Happy Holidays everyone! While many of you are enjoying the holiday season, I'm one of the lucky few that also gets to celebrate their birthday within a few days of Christmas. I'm a bit of a foodie, and one of my favorite indulgences is a great meal on my birthday.
This year I decided to step up my cooking game and try out a new (to me) method of cooking called sous vide. Sous vide is a technique where food is cooked in a water bath for an extended period of time at a much lower temperature than the food would be cooked at with traditional cooking techniques. The technique has been used in restaurants because of the quality of food it produces with little to no effort. Recent advances in technology have lowered the cost of these devices and they are now becoming accessible to home chefs.
Being the nerd I am, I couldn't settle for buying an off the shelf sous vide...I'd have to build one myself. Armed with a LaunchPad, I cobbled together a low cost wifi connected sous vide controller. I combined a MSP430 USB LaunchPad with an ADS1118 Thermocouple BoosterPack, a SimpleLink Wi-Fi CC3100 BoosterPack and a custom 4-channel solid state relay board.
On the software side of things, I reused a pre-existing sous vide sketch by the fine folks over at Adafruit. The sketch was originally written for an Arduino, but because this LaunchPad is supported in Energia, I could easily run the code on my LaunchPad. I added some code to interact with Temboo and Twilio, so that I could control the cooking and get status updates via text message.
After hooking up the solid state relays to the heating element of my crock pot, filling it with water, and placing the thermocouple in the water bath, I was ready to cook.
For my birthday, I decided I would have a classic surf and turf consisting of a filet and lobster tails. To prepare the filet for cooking, I applied salt and pepper to both sides of the filet before placing it in a plastic bag with some fresh thyme and a few cloves of garlic.
The lobster took a bit more preparation. I bought lobster tails at my local grocery, but before I could cook them in the sous vide I needed to remove the meat from them. To do so, I par boiled them for 1 minute before taking them out, cracking them open, and removing the meat. I placed the tails in another plastic bag and covered the tails with some Beurre monté I had prepared. At this point the proteins were ready to be cooked.
I placed them in the water bath at 135F and let them bathe for about an hour.
When the hour was almost up, I tossed some asparagus in a skillet with some olive oil, garlic, and salt. While that was cooking I removed the steak and lobster from the bath.
After removing the sprigs of thyme from the filet, I tossed it into a smoking hot cast iron skillet that I had greased with a little olive oil. After a minute on each side, the steak had a nice sear and I removed it so it could rest for a bit on the plate. In the mean time I plated the lobster with the asparagus.
With the food prepared and a nice glass of red wine, I savored what I had prepared. The steak was a perfect medium rare, burst with flavor, and melted in my mouth. The lobster was tender, buttery, and had an amazing natural sweetness to it. All in all, it was an amazing meal and one that I'm proud to call my birthday dinner.
While I used these electronics to create a sous vide cooker, this same setup could be used to create a precision electric smoker or even a reflow oven for assembling PCBs! If you'd like to create your own you can download the software from here:
http://forum.43oh.com/topic/6235-wifi-sous-vide-sources/
The development environment Energia can be found here:
The source files for the solid state relay board can be found here:
http://forum.43oh.com/topic/6173-discrete-solid-state-relay-bp/
Finally, all the other boards I used can be purchased at the TI e-store:
Happy Holidays y'all!
