I would like to try out sous vide, but I don't want to invest in the gadgets, until I have tried it and decided I want to keep using it. So I have thought about the best way to try it with no budget. Online, one of the method suggested is to use a beer cooler and zip bags. Would it also work to use a thermo bottle (a bottle, which keeps your tea / coffee warm) for this? I recently used my thermo bottle for 12 hours+, in the winter, and even after 12 hours it provided fairly hot tea. Would this work or would it be too small as container? I am pretty sure, that it could hold the temperature well. Or would it be better to simply use a pot on the stove and stir occasionally? I am not trying to achieve amazing results here, just to get a taste of the technique and see if it really is beneficial for me.
Thermo bottle for impromptu sous vide
sous-vide
Related Solutions
Yes you can. Some of the best sous-vide I've had has been in a crock-pot.
You'll need a crock-pot with a manual (analogue) dial. What you do is set the dial to maximum and use a PID controller (found ~$20 on ebay).
Take a look at this article about hacking your slow cooker:
http://www.cookingforgeeks.com/blog/posts/diy-sous-vide/
Update:
Sous-vide by definition requires control of the temperature (Beer Cooler does not control, but holds well). However, you can still do this without extra logic. All you need is a good thermometer and time:
Fill your crock-pot to 70% with room temperature water, set your Crock-Pot to the lowest setting, and leave it for 2-3 hours. Thermo-dynamics laws dictate that you will reach an equilibrium with time. If you're bored you can keep a log of the temperature change over time and stop when you notice it doesn't change much any more (it'll be helpful for next cooking session).
Measure the water temperature and check against where you need to be (125, 140, etc). Adjust the dial and throw more time at it until the crock-pot reaches equilibrium again. Repeat until you have reached and sustained your desired temperature. Make sure your crock-pot is not near an open window with draft to mess with the crock-pot (i.e. keep the room temperature steady).
Weigh your food and put it in the rock-pot. Take out the same amount of water from the existing water in the crock-pot so that the total weight of the crock-pot is the same.
This isn't hard if you use the metric system. Each Millilitre of water weighs 1 gram. So for 1lb, take out 454ml or essentially two cups.
Now you can use the same timing and temperature rules as everyone else.
PS: For the 'ballistic' method, I.E. the beer cooler, you can measure the temperature loss over time of water in the cooler to land you perfectly where you want to be. Chef Kenji says a 'couple of degrees higher'. But you can predict the drop over your cooking time as well as the initial temperature. And roughly speaking: Mass Of Food x Food Temperature + Mass of Water * Water Temperature = Total Mass * Final Water bath temperature.
I confess I'm not familiar with the term entrecôte, but looking it up, its pretty clear this is a already-tender cut. So you don't need to tenderize it.
In fact, you probably don't want to tenderize it—at some point, it'll go from tender to mushy. Unfortunately, from frozen, at least according to the Baldwin tables, you'd need over five hours. If you additionally want it pasteurized, that'd probably be over six hours, but he doesn't have a table for that. Either of those times is risking mushy, at least on the outside.
You can reduce the heating time substantially by thawing it in the fridge. This also gives you the opportunity to sear before bagging (killing any surface bacteria, and also improving flavor). You're probably looking at around 3–3½ hours this way (maybe up to 4 for pasteurization, depending on exact thickness).
Finally, once its thawed, you could split it in half, giving you two, 25mm steaks (split before searing, of course). Then you're looking at around an hour in the water bath, or two for pasteurization.
Even with a pre-sear, you'll want to sear after cooking as normal, too.
Your final option is to up the water-bath temperature a bit, and pull before the steak reaches thermal equilibrium. Basically, the last few degrees take forever—heat transfer is proportional to the difference in temperatures—so if you're OK with a doneness-gradient, as you'd find in traditionally-cooked steaks though not as extreme, you can do this. Problem is, I don't have a table for this, so I'm not sure what the time would be at, say, 59°C. You could attempt to rig it with a probe thermometer to find out, but beware cheap probes are not waterproofed where the wire enters, and will be break if water gets there. There are i-Device apps that will calculate these times for you (PolySci Sous Vide Toolbox, Sous Vide Dash) but I haven't used either (no Android versions...) [This is called the deltaT method]
Related Topic
- Vegetables – Procedure for sous vide potato salad prep
- Sous Vide Frustrations
- Sous vide pasteurization for pregnant wife
- Trying sous vide techniques with an induction cooker
- Chicken – Sous Vide chicken for reheating
- Sous Vide Spoilage
- Fish – Is striped bass suited for sous vide
- Why does meat go bad after 1 month sous vide at 55-60C ( 131 – 141F)
Best Answer
I don't think a thermos bottle will give you enough room to cook much of anything. However in principle, it could work. It would be better to use a cooler. This old Serious Eats article explains everything. Of course, that was written 8 or 9 years ago, when immersion circulators were very pricey. You can get them now for as low as $99 US.
You won't need 12 hours (and I wouldn't recommend any long duration cooks without an actual circulator). You can easily cook a steak (even in a pot in the kitchen sink with running hot water if your water heater puts out high enough heat) in an hour. You could also do this on the stove top, controlling the burner and monitoring the water temperature, but a cooler will retain the heat and you will be pretty good for a cook of an hour or so.
I've been using sous vide for at least 10 years. I don't use it for everything. It's one of a set of kitchen tools. However, I do find it useful. Given the current price point, I would say it is worth the purchase. Plus, then you have the most control, with less monitoring...plus the ability to experiment with much longer cooking times (which impacts texture of proteins).