I don’t jump on board with the next new trend, because the trendy is probably phony, it probably won’t solve any problems and there is more I can learn about the stuff I already have. My house and kitchen aren’t big. I am more on the minimalist side.
I bought an Instapot because everyone loved it. Not just online, but people in real life. It’s a sophisticated pressure cooker. What bugged me, is that you add ingredients and push the button, and you’re done. I want manual control. What pressure and temperature?
When I bought a microwave oven, I chose a model to minimize automatic buttons like “potato”, “popcorn” or “pizza”. The microwave doesn’t know the mass of my potatoes.
I gave the Instapot to my charming niece. She uses it all the time.
A friend just bought an air fryer and loves it. He uses it twice a day for everything he can think of. I’ve got a convection oven, which is sort of the same thing. He doesn’t understand why I’m not buying one.
After I bought it, my friend Cheryl, NoRo’s chef in attendance, scoffed at the sous vide. She looks at trendy appliances the same way I do.
When I kept bees, they produced honey in the spring and the fall. That’s when there is the most water around and the most blooming plants. I harvested honey in October and would get about 50 pounds of honey. To remove bits of wax from the honey, it gets filtered through a fine mesh. It’s pretty cold in October, so the honey was thick. It would take hours to pour it through the filter.
The honey needed to be warmed up, but if it gets too warm, then the honey gets pasteurized. The answer was to put the honey bucket in the laundry tub, and fill the tub with water. I bought a sous vide, and set it to 98o . A towel was draped over the tub to contain the heat. I’d leave it like that for 12 hours, then filter the honey.
Once I had a sous vide, I tried it for steak. It’s fantastic.