Want to try my hand at sous vide cooking. Figure I would use my crockpot and my temp controller. Is there any tricks to this method or does it work ok?
I have some country style pork ribs that I was thinking about cooking. Normally my wife makes them in the crockpot with bbq sauce. Could I add the bbq sauce into the bag with the ribs and just cook them that way at 145° for 8 hours?
Any tips would be great! Thanks!
I’ll be the first to admit I had to Google “sous vide cooking”. The process makes sense since you would lose none of the juices during cooking. Am I to understand the meat has to be browned after though?
The crock pot and temp controller makes sense to me but does the immersion circulator normally used keep all of the water at the precise temp throughout?
Let us know how it turns out. You do come up with some cool stuff.
I thought someone else posted about this awhile back but maybe not. Maybe it was something with the immersion circulation sous vide device used for mashing.
But yes I bet the actually device that circulates the water would be the best thing. For the crockpot setup I already had everything I needed.
Found a youtube channel “sous vide everything” and watched a couple videos and just winged the rest. First time turned out pretty well. I ended up putting on a barbecue rub on the pork and vacuum sealed it. Put it back in the fridge and heated up the water to 150º. This took a little time even using hot tap water. Then I submerged the pork in the water and let them temp controller do the rest. Cooked it from about 10:30 last night to 5:30 this evening. Pulled out the bag and dabbed them dry with a paper towel. Put on some barbecue sauce and attempted to sear them on the george foreman. That part didn’t quite work but the final product was really good. Something I would try experimenting with again.
I use a sous vide machine for heating strike and sparge water, and as a simple HERMS if I want to do a step mash or what not. Works pretty well, and makes it simple to hit target temperatures since it doesn’t over-shoot. It also makes pretty good food, if you’re into that sort of thing. Anova (maker of the immersion heater) has a pretty decent free phone app for controlling it, and also has a lot of recipes bundled into the app. Might be worth checking out, even if you just use it for recipes and guidelines.
How big of a mash are you talking and how far does it stick down into the water? Seems interesting. Could be able to mash indoors with my BIAB setup. Wondering if my kettle may be too tall. Looks like the Wi-Fi blue tooth model is an extra 100 watts. It’s $50 off right now so either $99 or $149.
There’s a min/max line on the unit, but it probably can go 8-9" into the liquid. I don’t actually use it directly in the mash. I recirculate through a 10-gallon cooler with a pump, into a coil in the kettle, and the Anova heats the water in the kettle to the target temperature. And since I have a kettle full of hot water at that point, I just use that for sparging. If I’m just heating strike or sparge water without the HERMS set-up, I try to keep the water to less than 5 gallons each and heat it in a 5-gallon kettle, which fits it just fine.
I’d think that you could come up with a simple bracket that would drop the unit far enough into the kettle to keep the liquid level appropriate. Especially with the wifi unit, you could set the unit to start early in the morning so that you wake up to heated strike water. Makes the brew day start that much better to wake up to hot strike water!
I ended up buying one somewhat impulsively. More or less to actually use the unit as intended for cooking. But if I can use it for brewing too then even better. Looks like it won’t work exactly with my current setup a 10 gallon kettle. It would need around 8 gallons in the kettle for the Anova to be above the min level. Not sure if making a drop down bracket would be safe for the unit. Below the sides of the kettle may not be good for moisture and the control unit vent. Seems like this might turn into buying more things that I really don’t need to get it to work for me at the moment.
Probably not worth taking the risk damaging it. It’s a fun little toy, great for steaks. If you make fermented pickles, lots of recipes can be canned and pasteurized for preservation. This is a great tool for holding the water bath at a precise temperature. Or if you bottle sweet carbonated cider, you can pasteurize the bottles by gently heating and holding them at temp, which reduces the risk of shattering the bottles. Or if you have a pump, you can control your mash temp by running the wort through a coil in another pot, and use it to control the water temperature in the second pot with the coil. Lots of uses!
