For Valentine’s Day, I surprised Liz with an iPad Mini. We were selling her current Macbook Air because it just didn’t have the power to run Solidworks, Autocad, and other technical programs she’d soon need for her engineering/design classes. However, she attached a fair amount of sentimental value to that particular Macbook Air (it was another surprise gift from me). I figured I’d at least update the sentimental value with the iPad because it filled her need for a portable device and she had liked the Mini when we visited an Apple Store recently.

For her gift, she surprised me with a Raspberry Pi. In a pie.

Apparently, she had searched for a good “pie proxy” as a presentation tool for the Raspberry Pi but eventually, for lack of a better option, settled on an actual pie (blueberry, but close enough). I don’t have a picture of the pie, unfortunately, but I do have a picture of the blueberry stained box, which I vacuum sealed afterwards in case I needed any of the numbers on it (it’d otherwise be sticky and good luck cleaning off the box without destroying it).

I suppose this might have been a problem if I needed to return it.

I suppose we’re a bit of an odd couple, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

One thing that has bothered me about all of my experimentation with sous vide cooking is that everything that I’ve done could technically be done with normal cooking methods. Despite making the best chicken, steak, and poached eggs (or the only poached eggs) that I’ve ever made, it was possible for me to still cook this food with more conventional methods. I wanted something that is largely unachievable with any other method.

Enter the deep-fried porchetta, which I was inspired to make from this recipe

It pretty much captures what I love about sous vide — the ability to separate sterilizing food from creating the texture of food. Porchetta is hard because it’s difficult to fully cook the meat, keep the inside tender, and make the outside crispy (but not dry) all at the same time. That’s because there’s only one blunt object method of cooking it used (dry heat blasted outside in). Here, we can elegantly separate the parts (sterilization and tenderizing, vs. crisping… or deep-frying) by using separate cooking techniques, the key ones being sous vide and deep-frying. I couldn’t wait to try it.

For a few months now, I’ve been using a $25 deep fryer I found at an estate sale to cook sous vide. It has a bit of a crack and is somewhat old, so I’d probably hesitate using it for real deep frying, but I wasn’t intending to deep fry with it anyway.

This thing was definitely a steal for the price… though maybe not for someone who actually wanted to do some deep frying – you’d have to factor in potential medical bills.

It has a built-in thermocouple, has a nice metal basket with handle to pull the heated food out when done, and already has its own (powerful) heating element — essentially it has all the components necessary for a good sous vide machine. I even tested its temperature accuracy against a trustworthy thermometer and it came out pretty close. What could be better? (Spoiler alert: There is something much better.)

This post gets a bit technical and geeky, but I think understanding the theory of cooking is pretty important to cooking well (and consistently). And I can’t stop talking about to people in person anyway, so what the heck.

I’ve experimented with a lot of different cooking techniques over time (clay bakers, pressure cookers, etc.), but nothing has really excited me as much as sous vide. What I really love about sous vide is that it lets you very cleanly separate the two essential goals of cooking:

1. Sterilization of food
2. Tenderizing/texturizing food