I got the most basic one. $95 at Walmart. I heard some of the fancier models tend to break more often.

Here's the model I got, looks like it's currently $103 at Walmart though!

http://www.amazon.com/FoodSaver-Adv...r/dp/B001M59ALC

Nancy, thanks for that link. Harold McGee wouldn't just manufacture an answer as many people would.

In all your reading have you seen any mention of sous vide at high altitude? I live at 5500 feet and it makes a big difference in conventional cooking. Water boils at ~201.9F here (depending on barometric pressure), compared to 212F at sea level. It takes longer to do conventional cooking because the water inside the food doesn't get as hot. But I can't figure out if that would change cooking at low temperatures like we're using.

oh dear, dh is a bit more interested than I expected, but he wants to create and program something from scratch himself...

If I can just order the PID thingy I would use the heavy duty freezer bags from costco with our rice cooker. I have to convince dh the project will be more time consuming than interesting for him now. hmmmm.

I just spent a minute or so googling sous vide high altitude and didn't find anything, but I found this Sous Vide thread on Cook's Illustrated forum!
http://www.americastestkitchen.com/...ter1-p=1#198251

Only thing I saw was that water boils at a lower temperature. Maybe an experiment would be to put an egg in at various temperatures and see if they match up to the pictures in the Douglas Baldwin document.

Oh, that Harold McGee thing has more interesting stuff in it:

http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes....-vide/#more-534

Altitude will not matter for sous vide. Altitude will only matter if the temperature is hot enough to boil water. Sous vide uses lower temperatures than will boil the water in food (no matter what the altitude).

When water (or anything else) boils, its temperature during the liquid to gas phase conversion remains at the boiling point until all of the liquid is gone. (This is the plateau that you see in phase change graphs in general chemistry courses.) For example, at sea level liquid water in a 300 F degree oven will not become heated to 300 F as liquid, but will instead heat to 212 F as a liquid and will remain at 212 F until all of the liquid water has been converted to a gas; any additional heat from the higher temperature will be used in the phase change, not in raising the temperature of the liquid. But, liquid water at 130 F is the same temperature no matter what the pressure is.

Horray! Thanks for the science.

Thanks Carolyn!

One more advantage of sous vide over conventional cooking methods: You don't have to guess how to adjust the recipe for high altitude.

Ok, now I am hooked. Today I did some tough petite sirloin steaks in my homemade Sous Vide machine and they were fantastic. I pan fried the same steak earlier in the week and it was as tough as nails. Today I Sous Vide'd it at 138F for about 2 hours and the results were out of this world. I finished in a saute pan with some butter and it was one of the best steaks that I have had in some time. I could even cut it with my fork it was so tender. I am totally amazed because the steaks were on sale this week for 2.99 a pound.

I bought a rechargeable hand held Meal Saver gadget at Walmart today for 19.99 and it came with 4 bags. I put 1 piece of meat in a Zip Lock bag and removed the air with a straw. Then I put 2 pieces in a Meal Saver bag with the green circle on it and used the rechargeable evacuator. It worked fine, in fact it worked much better than the Zip Lock because when I placed the Meal saver bag in the water it went to the bottom while the Zip Lock was a bit buoyant.

I saw some good candidates for cooking vessels at Walmart today. I am looking at a 6 qt. one with a glass cover and a hole in the cover for a probe in the $30-40 range.

Meal Saver=Food Saver

Cool Jayseem. Please share all your experiments with us, we're dying to know.

I tried making a small batch of chili yesterday, first searing cubes of beef to see how they would come out compared to starting with raw beef. My results were not special. I think browning the beef first caused a loss of flavor that would have been there had I started with raw.

I eat a lot of chicken and the breast meat always seems to get dried out and tough if left in too long. I am going to experiment with the breast meat this week. I buy frozen breasts from sam's or Walmart so I will probably begin with the frozen variety and see how that works out. Crossing my fingers because tough steak and tough, dried out chicken breasts are usually what I end up with.

Was your chili SV? What was your temperature? Glad to hear you like the magic steak machine!

I have duck confit on my to-do list now that I have some duck fat.

I did chicken thighs and they came out very nice.

The Rival Meal saver has some issues. I looked into it before I bought the foodsaver. You might want to google reviews for it. However, it is a step up from ziplock bags!

There are also third party rolls of bags that are cheaper than the ones foodsaver sells.

Nancy, you chose this PID right? Are you happy with it? You've said you wish you'd gotten a bigger rice cooker -- how do I know which one doesn't have a sharp edge that will damage the pid?

Yup! That's the one, are you getting it? It works great! I have messed up setting the temperature a few times. Thought I had set it and turns out I hadn't pushed the set button or something. I don't like the timer really so I set it for 47 hours and just don't use it. The timer is in 10ths of hours, btw. Accuracy wise, every time I've removed something and opened the package and taken the temperature of the meat, it has been exactly spot on. I'm very impressed!

I can't really get a bigger rice cooker unless I go with the Winco and it was pretty expensive. Maybe later I'll try some other device. The round shape of the pot isn't the greatest but for right now, for home cooking it is fine. It's just that for thanksgiving I might have lots of stuff to reheat, but I could use a pot on the stove probably.

Well, that PDF I linked tells you some that aren't good choices. I just decided on mine because I found it has a hole in the lid. It's the black and decker... I think 24 cup. I think a lot of the models in the PDF are not available any longer. I ordered mine from some Amazon affiliate.

I think any rice cooker, even a 30 cup one, is going to be crowded when you start jamming lots of stuff in it. But still, I did have my brisket and egg custard going at the same time and it worked out.

A slow cooker will take forever to heat up and stabilize (they said 2 hours) but if you start off using hot water in it maybe it isn't so bad. However you might get some temperature swings +/- 5 degrees while it stabilizes, which is ok for most things, perhaps not eggs.

The Winco plus the PID are more expensive than the Sous Vide Supreme. which is nicely rectangular. I wish the SVS had some reviews or information about its warranty. The Eades' are really great, but they're not appliance manufacturers.

I already own a nice heavy 16 qt stockpot (64 cups!) that I've been using for sv. I think the large volume helps to keep the temperature stable. Would the temperature swings be too big if I got maybe an induction burner and plugged it into the PID? I've been keeping a steady temp on the one electric burner on my stovetop, I just don't have thermostatic control. And that way the only uni-tasker would be the PID. The induction burner could be handy for, say, a buffet.

(wanders off to look for a magnet to test the pot ....)