Ziplock's may be toxic:
http://camping.about.com/od/campingrecipes/a/ziplocbaggies.h...
Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
31–40 of 49 posts
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#32Ziplock's may be toxic: http://camping.about.com/od/campingrecipes/a/ziplocbaggies.h...
This 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”
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#33I 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.
Typically 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 foo…
Beef is ideal to sear just before SVing, not only does it seal in the moisture, but the most dangerous bacteria on beef is on the surface, and just slapping the beef down in a very hot pan, flipping and removing is enough. This is why you can have a blue steak that is cold on the inside (not in many restaurants however) and cooked on the outside.
Searing your steak before cooking would likely aid in the hacked SV as a lack of vacuum sealing means some moisture may be lost, but searing prevents this. It also protects the average, less experienced, cook from giving themselves a wicked case of food poisoning.
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#34This 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…
Auber 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.
That's some pretty impressive FedEx service, too!
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typically 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 foo…
Beef is ideal to sear just before SVing, not only does it seal in the moisture, but the most dangerous bacteria on beef is on the surface, and just slapping the beef down in a very hot pan, flipping and removing is enough. This is why you can have a blue steak that is cold on the inside (not in many restaurants however) and cooked on the outside. Searing your steak before cooking would likely aid in the hacked SV as…
Searing does not prevent any moisture loss.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searing
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#36It 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/
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#37I 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.
The whole point is that temperature of the medium is unrelated to the temperature of the food.
A raw steak is a steak that reaches UPTO temerature X (about 55C I think) during the cookieng.
So you can put it into a low temp cooking device for an hour on 55C or you can throw it onto a 200C owen and leave it there just enough time for it to heat upto 55C.
If you miss this 55C point and it heats upto 60C it wont be raw anymore. After all: "The entire range of steak doneness, from rare to well-done, is only a matter of 14°C (25°F)" (http://www.cookingissues.com/primers/sous-vide/part-i-introd...)
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#38I 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 $9 150…
I'm thinking of building something similar but instead of connecting the heating elements directly install a normal wall outlet and use a longer cable for the temp probe.
This way it would be possible to use a rice cooker as some have used in different projects or you can always plug in the same heating elements you used in your setup.
Do you think this would be feasible?
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#39I 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 $9 150…
Thanks 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.
Actually, what gave me the confidence to use the 1500 watt heating element was when I searched for the PID I was buying on google, I found a lot of links to home-brewers who used these heating elements drilled into the side of big aluminum/stainless steel pots. They were using even higher wattage units to get quicker boil times.
Re: Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
#40I 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 $9 150…
I'm thinking of building something similar but instead of connecting the heating elements directly install a normal wall outlet and use a longer cable for the temp probe. This way it would be possible to use a rice cooker as some have used in different projects or you can always plug in the same heating elements you used in your setup. Do you think this would be feasible?
You pretty much describe exactly what I built. It's all installed in a wooden box I created that sits on my counter, the top has the PID display, on either side is a wall outlet, one controlled by the PID and one direct 120V current for the water pump. The temperature controller is on a long wire that just comes out of a whole I drilled on the front, though you can build the fancy headphone attachment as detailed in the link. All the other wiring is in the box too, including the relay which is nice since it muffles the sound of the relay switching on/off.
I tried using it with the rice cooker I had and the results weren't great. I found the temperature fluctuations too erratic but didn't really investigate too much since my rice cooker was gonna be too small for anything but eggs.