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Comment by ecuzzillo | Hacker News Reader

I really want to do sous vide, but basically everything I've read says you get bad results unless you have a serious-dude vacuum chamber packer sealer $4000 thing, which seems mildly impractical.

Especially, you can't do the spectacular compressed stuff without one of those.

You can get sous-vide-like results sometimes without said equipment, though; Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home book contains a lot of unstated backports from sous vide techniques. For instance, he has you blowtorch a big prime rib roast and then cook it at very low temperature in the oven (275 F) for two hours. It reliably comes out with the uniform-pink-almost-all-the-way-to-the-edges effect. Presumably not quite as close.

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I call shenanigans on the $4000 SV rig stuff. Commercial kitchens will spend $4000 on an immersion circulator alone, and that's before the cryovac or whatever they're doing to seal food.

If you want to (a) make watermelons with the texture of a strip steak or (b) cook SV in huge volume, you need to investigate high end equipment.

Otherwise, the concept behind SV is extremely simple. Precisely controlled temperature over long cooking time. The $120 PID controllers do that job just fine.

What have you read that says you need a cryovac to do SV well? The Baldwin guide actively endorses the ghetto setup, and there are numerous blogs of people succeeding with it. The Keller sous vide book isn't a home cookbook any more than the Alinea cookbook is. You're not making French Laundry food at home no matter how you equip your kitchen.

Actually, I do make French Laundry food at home sometimes. From the original cookbook, anyway.

I would think you still need something vaguely vacuum-sealer-like, since as the Baldwin guide says any air pockets will expand and insulate half the object.

But I suppose I'll try the $40 vacuum sealer.

You definitely get small pockets of air. On the other hand, the week I started doing this, I fanatically probed the temperatures of the proteins I cooked, and they were invariably exactly where I set the controller to. It got boring, so I stopped checking. Also, the difference between perfect 131-133f ribeye and carefully cooked conventional ribeye is not subtle.

I would imagine that the pockets of air is going to matter less the longer you have the protein in the bath. What is your typical use case start it in the morning before work and then dinner? or is is a more abbreviated cycle?

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