Sous Vide at home

After donating approximately a week of my life reading the earth shattering thread on eGullet dedicated to all things sous vide, i thought why not try this at home...

Turns out its pretty easy (disclaimer: results will be significantly worse than what you may receive if Thomas Keller is the technician), all you need is the following relatively accessible gadgets...

A food saver. This is the cheapest way to vac-pack ur food for the water bath. The biggest issue here however is getting liquids in e.g. marinade. One such solution is to pre-freeze the marinade or oil or ... But there will still be occasions when you just can get the bag to seal. The foodsaver will suck any liquid out during the vacuum process into its internals, rendering it into a chocolate teapot.
The chamber vacuum units use a different method to vac-pack, this is what the restaurants would be using, the downside is the $1000 you part with.

A commercial rice cooker. You may be able to get away with a large non-commercial unit or even a large slow cooker, but the beauty here is the simplicity of the unit. In my case 30 cups so large enough for 20 litres or so easy. Also the important 'feature' of this unit is the mechanical on/off switch. You dont want a unit with a digital display or button as this will be using fuzzy logic. The mechanical on/off switch enables the next piece of kit to effectively control the operation of the rice cooker.

Next piece of kit being... A PID controller. This will be a familiar device to most sparky's. Its used to hold temperatures and control a heating element. In this case a rice cooker. These can be purchased online pretty easily.

To hook this up couldnt be easier. Plug PID into wall, plug rice cooker into PID (not into wall), fill rice cooker with desired amount of water, place PID temperature sensor into water, set target temperature on the PID, wait.
The PID will measure the current temp via the sensor, from tap it may be roughly 30 degrees, if we've set a target temp of 60 degrees the PID will turn 'on' the rice cooker. The rice cooker will operate as normal heating the water, when the PID notices the temperature has been reached, it will cut 'off' the rice cooker. And so on, activating and deactivating when needed.

These rice cookers all have pretty good insulation so once the desired temp has been reached there is little fluctuation, apart from when you add your prepared items of course.

Now I must admit I havent given this as much use as I could, I'm not convinced on the way it cooks red meat proteins... And should you caramalise the meat before or after the waterbath? However I'm happy to keep trying for the perfect combination.
One thing is for sure it is unbeatable with eggs, 62 degrees for 1 hour, the result is a quivering white with a yolk that has a consistency of soft butter. Or see my previous Camembert post to show the setup's versatility.

While its great to play with different cooking temps for different cuts of meat, and in some cases for extraordinary amounts of time, you need to be careful of the food safety aspect. Any cooking below 60 degrees can be pretty dangerous. Also any meat which is not eaten immediately (or soon enough) after its removed from the waterbath is pretty dangerous. Plenty on info online regarding health tips for sous vide cooking, I wont get into it here, it gets way too technical.

Oh and ever wonder how to get that perfectly cooked trout which looks raw but is completely cooked? 40 degrees sous vide.