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Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
- geoffc 16y agoThat's cool! I'm going to try an omaha steak in my cooler, it is already vacuum sealed so as far as I can see I just throw the steak in the hot water and go have a few cold beverages while it cooks. Mmmmmh.
- logicalmind 16y agoI don't want to burst your bubble or anything, but you should call omaha steaks and ask them what the USDA grade of their steaks would be if they paid for them to be graded. Combine that with the fact that they are usually frozen and you're not getting a good deal on their meat.
- roberte3 16y agoI did this last weekend, it made one of the best steaks that I have ever had in my life. I used a cheap cooler, so I cranked up the temp by 10 degrees above what I wanted the steak to be at when it finished. One thing that isn't brought up on the page, you probably want to use a rapid digital thermometer rather than your standard analog meat thermometer, I probably let out too much heat when I checked the temp halfway though.
- tptacek 16y agoThis is an awesome hack, but I gotta point out that the price point on "real" SV he's using is off. It's $400+ if you buy a Sous Vide Supreme. But you can also buy a $40 rice cooker (which is a multitasker) and a $130 PID controller from Auber Instruments. The only downside to the beer cooler hack, besides the fact that it's not precise enough to do eggs, is that it won't work over very long cook times. It looks like it'll kill on steaks, but it isn't going to work for medium rare short ribs. More Hacker News on Sous Vide, another topic I seriously will not shut up about, is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1093433 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1093433
- joshu 16y agoI wonder if we could get enough traffic together for a cooking-oriented HN.
- francoisdevlin 16y agohttp://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking http://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking
- tptacek 16y ago(it occurs to me though that the cooler insulation might help a lot with "active" SV, and now I need to find a way to PID-control an immersible heater).
- farmerbuzz 16y agoAre there any crock pots out there with suitable temperature range and digital temperature control? Seems too simple to not exist..
- tptacek 16y agoNot really, to either interpretation of that question: (a) There's no crock pot I can think of that controls the temperature of what's in the pot; in other words, fill the pot with water, and there's no crock pot that keeps the water at 130f. (b) Crock pots are (allegedly) hard to control with PID controllers (that's why everyone uses rice cookers); the "low" setting on the crock pot is apparently still too hot. It's also getting harder and harder to find crock pots that don't have digital controls, which is a dealbreaker if you want to use a cheap PID controller.
- icey 16y agoAuber has great customer service too - the sensor on my PID went bad and when I emailed Auber about it, they FedExed a new sensor to me within minutes.
- ianferrel 16y ago
- jimdeterman 16y agoHome brewers have a very similar problem. When you make beer from all grain, you need to stop the heating at certain temperatures and stay at that temperature for some amount of time to let certain enzymes activate. Using a cooler to maintain heat is fairly standard in home brewing. Very neat.
- yish 16y agoI have made a modified sous-vide setup based on the following excellent instructions which I have not seen mentioned here. Total cost was under $75 for me since I simplified the setup a bit. Temperature accuracy is excellent. http://seattlefoodgeek.com/2010/02/diy-sous-vide-heating-immersion-circulator-for-about-75/ http://seattlefoodgeek.com/2010/02/diy-sous-vide-heating-imm... Quick overview of my modifications. I used a 6" deep full size hotel pan I got in chinatown as my water bath and a standard $9 1500 watt water heater element instead of the set of immersion heaters.
- tptacek 16y agoThat is awesome. How hard was it to make? When you switched to the 1500 watt heater, did you have to tinker much with the PID controller?
- yish 16y agoPretty easy once I got all the parts together. Assembled it all over the course of one night. Hardest part was drilling the hole into the side of the hotel pan for the water heater. Luckily my neighbor is an electrician and had a step bit that worked perfectly, took about 45 minutes. Oh, and the Radio Shack relay mentioned didn't work for me when hooked up to my PID's solid state relay (different PID then used in the link). The switching voltage wasn't enough but eventually got a relay that only needed 5V to switch. Short term I used the internal relay which worked fine, but was noisy and I wasn't comfortable driving that amount of amperage through it.
- stcredzero 16y agoBy using beer cooler, you can reduce the heat output required to maintain a constant temperature. I also wonder if one could substitute a mixer or model boat propeller on the end of a rod and a small motor for the pump?
- shpxnvz 16y agoThanks for the link! I've been looking for plans to build a mash heater for home-brewing, and that looks like it will fit the bill nicely.
- chrisa 16y agoThis reminds me of a staple of my Boy Scout cooking: eggs in a bag. Just crack your eggs into a zip top bag (it must be a freezer bag to handle the temperature), add cheese, or peppers, or whatever you like in an omelet, suck out the air, and put it in boiling water until it’s done. Then, if you eat your omelet straight out of the bag, you have no clean up! It had never occurred to me then to try to cook anything else in bags, but I'm certainly going to try this out.
- tptacek 16y agoJust remember that there's a huge difference between boiling and SV'ing eggs. Boiled eggs sound gross. Boiled steak is gross. You don't want to let the eggs get over 150. Eggs cook fast. Water boils at 212f.
- logicalmind 16y agoExcept for poached eggs. Cooked in nearly boiling water. Quite excellent.
- chrisa 16y agoAh yes, I forgot to mention: watch your eggs very closely, or they turn slimy (which is as gross as it sounds, yes). If you get them out in time though, they taste basically like an omelet cooked in a pan. Then again, I was a teenager last time I did that, so maybe I'd have a different opinion if I tasted them now :)
- DrSprout 16y agoAny consideration for toxicity? I can't imagine plastic baggies are designed to keep food safe for human consumption when you heat them enough to cook meat.
- tptacek 16y agoCheap bags start breaking down around 190f. You wouldn't want to eat anything that came out of a 190f bag anyways. It's a valid concern though.
- whyenot 16y agoI would be at least a little worried about food poisoning. Cooking salmon at 115 deg F, or beef at 125 deg F or even chicken at 140 deg F is not a high enough temperature to kill off many harmful bacteria and parasites. In normal cooking, the external surfaces of the meat, where most contamination occurs, reach much higher temperatures.
- logicalmind 16y agoKilling most bacteria is a function of temperature and time. The higher the heat, the less time it has to be at that temperature. The lower the heat, the longer it has to be at that temperature. It's all a numbers game. Nothing is completely safe.
- whyenot 16y agoThat's not entirely true. If you for instance "cook" meat at 100 degrees you'd end up with more bacteria than you started with. You do need to cook at a temperature that is hot enough to actually kill the bacteria. It's not a numbers game at all, it's understanding a little microbiology. Nothing is completely safe, but food poisoning is also not fun.
- logicalmind 16y agoI highly recommend that anyone read this information before attempting sous vide. It outlines the various bacteria involved and the time/temp calculations for various items: http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html
- tptacek 16y ago128f and above, with the caveat that pasteurization takes a lot longer at 128f than it does at 150f.
- yish 16y agoTypically you would sear the fish/beef/chicken before/after for texture, flavor and color. Beef for instance will come out grey on the outside and look unpleasant unless seared (inside is still bright red/pink though). The bigger risk is the time that the food is left in the danger zone of above 50 degrees and below 125 degrees (don't quote me on those numbers, going off memory). Basically any bacteria present in food in that temp range will start reproducing quickly. I have heard 4 hours as the time limit acceptable to have food in that temp range before being considered unsafe.
- stjarnljuset 16y agoThis reminded me of something my friend sent me: cooking salmon in a dishwasher. http://www.salon.com/nov96/salmon961118.html http://www.salon.com/nov96/salmon961118.html
- hernan7 16y agoZiplock's may be toxic: http://camping.about.com/od/campingrecipes/a/ziplocbaggies.htm http://camping.about.com/od/campingrecipes/a/ziplocbaggies.h...
- jacobolus 16y agoThis is talking about a completely different temperature range. What you meant is “cooking your Ziplock at > 195°F may make it melt, and the effects thereof have not been adequately studied”
- dzlobin 16y agoIt seems like there are a decent amount of misconceptions people have about sous vide cooking. Everyone should have a look at the sous vide primer here http://www.cookingissues.com/primers/ http://www.cookingissues.com/primers/