D.I.Y. Would You Ever Do This At Home?

My wife and I went out to dinner once and ordered a pizza with eggs on it. They were this amazing texture: almost like poached but even softer, perfectly round, runny without being overcooked. When the waitress came back, my wife asked, “How do they get the eggs like this?”

The waitress told us: “They’re sous vide.”

It was our first time experience with sous vide food of any kind, and we immediately went home and researched how it worked. Turns out, to sous vide means to cook something in a plastic pouch submerged in hot but not boiling water for long periods of time.

Low temperature and long cooking times? It sounded like a slow cooker. Which made me wonder: could a slow cooker, with a few minor tweaks, be turned into a sous vide oven? The internet said: of course! But how difficult would be? That’s what I needed to find out.

My first stop was Instructables, where I learned that:

The heart of the sous vide cooker is a digital temperature controller. You can easily find them on eBay for less than $25, including shipping.

What great news! All I needed to do was purchase a digital temperature control and I was in business, right? Wrong! Because what followed was a guide for putting together and installing a “C14 receptacle” that involved designing a template, printing it out, laying it on a piece of plastic, and cutting it with a Dremel tool. I was in over my head.

But maybe it was just the wrong starting point. Maybe Instructables was a bit more advanced than what I was looking for. What I probably needed was this article from Huffington Post. Surely, this would be written for all the regular folks like me out there just looking for a good sous vide solution.

All you’ll need is a cheap slow cooker, an extension cord, a thermostatic controller and a thermocouple. You should probably also have an elementary knowledge of wiring before you give this rig a whirl.

Okay, I did not have any of that. I did not know where to buy any of that outside of the extension cord. Also I would go so far as to say that there was no such thing as a “elementary knowledge” of anything involving the conduction of electricity. You could know something about it, and you could know a lot about it, but nothing there was to know about it was simple enough to be considered “elementary.”

Maybe the problem was the slow cooker. A different kitchen appliance might be better. This Popular Science article suggested using a rice cooker. Perhaps the rice cooker allowed for a simpler transformation?

The out-of-the-box calibration on your PID controller may work well with your particular heating apparatus – most of the ones designed for cooking use are pre-calibrated for a large commercial rice cooker – or it may not. Some controllers include an auto-tuning feature; with others, you have to manually tweak the P, I, and D parameters to work best with your setup – e.g., when the thermocouple detects that it’s approaching the target heat, how soon do you want it to shut off?

This was as far as I got. I tried to run it through Google translate, but unfortunately “Science” was not one of the input-languages I could select.

In the end, I found myself at on Crock-Pot.com. Surely the official website of America’s favorite slow cooker wouldn’t lead me into something too complicated. Right?!

You will also need an extension cord that is cut in half, wired together and fed through the thermostatic controller.

If I ever cut an extension cord in half, I’m pretty sure I’d call either emergency services or my dad to come take care of it. Generally, I try not to step on extension cords, let alone go at them with shears.

I felt I’d come to the end of the line. My dreams of inexpensive at-home sous vide had died. But then, I saw a light at the end of the tunnel, a life hack I could truly get behind:

Why turn a slow cooker into a sous vide machine when you can just buy a sous vide machine that is also a slow cooker? Like this Hamilton Beach Sous Vide Water Oven & Slow Cooker, for example. It’s only $55.

That little helpful nugget came from this site.

Yes, that link does just lead you right back here. And yes, I did write those words myself. But the point stands: you can spend some money and a whole day in the garage putting together a slow cooker that can sous vide. Or you could spend probably as much money (if not less) and just wait for one to be delivered. The choice is yours.