So my especially creative boyfriend "made" me a sous vide cooker for Christmas. Included is: a vacuum sealer set; bags; a bound, printed Practical Guide to Cooking Sous Vide by Douglas Baldwin; a crockpot and a sort of electrical current controller/ temperature gauge. How it works is you plug in your crockpot to this controller, set your temp. on the controller, a temperature sensor goes into the water in your crockpot and if your water gets too hot/ too cold, the controller shuts off or turns on the power on your crockpot. He did EXTENSIVE research and thinks this set up will work just as well as the $400 cooker you've reviewed here. I will be sure to let you know how my renegade sous vide set up works. I told him "worse comes to worse if I stink at cooking sous vide, at least I've now got a crockpot and vacuum sealer, right?"
Far from the days of deriding it as "the gentlest poaching of them all", I'm pretty interested in "sous vide" cooking nowadays. I put it in scare quotes because that appellation only describes the first, and frequently most expensive, part of the cooking method.1. Put contents in a plastic bag and remove all the air ("sous vide"). The cheapest device I've found for this is $1,100. I'm talking about a real chamber vacuum sealer, not one of the FoodSavers that will gleefully suck out all the liquid as well.2. Put bag into a precisely-temperature-controlled water bath. This is accomplished by the calculusey temperature controller ($1,000) and a stainless steel tub ($?).Now there is a consumer model for this kind of cooking, but only the water bath part. NOT for the chamber vacuum sealer, which is the more interesting device. Heston Blumenthal uses it to great effect in his Fat Duck Cookbook recipes, and not all of them end up in a water bath. The consumer device is reviewed here:http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/12/new-sous-vide-supreme-machine-review.html?ref=se-bb1$449. Hmm.But what interested me more than the review is one of the comments in that same page. She writes:QuoteSo my especially creative boyfriend "made" me a sous vide cooker for Christmas. Included is: a vacuum sealer set; bags; a bound, printed Practical Guide to Cooking Sous Vide by Douglas Baldwin; a crockpot and a sort of electrical current controller/ temperature gauge. How it works is you plug in your crockpot to this controller, set your temp. on the controller, a temperature sensor goes into the water in your crockpot and if your water gets too hot/ too cold, the controller shuts off or turns on the power on your crockpot. He did EXTENSIVE research and thinks this set up will work just as well as the $400 cooker you've reviewed here. I will be sure to let you know how my renegade sous vide set up works. I told him "worse comes to worse if I stink at cooking sous vide, at least I've now got a crockpot and vacuum sealer, right?"Super practical. Alton Brown would make a device like the one she described.My question: where to find the "electrical current controller / temperature gauge"?
Pie-in-the-sky question: where can I find a bona fide chamber vacuum sealer at a 90% discount?
This seems like the best write-up for a "fuzzy logic" all-purpose temperature controller. I'd use this for making the water bath.http://www.susanminor.org/forums/showthread.php?t=315
Speaking of chamber vacuum sealers, gg, how about this one?http://www.qualitymatters.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=QMVP-210&click=21247$1,033.99
Liz is exactly correct. That's how the food saver people do sous vide. Freeze the liquid first.