Sansaire Sous Vide Circulator Brings Pro Technique to Your Kitchen
A self-professed food geek has developed a sleek kitchen gadget that makes high-end sous vide cooking accessible in your own home.
Sous vide is a cooking technique where food is kept in a water bath that is held at a consistent, low temperature. As explained in the video below, the sous vide method can’t overcook food in the water, allowing consistent results each time you make something. It is partially similar to cooking with a crock pot, in that you can plan a meal ahead and leave food cooking for hours at a time.
Seattle-based Scott Heimendinger and Lukas Svec created the Sansaire immersion circulator, which heats and holds water at a very precise temperature, circulating the water to even out hot and cold spots. The consistent results give you evenly-cooked food, as show in the image below (sous vide on left, versus traditionally-cooked on right).
Sous vide is a technique we’ve seen in restaurants, but Heimendinger told Mashable it makes sense in the home environment “because it removes you from the role of human thermostat.” In an oven, the temperature is higher so you can overcook food. With sous vide, the water bath is set at or slightly above the intended temperature you want the food to reach. Heimendinger said he cooks a medium-rare steak via sous vide at about 52 degrees Celsius. Afterwards, he uses a blow torch to quickly sear the steak.
Heimendinger, also founder of the blog SeattleFoodGeek.com, said he first discovered this technique when he went out to dinner and had a side salad with a sous-vide-cooked egg on top.
“The texture was so incredible,” he told Mashable. “It was so perfectly cooked. The yolk: it was thick but still runny, and the white was like pudding … There was something totally special and different about it, and I had to know how it came to be so.”
Along with cofounder Svec, Heimendinger wants to take their Sansaire gadget into full-scale production by raising funds on Kickstater. Their project hit its $100,000 goal in about 13 hours, when it first launched in early August. With 13 days still left to go in the Kickstarter campaign, backers had already pledged more than $516,000, as of Friday afternoon. The Sansaire costs $199, much lower than the pro $1,200 circulators Heimendinger says he traditionally saw on the market.
This summer, competitor Nomiku also raised more than a half-million dollars on Kickstarter for its immersion circulator. The Nomiku device currently costs $359.
A Food Geek
Heimendinger (pictured above, left) said he has always had some interest in food, noting that both his parents were good cooks and used to have a lot of dinner parties.
“When I got to college, I got more interested in cooking on my own, mostly because the food on campus was pretty terrible,” he said.
Heimendinger studied information systems at Carnegie Mellon University and has worked for IBM and Microsoft. He’s now involved with Modernist Cuisine, a Seattle-area research lab that merges the art of cooking with science. In 2012, he was recognized in the food and wine category in Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list, for his work at with modernist cooking techniques. He told Mashable he takes an engineering approach to cooking.
“I meet a lot of people who are into this style of cooking who have a background that’s similar in nature,” he said. “And I think that the sort of X factor is that you’re approaching cooking like an engineer, as opposed to like an artist.”
Where Heimendinger is today with the Sansaire circulator actually began with his own curiosity and tech chops. He reverse-engineered a laboratory circulator and built his own version (pictured below) that cost only $75 in parts. While he admitted this do-it-yourself design was “not the most gorgeous thing in the world,” he posted the instructions online and it has generated lots of interest: Heimendinger is aware of at least 1,000 people who have also built this version.
Have you tried sous vide cooking? What other kitchen gadgets do you like to prepare meals with? Let us know in the comments.
Images: Sansaire
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Read more: http://mashable.com/2013/08/23/sansaire-sous-vide-circulator-kickstarter/
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