Cooking Sous Vide the DIY Way

Everyone's talking about sous vide, the scientific cooking method that's making its way from the lab to the home kitchen. The Sous Vide Supreme, which we reviewed earlier this week, is the first turnkey sous vide setup for home cooks. But we DIY kitchen nerds haven't been idly waiting for an off-the-shelf solution: We cobbled together our own sous vide setups years ago. It can be done by piecing together a few readily available components -- or even, for more intrepid tinkerers, by soldering together some less readily available ones. Here's how.

The basic elements of a sous vide setup are simple: a way to seal your food in vacuum bags; a water bath to cook the sealed food in; and a way to keep the water at the precise temperature you want for as long as you want. If you do sous vide in a lavish commercial kitchen, you probably do your sealing with a powerful, high-volume chamber sealer, and cook in a water bath heated by an immersion circulator. These components, originally pilfered from science labs by the first sous viders, have now joined the culinary canon, but they're still manufactured to precise tolerances and will set you back a few grand, or a lot of weeks scrounging on eBay. It's possible to whip up magnificent sous-vide meals with significantly less investment, though. Here's a look at what you'll need.

Sealing

Vacuum-sealing food before you cook it serves a few purposes. It prevents the edibles from mingling with the water bath, and keeps the flavor concentrated. Inside the bag, the meat can mingles only with its seasonings over a period of hours and become very tasty indeed. The presence of air in the bag can insulate the food, preventing it from reaching its ideal temperature; it can also cause the bag to float in the water bath, which also prevents it from reaching its ideal temperature.

READ MORE AT: https://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2010-01/cooking-sous-vide-inexpensive-diy-way