Originally Posted by
falconea
I know that sous vide cooking is done at temperatures very close to the ideal temperature for bacteria to grow. You really do need to have the professional heating equipment with precise thermostats to avoid food poisoning.
Audrey
Thanks - as I said in my post - I own a Sous Vide Supreme. I've tested it using very accurate probes and it is accurate to +/- 0.5 degrees across the whole tank. As you know the plus side of sous vide cooking is that the highly accurate level of cooking temperature produces a much safer product assuming you set the temperature above pasturisation point.
Originally Posted by
marble
I'm currently in the process of building my own 'sous vide' cooker using
this guide as a starting point (though I'm going to enclose my tank and provide some insulation). Assuming the temperature is accurate and stable (easy enough to check with a good thermometer), there's no reason why a diy solution isn't usable. Of course, the downside is that the diy solution is ugly and unwieldy ... but hopefully it will serve its purpose of allowing me to try sous vide without much expense.
I'm impressed by your efforts - you're far clever than me ... and there are a few other potential challenges which I guess will be a part of your tinkering.
The piece of kit
looks like it should do it but your challenge with attempting to make your own is that you will find it difficult to find a way of maintaining a
very constant tempetature across the whole tank. If you think of the way a thermostat works it will continue to warm the water once it's "clicked off" and will continue to cool after it's gone the other way. And if you overoook by a few degrees for say 48 hours it will provide a completely different product than what you had intended.
Professional sous vide machines use chips with predictive PIDs with sensors around the tanks which control different zones of the heating elements to ensure the temperature remains very close to the temperature you specified. And it's that degree of accuracy you're trying to acheive to provide the
consistency of texture and degree of cooking - and to ensure pasturisation (killing of bad bugs!) required. For example, with steaks you may conclude that the temperature for you is 134.5 - and once you've arrived at that conclusion you'll find that plus or minus a degree makes a highly discernable and irritating difference.
Unless you can produce that level of accuracy it isn't going to provide you with sous vide cooking and will not produce the same results - and might prove dangerous if you fail to reach pasturisation points particularly with poultry for example.
The piece of kit looks like it will come close and if however the tinkering produces that degree of accuracy then clearly it works! I keep mine in a /larder/utility area so the appearance of your box of tricks wouldn't be an issue. I guess you won't know unless you try so good luck with your experiements and share both the results and some of your successful recipes please!