Dishwasher Cooking: Make Your Dinner While Cleaning The Plates

"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.

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.

> exemption for farmed fish

A) Farmed fish only. The same fish that comes with a hefty dose of antibiotics and other tasty compounds [0], stuff that does break up but only if the fish is cooked.

B) Now, wild salmon has parasites as it grows up and spawns in fresh water. I assume this is not a contention point.

A + B + tell me again that you are OK with eating raw salmon and I'll tell you that you either like parasites or toxins :)

And, after all, all salmon sashimi you'd get in any Japanese place comes from the deep-frozen fish.

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[0] http://www.albany.edu/ihe/salmonstudy/pressrelease.html - First hit in Google for "eating farmed salmon raw"

Good chefs will always tell you: Use the right knife for the right job. Can we not simply use our kitchen appliances and tools for what they were designed for? The author suggests (and I'm inclined to agree) that using a dishwasher to poach salmon is a fairly wasteful use of electricity and water. If you want poached salmon, get out a pot and some water. If you're really particular you could buy a cheap thermometer to poach at whatever temperature you choose, and I'd be willing to bet you'd get more consistent results than using a large machine designed to clean plates. I'm all for new techniques and ideas in the kitchen, but this is a fad that should not and will not stick around for long.

> Good chefs will always tell you: Use the right knife for the right job. Can we not simply use our kitchen appliances and tools for what they were designed for?

I guess you never used a torch to reverse sear meat? The right knife for the job is the one that gets the best results. I do agree that there are probably better ways to get the same results, but if you dishwasher gets you the exact temps you need, go for it. I do a lot of sous vide steaks in a large cooler.