sous vide

Make: Projects – Water Bath Thermostat

Make: Projects – Water Bath Thermostat

This project was inspired by “Cooking for Geeks” author Jeff Potter’s quick DIY sous-vide hack. My plan, initially, was to just hack the controller into an enclosure with an A/C outlet, the idea being that you could just plug any heater you wanted into the outlet. Looking around for cheap temperature controllers, however, I happened across the STC-1000 on eBay for $25. It’s not PID, but it has proven to be plenty accurate enough for almost any practical purpose. And since the STC-1000 has both heating and cooling functions built-in, the logical next step seemed to be to split a single A/C outlet so that you could plug a heater or a cooler (or both) into it and use it for all kinds of stuff.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan40
“Sous Vide” Cooking: The Basics

“Sous Vide” Cooking: The Basics

“Sous-vide” is fashionable French for a method of cooking that involves longer cooking times at lower temperatures and reduced atmospheric pressures. It means, literally, “under vacuum.” Commonly, food is sealed in plastic vacuum bags and cooked at temperatures well below the boiling point of water for dozens of hours, although the particular parameters vary widely with the food to be cooked. The point, really, is that the equipment involved is capable of finer automated control of those parameters than your conventional range, oven, and/or microwave, and the quality and flavor of the natural ingredients can be vastly improved—without sacrificing safety—by using it.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan10