How to Hack Your Slow Cooker - CHOW Tip

Jeff Potter, author of Cooking for Geeks, shares a very technical tip on how to turn your slow cooker into a sous-vide machine.

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TRANSCRIPT
Here's how to hot-wire your own sous-vide rig, using less than a hundred bucks a component so you can order on the Internet. Grab a thermostatic controller. It's like an on/off switch. Then you need a thermal couple. It basically takes the temperature at the end point here. And this is your basic extension cord that's been cut in half and wired together so that you can feed it in through the thermostatic controller. Then you also need a cheap twenty dollar slow cooker. The important bit here is to get something that has an on/off switch, as opposed to digital. Wire it up all together and then you've got your own do-it-yourself sous-vide rig. So the way this works is that this guy basically interposes on the power that would normally go into the slow cooker, cycling it on and off based on the temperature that the probe is reading. The main point is to precisely control what temperature you're at so reactions that occur below that temperature happen and things that occur above that temperature don't happen. For making eggs we're going to set it to 148 degrees Fahrenheit. What this does is cook the egg to a nice soft poached point. There's like twenty different types of main proteins in eggs and they cook at different temperatures. Drop that egg into a water bath where the temperatures right in the middle and some of those proteins will cook and others will remain uncooked. So when you crack the egg, after cooking it sous-vide, it just kind of falls out of the shell. No spoon involved in scooping it out.