tough glue that keeps vegetable cells connected, doesn’t
begin to break down until 183°F. Even after only 15
minutes, a beer cooler filled with water this hot will have
cooled by several degrees—it just doesn’t work. So for the
time being, it looks like if prolonged (2 hours+) or relatively
hot (160°F+) cooking is among your requirements for a
sous-vide cooker, you’re going to have to spring for the real
deal.
On the other hand, I’d easily argue that categories 1 and 2
are in fact the primary use of a sous-vide machine—
particularly for a home cook. A quick Google search of the
types of recipes home cooks have been playing around with
confirms this.
Confident, I then moved on to the field tests, cooking
steaks to 125°F and chicken to 140°F (sound like a
salmonella trap?—we’ll get to food safety in a minute). In
both cases, the results were completely indistinguishable
from each other.
Here’s the coolest part: it just so happens that the hot
water from my tap comes out at 135°F—the perfect
temperature for cooking steak. What luck!
The beer cooler is more easily transportable than a
professional water circulator, and it doesn’t require an
electric outlet. So, last summer, I was able to start cooking a
2-pound dry-aged rib-eye in my kitchen, carry the whole
cooler out to my deck 2 hours later, slap the beef on a
blazing-hot grill for 30 seconds on each side just to mark it
and brown the exterior, and then enjoy the most perfectly
cooked meat that’s ever come off my Weber. Anywhere you
have access to hot water and a cooler, you can cook sous-
nandana
(Nandana)
#1