wife only dreamed of. Salmon so tender it melts if you look
at it too hard. The kind of double-thick pork chops that
would’ve made me break out a celebratory PBR midservice
when I was still a line cook. We’re talking perfect food here.
Of course, there’s a catch, and it’s a big one: a typical
water circulator will set you back about $1,000. Even the
cheaper home versions now on the market (like the Sansaire
and the Anova) are at least a couple hundred dollars, all in.
In fact, there’s a whole legion of people out there on the
internet who’ve devoted considerable time and resources
into figuring out ways to put together a cheaper sous-vide
setup. These fall into two categories:
- Category 1: The rice-cooker, aquarium-bubbler, PID-
controller method. It’s accurate, but it requires a fair
amount of DIY know-how and costs a couple hundred
dollars to hack together. - Category 2: The David Chang pot-of-water-on-the-
stove, fiddle-with-the-heat-as-necessary method. This is
less accurate, and it requires you to hover around the
stove for the entire cooking time.
Convinced that there was a faster, easier, cheaper, and more
foolproof way to achieve the same results, I started poking
around. Essentially, in order to create a low-temperature
water cooker, all you need to do is keep a large body of
water at the same temperature for a couple of hours: so, a
well-insulated box should do the trick. And, fortunately,
there’s already a tool in pretty much every home that’s
designed precisely for the purpose of keeping large volumes