Let me start by saying I have always loved to cook since I was just a kid watching my mom make me meals in our modest kitchen back so many years ago. I always loved to help out and when I was in my mid teens one of the 1st real jobs I had was washing dishes in a restaurant at the age of 14. When I turned 17 I was able to step up and move to being a line cook learning how to prep and plate breakfast, lunch and dinner menu items for a popular chain restaurant. My love of cooking and learning stayed with me even as my career path lead me into sales and marketing in the banking business for over 30 years. I have always been the main cook for my family and continue to learn and experiment with new things.
In the last 15 years i have started to really get into more grilling, smoking, barbecuing and cooking more on my charcoal and kamado type grills. Doing low and slow smokes, hot and fast grilling. reverse searing steaks, and leaning all kinds of new things that can be cooked on the grills. I first learned of Sous Vide cooking about a year ago and I really wasn't that interested in it. I have to admit cooking in a water bath seemed a little weird to me and looked a little too fancy for my style of cooking. Then one day about 9 months I started seeing some of my barbecue friends start talking about how they did some steaks using sous vide and how great they were, I started to take more notice. As with everything I do I dived right in and did as much research as I could, searching for websites, YouTube videos, other Facebook groups, anything I could find to gain more knowledge before taking the leap at buying the equipment.
My first sous vide circulator arrived for Christmas 2017, and as soon as I opened the box I was hooked. I have used that same unit for almost every meal I have cooked since then. Since i was already big into smoking, grilling, barbecue, it just made sense for me to put the two cooking methods together. You see, sous vide is pretty much the Ultimate "Low and Slow" method of cooking. Everyone who has ever barbecued knows that some of the best food you can cook is done low and slow so that the meat can get tender and juicy. As a big follower of some very large YouTube barbecue and sous vide channels, I noticed there was not very many who incorporated both methods into there videos, it was either one or the other. That is when the "Fire & Water" cooking channel was started! The idea of both fire and water working together as a yin and yang to make awesome food was a natural to me given my marketing experiance. I started by creating a group on Facebook and recruited people from both sous vide and barbecue groups and it grew to over 1000 members in just 3 weeks time! From there I started the YouTube channel and have been growing very fast in just two months time!
Thanks for taking the time to read my story, and I hope you enjoy watching our videos and participating in the Facebook group! I hope to grow this into something that everyone can learn from!
