Coolers. They’re not just for Busch Light anymore.

We’ve seen a lot of this country together, me and my cooler, The Blue Angel. We’ve been to the beach, barbecues, football games, golf courses, amusement parks, shady house parties in questionable parts of town and of course the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Me and The Blue Angel have experienced so many wonderful moments, mostly powered by Busch Light, that I almost feel bad for the person I stole it from back in my foolish college days. Did I steal those memories from them? I’ve considered titling my memoir Stealing Hearts. Stealing Coolers. The Craig Stewart Situation. Maybe I’ll learn to scrapbook, just to make sure I never lose these magnificent memories of me and ol’ Blue.

This cooler has been hit with a 7-iron (the most effective golf club to use as a weapon), thrown down a mountain and vomited in and around. It has never complained. It can’t talk. It’s a goddamn cooler.

Just when I thought I’d put this baby through every test short of the MCAT, this week’s The Food Lab recipe presented a new and unique challenge—using it to cook. Not just as an apparatus to carry beer and meat to the grill, but as the cooking device in and of itself.

It sounds insane, but according to Kenji Lopez-Alt you can cook fish (and steak, burgers and just about anything else) in a trusty old beer cooler. You just need a little water. Kinda like California.

Allow me to explain. Cooking in a beer cooler is possible because of a method called sous-vide. Despite sounding like a 19^th century disease, sous-vide means “under vacuum” because in cooking everything needs a fancy-ass French name.  Essentially, you heat water to the temperature you want the food cooked, place a vacuum-sealed bag with the food in the water and leave it there for a while. It cooks the food evenly and eliminates the possibility to overcook. Most importantly for me, it’s virtually impossible to set on fire.

In commercial kitchens they cook sous-vide with expensive machines to regulate temperature. In Craig and Kenji’s kitchen, we do it down and dirty, with a machine usually used for regulating the temperature of 12-ounce brew donkeys. It’s all about heating the water to the appropriate level and temperature transfer. It’s a miniature hot tub inside the cooler—with none of the standard weird hot tub sex stuff.

It takes a lot to leave me speechless. Ask any of my coworkers/neighbors/people seated next to me at baseball games. But putting raw salmon in a cooler with warm water and pulling out fully cooked Olive Oil Poached Salmon (Page 399) with Grapefruit Vinaigrette (Page 400) was goddamn magic—and not some Criss Angel bullshit. I’m talking like the time David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear. I’m talking when Tiger Woods made that chip on 16. I’m talking parachute-day-in-elementary-school levels of magic.

All great magic tricks (I can’t believe I actually wrote that. Am I saying magic is cool? I mean, it’s cool in a “You do you.” kind of way I guess. It’s definitely not traditional cool. It’s sorta Bon Jovi in the early 2000’s cool: it seemed cool but was kind of awkward and sad when you really dug in. Now he does Direct TV commercials. It’s hard to be cool when you’re the face of AT&T, one of the most hated companies in America. But I’m talking about magic. And not the aural kind you get from Slippery When Wet-era Bon Jovi, the strange and dark kind you get from men wearing cummerbunds at children’s birthday parties) have an explanation.

In this case the explanation, and most important ingredient, didn’t make it in for picture day. We’re talking good old-fashioned H₂0. To cook the salmon properly, I needed 120^o water. My faucet spits it out at about 118^o so a few seconds on the stovetop and I was all set. Water? Meet the organ-transplant device I once left by a gas station in Paducah, Kentucky.

Salt, pepper, olive oil and salmon all went into the second most important ingredient–the freezer zip bag. I’m proud that as a society we’ve found a better use for freezer zipper bags than carrying marijuana. Everything went into the cooler, and using the pressure from the water to push all the air out of the bag, I sealed it up tight as Vanna White.

Then I closed the lid, threw a towel on top and worked on preparing the Grapefruit Vinaigrette. I sliced the grapefruit, combined the mustard, oil, basil and honey and… boom. Cavemen created fire, Newton created Calculus, my parents created this shining example of humanity and I have created vinaigrette. Bow before me.

15 minutes went by. I paced like Oprah waiting for her daily delivery of human flesh.

Another 15 minutes passed. I approached the cooler the same way I check social media—hoping for the best, expecting the worst.

I opened it and made a noise. A weird one.

Holy shit. I can’t believe this worked.

I feel like MacGyver and Bobby Flay had a threesome with Larry the Cable Guy, then gave birth to this cooking method next to an above ground pool in early September.

Seriously. I cooked salmon inside of a goddamn dirty old cooler and it turned out looking like this.

And it tasted delicious. None of the hints of Busch Light and Coppertone you’d expect from cooler-cooked salmon.

Delicious isn’t a strong enough word. This is the best salmon I’ve ever eaten, anywhere. It practically melted off my fork. It was fresh, flavorful and the vinaigrette played along without overpowering the fish. I made two servings hoping to have leftovers. I ate them both. I considered driving back to the grocery store for more salmon. I considered driving to the grocery store to buy more coolers. I did neither, preferring to stay true to my bluest friend.

Looks like I have another page to add to my scrapbook.

Recipe: 12/12
Did I Do The Dishes? THERE AREN’T ANY! IT’S A DAMN COOLER!