3 ms·

I have done that twice now. It works amazingly well, especially if you have a good grill to finish them on.

tptacek 16y ago
Broken record: if you're liking the results you're getting from the beer cooler, drop a couple hundred on a PID-controlled rice cooker setup. You don't need to shell out for a Sous Vide Supreme appliance to get professional results (in fact, a friend who wrote a review for the SVS was hard pressed to come up with any advantage to the SVS over the "ghetto" setup, other than that it doesn't make your kitchen look like a meth lab.)
- jarek 16y ago
  With mix of professional and personal curiosity I'd like to ask: what control do cheaper rice cookers use, and what does PID add? Super precise temperature control with no oscillation is the only thing I can think of -- is it that important?
  - tptacek 16y ago
    Rice cookers don't include PID controls. They have "hot" and "warm". You can cook with them (Roger Ebert had a great blog post about his one-pot wonder dishes), but that's essentially a gentle form of crock pot cooking. Super precise temperature control is one of the most important developments in all of cooking. If you have it, you can take almost any protein or almost any vegetable, select a final cooked state out of a (tiny) book, punch it into the control, and walk away for an hour, an afternoon, or a fortnight and come back to a 100% guaranteed perfect product. Three example implications: * You can buy $30 steaks, bag them, throw them in a rice cooker in the morning, go to work, come home, and have them perfectly rare-medium-rare all the way through. I'd say "better than at a steakhouse" if so many steakhouses weren't apparently switching up to cook steaks this way. * You can take a tough braise cut (short ribs, octopus), bag it, stick it in the rice cooker for a couple days, and pull it out medium rare and tender. Tender medium rare short ribs are a novel product of precise temperature control; you can't do them on a grill. * You can take a vegetable and cook it at a target temperature that breaks down starches but not pectin and get unique textures out of them. Keller, who has obviously better equipment than we do, combines this with compression to get steak-like textures out of things like melons.
    - redcap 16y ago
      What are you bagging your steaks in? Paper bag? What setting are you using? Cook or Warm?
      - tptacek 16y ago
        Seal-a-meal. Paper, water, and hours: not a good recipe. I'm not using "Cook" or "Warm". I'm using a small box with a PID controller, into which is plugged my rice cooker, and which is itself plugged into the wall. A small digital thermometer checks the temperature of the water that fills the rice cooker and modulates the power to keep it within a degree or two of the set temperature I want. Right now, a pair of rib eyes and some tilapia filets are being held in there at 129f. In a couple minutes, I'll pull the fish and stick it in a smoker for a couple minutes, then sear both sides of the steak for 10 seconds or so, then plate and serve.
        tptacek 16y ago
        (Tilapia SV at 129f for 2 hours, then 10 minutes in a smoker? Beautiful. Like bacon fish. Kids ate it up.)
      - weaksauce 16y ago
        It's a vacuum seal plastic bag and you let the pid controller keep the bath at a temperature a few degrees warmer than you want the steak to finish at. Take them out of the bag and sear them really quickly and you have perfect steaks. Here is a great guide if you want to look further: http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html

Broken record: if you're liking the results you're getting from the beer cooler, drop a couple hundred on a PID-controlled rice cooker setup. You don't need to shell out for a Sous Vide Supreme appliance to get professional results (in fact, a friend who wrote a review for the SVS was hard pressed to come up with any advantage to the SVS over the "ghetto" setup, other than that it doesn't make your kitchen look like a meth lab.)

jarek 16y ago
With mix of professional and personal curiosity I'd like to ask: what control do cheaper rice cookers use, and what does PID add? Super precise temperature control with no oscillation is the only thing I can think of -- is it that important?
- tptacek 16y ago
  Rice cookers don't include PID controls. They have "hot" and "warm". You can cook with them (Roger Ebert had a great blog post about his one-pot wonder dishes), but that's essentially a gentle form of crock pot cooking. Super precise temperature control is one of the most important developments in all of cooking. If you have it, you can take almost any protein or almost any vegetable, select a final cooked state out of a (tiny) book, punch it into the control, and walk away for an hour, an afternoon, or a fortnight and come back to a 100% guaranteed perfect product. Three example implications: * You can buy $30 steaks, bag them, throw them in a rice cooker in the morning, go to work, come home, and have them perfectly rare-medium-rare all the way through. I'd say "better than at a steakhouse" if so many steakhouses weren't apparently switching up to cook steaks this way. * You can take a tough braise cut (short ribs, octopus), bag it, stick it in the rice cooker for a couple days, and pull it out medium rare and tender. Tender medium rare short ribs are a novel product of precise temperature control; you can't do them on a grill. * You can take a vegetable and cook it at a target temperature that breaks down starches but not pectin and get unique textures out of them. Keller, who has obviously better equipment than we do, combines this with compression to get steak-like textures out of things like melons.
  - redcap 16y ago
    What are you bagging your steaks in? Paper bag? What setting are you using? Cook or Warm?
    - tptacek 16y ago
      Seal-a-meal. Paper, water, and hours: not a good recipe. I'm not using "Cook" or "Warm". I'm using a small box with a PID controller, into which is plugged my rice cooker, and which is itself plugged into the wall. A small digital thermometer checks the temperature of the water that fills the rice cooker and modulates the power to keep it within a degree or two of the set temperature I want. Right now, a pair of rib eyes and some tilapia filets are being held in there at 129f. In a couple minutes, I'll pull the fish and stick it in a smoker for a couple minutes, then sear both sides of the steak for 10 seconds or so, then plate and serve.
      - tptacek 16y ago
        (Tilapia SV at 129f for 2 hours, then 10 minutes in a smoker? Beautiful. Like bacon fish. Kids ate it up.)
    - weaksauce 16y ago
      It's a vacuum seal plastic bag and you let the pid controller keep the bath at a temperature a few degrees warmer than you want the steak to finish at. Take them out of the bag and sear them really quickly and you have perfect steaks. Here is a great guide if you want to look further: http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html