So if you cure with them the meat will either be pink or red depending on the state of the meat before curing, how much you use, and how long the cure is. It has a preservative effect, but then so does salt. It adds a flavor that is similar, but a bit different than salt.

If you use the 145F water bath temperature, the meat will be firm enough to slice thinly and will be essentially the same texture as a steak cooked to medium or medium well. You can certainly use lower or higher temperatures as you like.

Tenderloin is a tender piece of meat, so you could prepare it via sous vide, but there would be no need to cook for 16-24 hours because there's not much collagen that you need to convert to gelatin. Personally I'd probably use a lower temperature, say 135F for about 4-6 hours for that cut of meat if I wanted to do it sous vide.

Going to tie, salt, and leave in fridge for 24-36 hours before I cook - and I know not to overcook and to tie short ends up.

But - any other tricks? Or spice rub idea?

Going to make two sauces - Bernaise and horseradish (with homemade creme fraiche).

Cook the roast at low temperature (I think he did 200F) for 4-6 hours, and then blast it at the end for 15 minutes, and it seals in the juices and flavor. I actually tried it a couple of times (a rib roast once and an eye of the round roast) and it worked pretty well.

How does the vacuum bag work?

Whatever you are cooking will be cooked by the water through the bag. Instead of cooking by time, you are cooking by temperature. So a medium rare steak would be cooked in about a 135F water bath for a few hours. Since there's no chance of overcooking you can leave it in the water bath for a very long duration (within reason) without affecting the outcome. This is quite handy as you can put your food in the water bath in the morning before you go to work and it's ready by dinner time whenever you are ready to serve. My recipe calls for very long cooking times, but an individually wrapped single serving piece of meat would only take an hour or two depending on thickness.

Douglas Baldwin's free guide is a good place to start to learn about the technique.

You cook lesser grades of meat slowly and it tastes really good. It's nothing new.

...cooked medium rare and just as tender as filet mignon, but with a lot more flavor. Imagine a piece of poultry cooked to 145F instead of 165F, which isn't dry or chalky, yet is perfectly safe to eat with no worries of salmonella poisoning.

You can't normally do those things with a slow cooker, unless you hook up a temperature controller to it and transform it into a sous vide setup, which is exactly how I do it.

There are other advantages as well. With sous vide you can select any doneness level you want from rare to well done and dial your preferred level in perfectly every time. You can do this with any piece of meat or vegetable that will fit in a vacuum bag. Similar to a slow cooker, you get the convenience of being able to start the food before you leave for work and it's done when supper time rolls around at your convenience. You also get the added convenience of being able to cook a week or two ahead of time, leave the food in the bag, then reheat whenever you want without the food tasting like leftovers. Since the food is fully pasteurized and sealed inside the bag, there's no pathogen danger even two weeks later stored in the refrigerator instead of the freezer.

but understand I am an older guy. I am enough of a long time progressive though to look into all of what you have said. I don't have to throw out all my pans though? I know I don't, but what you said sounds remarkable. I will certainly look into it.

are barriers to most home cooks.

And while a crockpot is a somewhat different technique, it's one readily available to the home cook.

Today I fixed chicken cacciatore for the very first time using my crockpot and it was totally amazing. I've of course heard about that dish forever, but I don't think I'd ever had it until very recently, which inspired me to make it. I now have six portions in the freezer for future meals.

And I suspect that trend will continue. A few years ago sous vide was the realm of high end cooks and food geeks that were repurposing second hand laboratory water bath circulators.

Today there's a variety of home appliances that provide the amateur home cook with the capability of doing sous vide. There's been a thread or two on the subject of people replacing their crockpots with smart cookers which provide the capability of slow cooking, pressure cooking, yogurt making, rice cooking, and sous vide. Because of their relatively low price and the versatility of the number of other appliances they replace, I think these are just going to become more and more popular once people realize what they can do. I don't have one, but I probably won't be buying any of those previously mentioned appliances again and will instead just get a smart cooker at some point.