Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
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Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#2That'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.
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#3I 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.
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#4This 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:
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#5Home 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.
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#6This 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…
I wonder if we could get enough traffic together for a cooking-oriented HN.
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#7I 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-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.
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#8This 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…
I wonder if we could get enough traffic together for a cooking-oriented HN.
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#9This 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.
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#10This 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 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).