Meats the French Way. And if you’re wondering if this fatty style of cooking could possibly be good for you, have a look at another one of my articles, Is Confit Cooking Healthy? The Pros, Cons & Alternatives.]

What is sous vide cooking?

Sous vide is cooking food in airtight plastic or silicone baggies or in glass containers at low temperature in water. When cooking with the plastic or silicone baggies, the food is generally completely submerged in the water. When using glass mason jars to sous vide, you can submerge the jars completely or keep the water level so that it’s lower than the top of the jars.

Like confit, sous vide is a French term; it means under vacuum. This is because the air is sucked out of the cooking bags before cooking (not usually for the mason jars, though it’s possible to do this).

According to the article, Everything Your Restaurant Should Know About Sous Vide Cooking, “The technique first emerged in the world of fine dining kitchens in the 1970s after its initial development in the NASA laboratory as an astronaut food preparation technique.” The author, Eliza Heritage, also says that the sous vide method helps restaurant kitchen managers deliver perfectly cooked meals, even during rush periods.

The basic process for sous vide cooking is:

• Put your food in a sous vide baggie (made of plastic or silicone) or mason jar.
• Prepare the sous vide water bath according to your recipe.
• Submerge the food in the water and cook for the time specified in your recipe.
• Once cooked, sear as necessary (for example, if you’re cooking a steak).
• Eat the food!

Equipment needed for sous vide cooking:

• Basic – A pot of water on the stove, some baggies and a digital thermometer. Optional: vacuum sealer.
• Mid-range – A pot of water or a plastic Cambro container, a sous vide immersion circulator and some baggies or mason jars. Optional: vacuum sealer.
• High-end – A sous vide water bath oven and some baggies or mason jars. These machines can look like a metal box, be a multi-use item (for example, also a slow cooker) or be an all-in-one device based on the immersion circulator. Optional: vacuum sealer.

What’s the difference between confit and sous vide cooking?

The differences between confit and sous vide cooking include the purpose, equipment required, ingredients, time and temperature.

The differences between confit and sous vide cooking

	Confit cooking	Sous vide cooking
The purpose	To cook meat until tender and preserve it in its own fat.	To cook meat and other food precisely until tender.
Equipment	A pot. The oven.	Pot, stove and thermometer, or immersion circulator and pot/plastic Cambro container or a sous vide water bath oven. Plastic or silicone baggies or mason jars.
Cooking medium	Fat, generally duck, goose or pork fat.	In its own juices. Optional spices and butter, etc.
Cooking temperatures	Higher: 200°F (93°C) to 300°F (150°C).	Lower: 120°F (49°C) to 190°F (87°C).
Time required	Two to six hours.	20 minutes to 72 hours!
Preservation method?	Yes.	No.

What are the similarities between confit and sous vide cooking?

The similarities between confit and sous vide cooking are the temperature and cooking time.

Both methods use low temperatures to create a tender result. Water temperature for cooking sous vide range from 120°F (49°C) to 190°F (87°C). Oven temperatures for cooking confit are still low, but a little higher than with sous vide; confit cooking temperatures range from 200°F (93°C) to 300°F (150°C).

Sous vide and confit can both be considered slow cooking but sous vide can take that to a whole new level. Confit takes hours in the oven, generally anywhere from two to six hours. Sous vide can take quadruple that amount of time, depending on the recipe!

According to the Cooking Times & Temperatures article at Sous Vide Supreme, cooking pork belly the quick way takes five to eight hours while the slow way takes 24 to 72 hours.

On the other hand, sous vide can be done quickly. Scrambled eggs take 20 minutes and tender vegetables can be finished in 30 to 90 minutes.

What foods can you confit?

Traditional confit is made with poultry and sometimes pork. In his book, The River Cottage Meat Book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says, “In theory, most kinds of meat could be made into a confit, but the technique achieves the greatest success when applied to ducks and geese. This is because they carry so much fat that no extra is required for the cooking or covering of the meat.”

This is perhaps why the most famous confit seems to be duck legs. I’ve made confit chicken thighs that turned out great, though I had to use extra lard.

However, not all beef is off the table for confit. For example, in their book, Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking & Curing, Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn include a recipe called Tongue Confit. They say, “Confiting is a way to make it tender. This truly does preserve the tongue so that it’s good for many months in the fridge if completely submerged in the fat.”

There’s also a burgeoning number of vegetable confit recipes, including tomato, squash and other root vegetables, fennel, onion, garlic, mushrooms, etc. These are often made with olive oil instead of animal fat and don’t keep for very long. Michael and Brian suggest that onion confit and garlic confit last two to three weeks in the fridge.

What foods can you cook with sous vide?

You can cook practically anything sous vide style! You can use the sous vide method for meat, seafood, many vegetables, grains, beans, desserts, custards and even Hollandaise sauce. Unlike confit, any meat can be done via sous vide. People love cooking their steak sous vide style because you can cook it rare (or medium, if you want) from edge to edge and then give it a quick sear.

While confit is a great way to cook and preserve food, it’s certainly not as versatile as sous vide cooking.

Are sous vide duck legs as good as confit duck legs?

There’s some controversy about whether sous vide duck legs are as good (or even better) than confit duck legs.

In the Toronto Life article, Q&A with Nathan Myhrvold, the author of Modernist Cuisine, 2011’s most talked about cookbook, Nathan says, “We did a taste test where we cooked the duck three ways: traditionally, sous-vide and steamed. As long as the time and temperature are the same, in a blind taste test, we couldn’t tell the difference. When I tell some chefs this, they almost get angry and don’t agree with it.”

With that said, what’s better may simply come down to what method you prefer. Or you can do a taste test yourself.

If you’d like to see if you like sous vide duck legs as much as traditional confit duck legs, try the Chef Steps recipe Easy, Crispy Duck Leg Confit. But plan ahead because it takes 16 hours.

Can you sous vide a pâté en terrine?

Yes, you can cook a pâté en terrine—also called pâté or terrine—sous vide style. There are a couple ways to do this.

The first way is to put your terrine dish in a water bath that’s heated with a sous vide immersion circulator and cook it until it’s done. The water bath goes to the upper edge of your terrine, just as it would in an oven water bath. The water isn’t high enough to get into the terrine dish.

In the Chef Steps recipe and article, Million-Dollar Country Pâté: A Simple Recipe That Looks (and Tastes!) Like a Million Bucks, they say the cooking time is about two hours, which is longer than pâtés cooked in a water bath in the oven (but depends on your recipe and temperature, of course).

Chef Steps also has a Chicken Liver Pâté recipe cooked sous vide in small mason jars; it looks delish. (You could also take the mason jar approach with the other recipe to get mini pâtés. A one-cup, wide-mouth mason jar would make a great pâté hostess gift, for example.)

I have to say, I like this idea for the summertime when it feels too hot to turn on the oven (is it just me who doesn’t have air conditioning?). Plus, by cooking your pâté in the terrine (or mason jars), you take out the element of cooking food in plastic or silicone. I know many people believe it’s safe to cook food in “food safe” plastic but I’m not one of those people.

If you don’t have a proper terrine mold with a lid, there’s still another way to sous vide. You simply put whatever terrine dish you have (a loaf pan, for example) in a plastic sous vide bag, suck out all the air and seal it. Then the whole pâté can be submerged in the water bath for cooking. To see an example of how this works, check out the Daily Brine recipe and article, Pâté de Campagne en Sous Vide.

Another option for chicken liver pâté is to sous vide the chicken livers before mixing them in with all the other pâté ingredients. An example of this is on the Cook Like A Chef at Home blog in the recipe and article, Sous Vide Chicken Liver Pate with Onion Jam.

In the comments of this recipe, reader (and lover of this recipe) Paul, says, “Modern chicken production is plagued by salmonella issues, but also chicken livers can get bitter by overcooking. The problem arises on how to cook them sufficiently that they are pasteurized, but not overcooked that they become bitter. Most recipes call for pan-frying of livers but usually state that they shouldn’t be ‘overcooked’. When one attempts to pan-fry a chicken liver, they are very difficult to cook all the way through as livers are quite ‘dry’, with no fat internally and can still be quite bloody inside even when the outside is brown …”

That’s an interesting tip.

Conclusion

Well, there you have it. Sous vide and confit are ways to slowly cook your food, with and without a gallon of duck fat or lard. I must admit that reading about sous vide pâtés has warmed me up to the idea of sous vide (though not the idea of cooking in plastic). May your confit duck legs and sous vide duck legs both come in first place at your taste test competition!