Posts Tagged ‘DIY’
Did you know that you can cure meat at home using nothing more than a wine refrigerator?
This was my first attempt at meat curing, and I’d say it went fantastically well. This project was inspired by Matt Wright and his insanely beautiful blog, WrightFood. Matt has some serious curing experience under his belt, and offers detailed recipes and techniques for home curing. For this project, I followed his recipe for Duck Prosciutto (recipe is towards the bottom of the post).
The recipe calls for curing duck breasts in salt for 24 hours before hanging them up to cure at 55F with 60% relative humidity until they have lost 30% of their original mass.
Although I’ve got big plans in my head for building a high-tech curing chamber (one day), I also remembered that I had an unused wine refrigerator sitting in the basement. Nothing is sadder than an empty wine fridge, so I decided to repurpose it for a bold new mission. The fridge has an adjustable temperature setting for champagne, whites, reds and long-term storage. Luckily for me, one of those settings corresponds to 55F. I didn’t bother measuring the humidity in the wine fridge, but I reasoned that it would have to maintain a reasonable humidity level to keep wine corks from drying out. The fridge also has a small fan, which is great for circulating the air inside and a desirable condition for curing meat.
My $75 DIY Sous Vide build make was just published in Volume 25 of Make Magazine, the premier publication for hackers, modders and DIYers and food geeks the world over. I re-wrote the instructions for the build, adding detailed photos and tips for construction. The folks at Make did a phenomenal job laying out and illustrating the article!
View a preview of the magazine article online
View the original $75 DIY Sous Vide article
Bonus! The nice folks at Boing Boing linked to the project on Make.
This turned out to be one of the more dangerous machines I’ve ever built. The goal was to make a cotton candy machine out of parts I had lying around. The finished product was an aggressive, 1/2 horsepower, 4000°F beast of a machine that lasted long enough to prove itself before dying of awesomeness.
If you want to build a cotton candy machine at home, all you need is:
- A tin can, like a tuna or dog food can
- A drill with a very small drill bit
- A motor (ex, your drill, an old CD player, a blender)
- A heat source, such as a propane torch, a lighter, or the coils from an old toaster
- A bucket to catch the cotton candy, or alternately a sheet of paper to wrap around the assembly
- Sugar
Follow the steps in the video to see just how easy this machine is to build. Oh, and don’t forget… safety first. My favorite part of this project was setting up a blast shield in front of the camera before we turned on the machine.
Special thanks to Victor (@sphing) for filming!
If you haven’t noticed, flavored salts are becoming wildly popular. On a recent trip to Whole Foods, I spotted an aisle-end display with no fewer than a dozen varieties: some infused with spices, some mined or harvested from exotic locales, and some smoked. Smoked salts – salts that have taken on the flavor of a particular burnt wood – are an excellent way to add a deep, campfire flavor to dishes. I use them all the time in dry rubs, and as a substitute for the flavor you get from actually cooking over wood. In this video I’m using hickory chips, but another popular option is to flavor your salt with by smoking the wood from old wine barrels. Needless to say, you’ll save a ton of cash on specialty salts, which, of course, you’ll need to import all those ancient wine barrels from Bordeaux!
It’s been a little while since I checked in, but I thought I’d give a quick update. I’m hard at work getting production versions of my sous vide heating immersion circulators ready for sale. The picture above is of my current prototype, based largely off of the DIY design I published a few months ago. As you can see, I’ve got a custom-made heating coil and a slightly prettier enclosure. The controller I’ve selected is also far more user-friendly, and I’ve upgraded other components after months of intense testing (and a handful of literal meltdowns).
Anyhow, I’m still working as hard as I can to bring you all a sub-$200 sous vide heating immersion circulator accurate to .1C! If you’d like to be on the email list when the first units are ready for sale, please leave a comment below.
I’ve recently been fascinated by the idea of sous vide cooking – a method of slowly cooking vacu-sealed foods in a precisely controlled water bath to achieve the optimal doneness. Last year, Sur La Table started carrying the world’s first “home” sous vide cooker, the SousVide Supreme. This was fantastic, since commercial sous vide cooking machines cost north of $2000. However, the home model (priced at $450) is still a steep investment for something that essentially just keeps water warm. I was determined that I could build a better device on-the-cheap.
Behold, the $75 DIY sous vide heating immersion circulator! By scrapping together parts that are readily available on eBay and Amazon, I was able to build a self-contained device that heats and circulates water while maintaining a temperature accurate to .1 degree Celsius (yes, point one degrees!). And unlike the SousVide Supreme, my device can be mounted onto any container (up to a reasonable size, perhaps 15 gallons) allowing you more room to cook, if needed.
To build your own device, you’ll need some basic soldering skills, the list of stuff below, about 6 hours of free time (plus time for glue to dry) and the can-do attitude of a geek who doesn’t want to pay $450 for a water heater. Click the “more” link for complete step-by-step instructions.
If these instructions have helped you build you own machine, I hope you’ll consider donating. My goal is to mass-produce the world’s first sous vide heating immersion circulator for under $100, and every donation helps!
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