Funky-shaped chicken breasts, dull-looking vegetables, goopy egg whites—these are common issues for cooks getting started with sous vide. Hey, we've all been there. But experience has taught us that a few simple tricks can mean the difference between an awkward-looking dish and the sort of pretty plates chefs present at the best restaurants.

Here, our favorite tips for avoiding the common pitfalls that come up when you're working with a circulator.

When cooking proteins sous vide, you always want to add oil to the bag. Adding ample oil is especially important with delicate foods or small pieces. How much is ample? Think of it this way: You can get into all sorts of trouble from a lack of liquid in the bag (much more on that below), whereas adding more than you might need has few downsides—other than waste, of course. But much better to use a little too much oil as you learn than damage lovely fresh vegetables and proteins, right? After a few trials you'll figure out exactly how much you need.

How does adding oil help you get great results?

When, for instance, a chicken breast slides to the bottom of a ziploc-style bag, it often gets pinched in the corner and takes on that shape as the collagen converts to gelatin in the cooking process. The result: a warped-looking breast with unseemly seams at the edges. Adding oil will prevent this and preserve the cut's natural shape.

If you've cooked fish or poultry—using either traditional methods or sous vide—you've likely noticed an unattractive white ooze forming on the edges. This is albumin, a simple protein that coagulates under heat. And it has a tendency to dull the sharp, clean edges that we covet when presenting guests with a fresh piece of fish.

Adding oil to fish before you cook it sous vide will allow the albumin to run off your food and sink to the bottom of the bag, keeping those nice edges intact.

Seasoning is just as important with sous vide as it is with traditional methods. Adding aromatics to the bag while you cook goes a long way in creating a flavor-forward dish.

The trouble comes when you combine a delicate protein—halibut, say—with things like garlic and a sprig of rosemary. The aromatics have a tendency to squish into the fish, creating weird-looking depressions in its flesh. Adding liquid to the bag will prevent your seasonings from "stamping" your protein, sticking instead to the job they're supposed to do—add flavor.

Everyone loves to prep in advance, and there's a temptation with sous vide cooking to portion food as early in the process as possible. Often, however, it's smart to cook first, slice later. Here's why.

Picture chopping your way through uncooked carrots—the hardness of the raw vegetables is not only murder on your knives, it also makes it difficult to get precise, evenly shaped pieces. Now, picture yourself gently slicing through supple, sous vide–cooked veg. That's better, isn't it?

Another reason to hold off: Pre-sliced pieces have a tendency to rub up against each other in the bag like teenagers at a high school dance. This often results in lumps forming on the individual slices where they joined together with other pieces; cooking vegetables whole will help you avoid this unfortunate consequence of inner-bag coupling.

One of the best things about preparing meat sous vide is you can cook it in advance, then reheat it just before serving. It may seem easier to portion your proteins after their spell in the water bath and before the reheating stage. We suggest, however, that you wait until just before you plate it. Meat sliced in advance has a tendency to dry out and become discolored along the sides; it has none of that lovely sheen you see on just-sliced portions. Remember when slicing any soft sort of food, you want to cut with a forward-backward motion rather than sawing through it.

For the best results with sous vide, always avoid cramming the bath or bags. Here's why.

Given enough space, prawns and other delicate foods cook beautifully in a sous vide bath. But cram a bunch of them in a bag at once and you'll wind up with a lot of mangled, terrible-looking crustaceans. Overcrowding also dramatically impacts the cooking time, resulting in unevenly prepared food—some pieces overcooked, some still nearly raw.

Place pieces carefully inside the bags so that they all have equal access to the warm water surrounding them.

Yes, the beauty of low-temperature cooking is that you don't have to micromanage your food as it cooks. But sometimes, simply placing food in a bath and walking away is not the best way to go. Gently agitating the bag at regular intervals can speed up the cooking process and keep food from sticking together. And hey, it's still a whole lot easier than slaving over a hot stove.

Again, here, we are trying to prevent foods from having too much contact with each other as they cook. If you pre-portion salmon pieces and stick them in a bag, they will slide together and stick to one another. Try to separate them, and you'll wind up ripping the pieces and creating jagged edges. As we pointed out above, adding oil helps. So does agitating the bag lightly every 10 minutes or so to move the pieces around.

We love using sous vide to reheat purées. Reheating them on a stove top is tedious and requires close vigilance—preventing you from attending to other components of your dish. It's also hard to achieve even heating; often, the purée at the bottom, near the heat source, gets very hot and requires constant stirring to prevent scorching, while the top portion is barely warm. Meanwhile, the texture of your once-smooth purée turns chunky, and the color grows dull. You can avoid all this by portioning the purée into smaller bags, and dropping those in a sous vide bath (we generally heat them at about 140 °F / 60 °C) to warm evenly as you attend to other tasks. If you're in a hurry, or have a lot of purée to reheat, agitate the bags every couple of minutes to speed up the process.

When preparing green vegetables, you always want to preserve that super-vibrant color that signals their freshness and palatability. The higher the temperature at which you cook these plants, the more rapidly you'll denature the chlorophyll, thus dulling their color.

In the image below, you see asparagus cooked at two temperatures: 95 °C (left) and 85 °C (right). After 20 minutes in the bath, the stalks cooked at 95 °C were dull and brownish, while the ones cooked to a lower temperature maintained their bright green hue. The takeaway: turn the temperature down for better-looking veg.

Pressing the meat as you chill it is a cool technique that yields a flat, even surface with a clean, appetizing look. The flat surface will also help you get a nice even sear.

This technique works great with steak but we especially love to press pork belly since the belly has a tendency to firm up and become uneven as it chills.

There are actually two parts to an egg white, and often the outer white—the section outside the egg-white membrane—won't fully coagulate during cooking. Most of us like our eggs free of watery, goopy bits, which a slotted spoon drains out handily. Simply lift your slow-cooked egg with the spoon, agitate gently to loosen the unwanted bits, and serve.

Chef's tip: Eggs sometimes crack in the bath. Avoid this by clipping the bag you are cooking them in against one side.

Blanching oysters (or other bivalves) in a water bath at 140 °F / 60 °C for just a few minutes makes them easy to open. If you time it right, the oyster doesn't cook, but it does end up with a gorgeous plump appearance and an appealing firm texture that heightens its freshness. And because this technique makes it easy to pop the oyster open, you're less likely to end up with shell debris floating in the salty brine surrounding the oyster.

Ready to impress some guests with your new pro-level sous vide skills? Get going with these highly relevant recipes.