"...far from being some passing high-tech fad, sous vide is a lasting contribution to fine cooking, a technique that makes it possible to cook foods more consistently and delicately than ever before."
(from "Under Pressure" by Thomas Keller)

Want to make delicious, perfectly-cooked food using a robot? Who doesn't!? This project will show you how to build your own "Sous viduino", an automated cooking pot that makes perfect eggs, succulent steaks and tender fish without the whole "slaving over a stove." All this is possible due to a recent advancement in cooking technology - instead of using a pan or pot, a "sous vide" (pronounced suu veed) machine heats the food in sort of a cross between a jacuuzi and a crock pot.

Sous vide is rapidly becoming an important cooking technique in many of the very best restaurants in the world. Sous vide combines principles of molecular gastronomy with industrial temperature controls to precisely manage the chemical reactions of cooking.

We love good food as much as we love science and technology, so of course we had to build our own sous vide controller. This project turns an inexpensive rice cooker into a precision cooking instrument capable of maintaining cooking temperatures within +/-0.1 C.

By precisely controlling the temperature, you can ensure that foods are cooked exactly to the desired level of doneness and no-more. This makes sous vide the preferred cooking method for everything from the 'perfect' soft-boiled egg to the steak that is medium-rare from edge-to-edge.

This guide was first published on Jun 10, 2013. It was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

This page (What is Sous Vide?) was last updated on May 24, 2013.

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