If you thought microcontroller-enabled cooking was only for Arduinos, Trey German contacted me with his sous-vide cooker, built around a Texas Instruments MSP430F5529 USB LaunchPad. The code was derived from a pre-existing Arduino sketch from Adafruit. They’ve got a tutorial on this technique with an arduino here.
The food that Trey cooked with it, a “surf and turf” looks incredibly delicious, and would probably fit in just as well on a cooking website. According to the original writeup, the sous-vide technique “has been used in restaurants because of the quality of food it produces with little to no effort.” Any style of cooking where you can simply drop the contents somewhere, and let your robotic minions do the rest of the work sounds like a winner to me. Admittedly, there was some boiling of the lobster meat beforehand, and the steak was taken out to sear afterwards, but most of the cooking was done on autopilot.
If you’d like to see more, I recently featured another DIY sous-vide cooker here, and previously we talked about prototyping the Nomiku cooking device. They ran a successful Kickstarter campaign, and you can order their devices here. Ordering one might force you to admit that this food looks more interesting to you than the satisfaction that comes with completing an interesting project like this, but who could blame you?
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