[conspire] sous vide question.

[Ross Bernheim]

Leo,

The Instantpot has been quite popular on Amazon and elsewhere. There are a lot of free cookbooks for it on Amazon as well. It cooks at about 11-12 lbs pressure. A standard stove top pressure cooker cooks at 15 lbs pressure. I have a Favor Duo that has a second setting for 11 lbs pressure.

I have the 10 qt size for several reasons. You lose volume to leave space for the steam. Up to half with foods that foam!. Second is it gives me room to easily do the pot in pot cooking method for a reasonable amount of food. I also use it to steam, pressure steam, and as a stock pot with the addition of a glass lid. 

Ross


> On Oct 27, 2017, at 12:49 AM, Leo P <yaconsult at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> This has been an educational discussion - thanks!
> 
> I find it interesting that there have been a bunch of homemade Sous Vide cooker projects using controllers based on things like Raspberry Pis and Arduinos.  This one uses Wolfram - the open source version of Mathematica: http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/170725   It's the geek in us, I suppose!
> 
> Lately, I have been trying out what could probably be considered the antithesis of Sous Vide - a smart electric pressure cooker - http://instantpot.com/  and have been quite pleased with the results so far.  You still have the same amount of time needed to build up the initial pressure but the set-it-and-forget-it aspect makes it very convenient.  As a child, the stovetop pressure cooker got a lot of use in the kitchen.  Bounced some jiggler weights off the ceiling occasionally too! 
> 
> And while my stew is cooking, I am researching and debating how worthwhile it would be to replace the Intel I7 950 4 core CPU in my aged X58 LGA 1366 motherboard with a Xeon X5650 or similar 8 core CPU.  The Xeons are available used on eBay for as little as $17 with $25 being a very common price and are reported to be very overclockable with youtube videos in abundance and my "enthusiast" ASRock motherboard has all the necessary BIOS tweaks available.
> 
> Has anyone tried a similar CPU upgrade from consumer to server chip?  It might be a cheap, fun little experiment to try considering the low cost and minimal disassembly.  The current configuration runs fine but this would give it another couple of cores for virtualization and the Xeons are reported to be much more overclockable and run quite a bit cooler.  In comparison, the high-end consumer version is the i7 980x with six cores start at about $160 used - six times the cost of the X5660.
> 
> Leo
> 
> On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 8:48 PM, Paul Zander <paulz at ieee.org> wrote:
> I thank everyone for their comments.  Now I am thinking there are two practical ways to implement sous vide:
> 
> Crock pot with improved temperature control: adequate for modest quantities, or skip the bagging and make a stew with carrots that are both sweet and crunchy and chicken that isn't terribly over cooked by boiling.
> 
> Big insulated container with lid and internal racks and circulating heater:  good for making quantities of food.
> 
> From: Ivan Sergio Borgonovo <mail at webthatworks.it>
> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com 
> Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 3:32 AM
> Subject: Re: [conspire] sous vide question.
> 
> On 10/26/2017 05:56 AM, Paul Zander wrote:
> > The concept is to use a crock pot with the the heater outside the vessel holding the water and a lid that reduces heat loss through the top.
> > 
> > 
> > I would think that after an hour or so, the temperature distribution will be rather stable. There will be a temperature gradient between the outside of the pot and the water inside.  There is probably an offset between the temperature of the sensor and the temperature of the food.
> 
> The gradient *may* be from top to bottom. I said "may" because I 
> witnessed those gradients with a different setup than a pot.
> 
> > The parameters of the control loop have been adjusted according to the location of the sensor: outside the pot vs. inside the pot.
> > 
> > Given the above, why would I need to do anything at 0400?
> 
> Re-position the food.
> 
> If there is no appreciable temperature gradient you don't need to 
> reposition the food, but if there is and you've a recipe that requires 
> 6h cooking, repositioning the food won't be that fun.
> 
> But you really have to implement it and check. I'm more optimist than 
> what it seems.
> 
> -- 
> Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
> http://www.webthatworks.it http://www.borgonovo.net
> 
> 
> 
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