3 ms·

Could this be considered a derivative of Sous-vide[0]? That is, the mason jar technique is cooking in an air-tight container and temperature is at least somewha

Could this be considered a derivative of Sous-vide[0]? That is, the mason jar technique is cooking in an air-tight container and temperature is at least somewhat regulated by the dishwasher. Have I had access to a cheap sous-vide machine this whole time!? [0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sous-vide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sous-vide

anigbrowl 13y ago
Sort of, but the temperature to a large extent depends on your water supply. Also, sous-vide often means cooking at low temperature for much longer than a dishwasher cycle. If you want to get into it on the cheap and are willing to experiment, a slow cooker is another option.
- hartror 13y ago
  Modern dishwashers have a heating element, they don't depend on an external source of heat for water. Some can use a more efficient external source to reduce heating costs, but dishwashers run a lot hotter than what comes out of the tap.
  - andrewaylett 13y ago
    Not all of them -- my dishwasher is typically set to wash (on eco mode) at a significantly colder temperature than the taps (which are set quite hot at the boiler).
- joezydeco 13y ago
  My dishwasher runs too quickly and my water is too hot to make this technique usable. I've had great success with a $20 crockpot and the Dorkfood DSV, a no-frills PID controller that you can get on Amazon right now for $99. Much cheaper and easier than the other Kickstarter projects or making your own with an Arduino or something. And I didn't think about the energy angle until now, but I'd think the crockpot transfers heat much more efficiently than a dishwasher, where most of the joules are going down the drain in a short period of time.
  - VLM 13y ago
    "And I didn't think about the energy angle until now" It doesn't matter except for greenwashing / guilt tripping purposes. Engineering analysis below or you can just trust me. The embedded energy in food is very high, enough to cremate the food quite easily. Actually enough to cremate the food and vaporize the ashes. Takes an astounding amount of diesel to make a can of corn and deliver it to your table, for example. WRT dishwasher salmon from the 70s (rediscovered periodically in the 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s, just like acid, but I digress) I googled around and found a "Kentucky State University" presentation claiming farmed salmon takes 11 MJ per portion to create and deliver to your kitchen before it gets cooked. To about one sig fig 1 MJ = 1 KWh so for a family of 4 you're looking at an embedded energy of "forty" KWh to provide the salmon. Its hard to envision a cooking technique requiring more than "forty" hours at a KW or 40 KW for an hour unless you get ridiculous like using a literal rocket engine or thousands (millions?) of green eco friendly watch batteries. Maybe if you burned organically grown truffle oil in a camp stove, or made charcoal out of beef instead of hardwood and grilled on it. Its not physically possible for my dishwasher to approach even 4 KWh... I did the wiring, I know you can't draw that much current over as short of a time as one cycle... The article also fixated on running the washer with soap on a normal load so you're really only "wasting" a fraction of its capacity, and most people don't run a washer at full capacity anyway, therefore the "waste" is typically zero. The amortized medical costs are much higher. So one time in a thousand the package un-noticably leaks all over and everyone in the family gets horribly food poisoned when using the contaminated dishes, leading to multiple days lost labor, and little billy needs an ER visit for IV rehydration at $2K blah blah and suddenly using a crock pot or buying a real sous vide cooker starts looking like the cheapest alternative by far.
- Tarrosion 13y ago
  Also, proper equipment is falling in price rapidly. You can buy an Anova immersion circulator for $200 (used to be $300 until the Sansaire kickstarter showed up). I see no reason to believe that the market has bottomed out; the components are just not that expensive.
  - VLM 13y ago
    The bottom is about $30. That's about what my tropical fish tank aquarium heater cost and it'll hold any fishy-temp within a degree, permanently underwater, for years. If you demand a digital dial, or a timer, or perhaps higher wattage to heat up quicker, you might be looking at as much as $50, maybe as much as $100. A hackerspace project (or startup?) to convert aquarium heaters into perfect hard boiled egg sous vide devices would be interesting and theoretically cheap. There's people who think nothing of $500 for a coffee maker, so they'd probably go $50 for a dedicated egg hard boiler or something like that, which would be well over 100% markup on wholesale prices for aquarium heaters.
tptacek 13y ago
Do you not have a drink cooler? It'll do a better job of this than a dishwasher. http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/04/cook-your-meat-in-a-beer-cooler-the-worlds-best-sous-vide-hack.html http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/04/cook-your-meat-in-a-beer-... The dishwasher cooking trick is old, by the way; here's a reference to an article in Salon about it, from the '90s: http://www.salon.com/2000/03/03/cookbooks_4/ http://www.salon.com/2000/03/03/cookbooks_4/
- loupeabody 13y ago
  This'll be the next thing I try, definitely. Thanks for letting me know!
- torstesu 13y ago
  Hook the drink cooler up with an arduino, temp sensor, power switch and an heating element and you'd be able to maintain that temperature as long as you'd like. http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/07/16/back-in-stock-sous-vide-powered-by-arduino-kit-pack-the-sousviduino/ http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/07/16/back-in-stock-sous-v... http://lowereastkitchen.com/wp/?q=node/3 http://lowereastkitchen.com/wp/?q=node/3
evilduck 13y ago
If you don't want to do anything with a loooong slow cook time (like beyond 4 or 5 hours), you can just use ziplock bags, hot water and a medium beverage cooler. I "backyard sous-vide" steaks and pork chops like this all the time. Ziplocks don't leach any nasties at 130ºF and you don't sous-vide grilling meat long enough for the heat loss of the cooler to really matter. Fish is cooked at lower temperatures than beef/pork, so it should work even better.
- darkarmani 13y ago
  Some added points: Ziplock bags should be good to around ~170F. I use a large cooler, a probe thermometer for the water temps, and a boiling kettle of water to bring the temp back up when it goes down. If you are concerned with bacteria in your meat (steaks have it mostly on the surface), you can follow the USDA:FSIS rules on time-temperature: steaks are safe after 121 minutes at 130F -- i go 3-4 hours to make sure the middle is that temp [1]. To reverse sear your meat I've used the following two options: torch and a charcoal starter chimney with a grate on top. I've found that you really need a reverse sear, because while the meats are extremely juicy, they have a bad external texture without a crust and you miss out on all of the good taste the maillard reaction gives you. [1] http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/rdad/FSISNotices/RTE_Poultry_Tables.pdf http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/rdad/FSISNotices/RTE_Poultry_...

anigbrowl 13y ago

Sort of, but the temperature to a large extent depends on your water supply. Also, sous-vide often means cooking at low temperature for much longer than a dishwasher cycle. If you want to get into it on the cheap and are willing to experiment, a slow cooker is another option.

hartror 13y ago
Modern dishwashers have a heating element, they don't depend on an external source of heat for water. Some can use a more efficient external source to reduce heating costs, but dishwashers run a lot hotter than what comes out of the tap.
- andrewaylett 13y ago
  Not all of them -- my dishwasher is typically set to wash (on eco mode) at a significantly colder temperature than the taps (which are set quite hot at the boiler).
joezydeco 13y ago
My dishwasher runs too quickly and my water is too hot to make this technique usable. I've had great success with a $20 crockpot and the Dorkfood DSV, a no-frills PID controller that you can get on Amazon right now for $99. Much cheaper and easier than the other Kickstarter projects or making your own with an Arduino or something. And I didn't think about the energy angle until now, but I'd think the crockpot transfers heat much more efficiently than a dishwasher, where most of the joules are going down the drain in a short period of time.
- VLM 13y ago
  "And I didn't think about the energy angle until now" It doesn't matter except for greenwashing / guilt tripping purposes. Engineering analysis below or you can just trust me. The embedded energy in food is very high, enough to cremate the food quite easily. Actually enough to cremate the food and vaporize the ashes. Takes an astounding amount of diesel to make a can of corn and deliver it to your table, for example. WRT dishwasher salmon from the 70s (rediscovered periodically in the 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s, just like acid, but I digress) I googled around and found a "Kentucky State University" presentation claiming farmed salmon takes 11 MJ per portion to create and deliver to your kitchen before it gets cooked. To about one sig fig 1 MJ = 1 KWh so for a family of 4 you're looking at an embedded energy of "forty" KWh to provide the salmon. Its hard to envision a cooking technique requiring more than "forty" hours at a KW or 40 KW for an hour unless you get ridiculous like using a literal rocket engine or thousands (millions?) of green eco friendly watch batteries. Maybe if you burned organically grown truffle oil in a camp stove, or made charcoal out of beef instead of hardwood and grilled on it. Its not physically possible for my dishwasher to approach even 4 KWh... I did the wiring, I know you can't draw that much current over as short of a time as one cycle... The article also fixated on running the washer with soap on a normal load so you're really only "wasting" a fraction of its capacity, and most people don't run a washer at full capacity anyway, therefore the "waste" is typically zero. The amortized medical costs are much higher. So one time in a thousand the package un-noticably leaks all over and everyone in the family gets horribly food poisoned when using the contaminated dishes, leading to multiple days lost labor, and little billy needs an ER visit for IV rehydration at $2K blah blah and suddenly using a crock pot or buying a real sous vide cooker starts looking like the cheapest alternative by far.
Tarrosion 13y ago
Also, proper equipment is falling in price rapidly. You can buy an Anova immersion circulator for $200 (used to be $300 until the Sansaire kickstarter showed up). I see no reason to believe that the market has bottomed out; the components are just not that expensive.
- VLM 13y ago
  The bottom is about $30. That's about what my tropical fish tank aquarium heater cost and it'll hold any fishy-temp within a degree, permanently underwater, for years. If you demand a digital dial, or a timer, or perhaps higher wattage to heat up quicker, you might be looking at as much as $50, maybe as much as $100. A hackerspace project (or startup?) to convert aquarium heaters into perfect hard boiled egg sous vide devices would be interesting and theoretically cheap. There's people who think nothing of $500 for a coffee maker, so they'd probably go $50 for a dedicated egg hard boiler or something like that, which would be well over 100% markup on wholesale prices for aquarium heaters.

tptacek 13y ago

Do you not have a drink cooler? It'll do a better job of this than a dishwasher. http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/04/cook-your-meat-in-a-beer-cooler-the-worlds-best-sous-vide-hack.html http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/04/cook-your-meat-in-a-beer-... The dishwasher cooking trick is old, by the way; here's a reference to an article in Salon about it, from the '90s: http://www.salon.com/2000/03/03/cookbooks_4/ http://www.salon.com/2000/03/03/cookbooks_4/

loupeabody 13y ago
This'll be the next thing I try, definitely. Thanks for letting me know!
torstesu 13y ago
Hook the drink cooler up with an arduino, temp sensor, power switch and an heating element and you'd be able to maintain that temperature as long as you'd like. http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/07/16/back-in-stock-sous-vide-powered-by-arduino-kit-pack-the-sousviduino/ http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/07/16/back-in-stock-sous-v... http://lowereastkitchen.com/wp/?q=node/3 http://lowereastkitchen.com/wp/?q=node/3

evilduck 13y ago

If you don't want to do anything with a loooong slow cook time (like beyond 4 or 5 hours), you can just use ziplock bags, hot water and a medium beverage cooler. I "backyard sous-vide" steaks and pork chops like this all the time. Ziplocks don't leach any nasties at 130ºF and you don't sous-vide grilling meat long enough for the heat loss of the cooler to really matter. Fish is cooked at lower temperatures than beef/pork, so it should work even better.

darkarmani 13y ago
Some added points: Ziplock bags should be good to around ~170F. I use a large cooler, a probe thermometer for the water temps, and a boiling kettle of water to bring the temp back up when it goes down. If you are concerned with bacteria in your meat (steaks have it mostly on the surface), you can follow the USDA:FSIS rules on time-temperature: steaks are safe after 121 minutes at 130F -- i go 3-4 hours to make sure the middle is that temp [1]. To reverse sear your meat I've used the following two options: torch and a charcoal starter chimney with a grate on top. I've found that you really need a reverse sear, because while the meats are extremely juicy, they have a bad external texture without a crust and you miss out on all of the good taste the maillard reaction gives you. [1] http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/rdad/FSISNotices/RTE_Poultry_Tables.pdf http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/rdad/FSISNotices/RTE_Poultry_...