To Sous Vide or not Sous Vide...that seems to be the question.
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There seems to be a lot of talk about Sous Vide lately. I don’t have much input on the topic as I have yet to play around with it but it’s been something on my to do list for quite some time. Rather than purchasing a new kitchen tool I decided to repurpose some brewing equipment for the task.
I used a 20 gallon stainless kettle from Bayou Classic, an Edelmetall propane burner, stainless sparging arm and a stainless head high temp chugger pump for recirculating.
The kettle has a built in thermometer and the burner is easily adjustable to control an accurate temperature.
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Hopefully this link works to see it in action…
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Nice stuff, Joe!
I used to brew 10 gallon batches in a recirculating infusion mash system (RIMS) that is mostly homemade. I may repurpose some of that equipment to try this next time.
I just completed my very first summer sausage recipe. I’m happy with the results, but I was up until 0430 waiting on it to get up to 160.
This should eliminate the evaporative cooling, and speed up the process quite a bit.
Keep us updated when you give it a go!
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megajunk I had the same experience with summer sausage last time around. I don’t know how long it took but I missed a lot of sleep that night. I figured the brewing gear would be great due to the size. The water shouldn’t see much drop in temperature when adding the meat and recovery should only be a few minutes. I’m cooking for a crowd this weekend but I’m considering a small batch of pepperoni to try out the ‘new’ gear.
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Joe Hell What is a “stainless sparging arm and a stainless head”? I ask because I have been doing a lot of playing around with ways to increase the relative humidity in a home style smoker and one of the ways to do it would be to agitate the water, which would make it evaporate more quickly. Is that what a sparging arm does?
I should have a video out on ways to increase the relative humidity in a home style smoker out in the next few weeks, I am very excited about the possibilities of one idea!
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Jonathon If you watch the video in the link below you will see the sparging arm in action. When it comes to brewing beer you go through a mashing process that converts your grain starches to sugar. An efficient way of doing so is to bring your water up to the correct temperature (between 150-160 degrees) and recirculating your water over the grain bed. This circulation also has the added benefit of filtering sediment out of the wort.
The Stainless head that I speak of is on the Chuggar brand high-temp pump.
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Jonathon I just had an idea in regards to increasing humidity and it uses another home brewing tool.
A carbonation stone is a porous ‘stone’ much like you would see in a fish aquarium to add current. In brewing it has a couple of different uses. You can pump air through the stone prior to adding yeast to your wort to increase available oxygen to your yeast to aid in fermentation.
You can also pump CO2 gas through stone into a beer that has just finished fermentation to speed up the carbonation process.
To increase humidity in your smokehouse you run air from an aquarium pump using silicone tubing to your stone. The door of the smoker should still be able to seal up well with the tubing running through. If you drop the stone into the water pan it should give sufficient circulation to increase humidity.
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Joe Hell That’s a very interesting idea on the stone…I am doing some testing tomorrow and shooting a video on advanced thermal processing but I am going to try to pick one of these up and give it a shot, thanks Joe!
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J Jonathon referenced this topic on
