This awesome. Anyone ever tried this? I might have to give it a whirl… for science. I won’t tell my wife how it was made until she’s finished the meal and unloading the dishwasher.
I have done this a few times and it turned out delicious! This method basically poaches the fish, which preserves some of the good fats on the fish. I usually put some salt, pepper, lemon slices and a sprig of some herb (thyme or rosemary) in the foil with it. Sometimes I would use some other seasoning or a bit of garlic.
I learned this method from the Surreal Gourmet (as mentioned in the article) as a teenager and gave it a try soon after. It came in handy when I went off to college, because it didn't stink up the apartment and bother the roommates.
If you try it, be sure to use a full, normal cycle. Energy saving and other modes might not get up to the right temperature.
I have. It works perfectly well. My main advice is to wrap the fish very thoroughly in foil, folding the ends tightly, to keep the fish juices and the dishwasher juices separate. Also, if you add lemon, keep it out of contact with the foil, because the acid reacts with the metal when heated; i don't know if it actually affected the salmon, but the foil blackened.
These days, sous vide is a much better alternative than the dishwasher, but is fundamentally the same concept.
It's worth a try - precision cooking is a way for anyone to have excellent results when cooking. Pretty soon you'll have an immersion circulator, a therma-pen, and a kitchen scale!
It's not really the same concept. Replicating dishwasher salmon requires first broiling the salmon (the initial high heat to get the dishwasher water to sterilizing temps), then steaming it (after the initial sterilization the dishwasher stops adding heat to the system), and finally baking it (after rinsing with cool water and draining, a lower sustained heat dries the dishes).
A sous vide bath won't replicate any of those steps (except maybe the steaming if you run the bath at practically boiling). Sous vide will cook good salmon but it's not a drop in replacement.
Does your dishwasher actively add heat outside of drying? Mine just uses hot water from the water heater. I don't think it even has heating elements tbh. For drying it has crystal dry which is zeolite.
Yes dishwashers do have a heating element to keep the water's temperature up as it recirculates. It isn't strong enough to let you use a cold water intake though.
Your dishwasher works very different from mine then, which is a common consumer model about five years old.
Mine is just a single constant temperature the whole time.
There's certainly no high heat much less sterilization, just bringing the water up to temperature and keeping it there, through pre-wash, wash, and rinse cycles. (Only commercial restaurant dishwashers get up to sterilization temperatures.)
And if the salmon is wrapped airtight, there's no conceptual difference between broiling/steaming/baking. It's all just sous vide, which is none of those. Because it's sealed.
People approximate "sous vide" on cooktops or in coolers all the time. Works fine. About half the things I used to do with my circulator I do with specific time/temp settings on my toaster oven now.
If you wanted to be super pedantic about it, you'd say that none of this is anything like "sous vide" because "sous vide" implies "under a vacuum".
At any rate: dishwasher salmon and sous vide salmon are, literally, the same dish.
I worked in a meatworks decades ago, and some line workers had special boiling water cups at their station to put their knives in to sterilising the knives.
Of course the workers would surreptitiously snip a bit of choice meat from the carcass, and drop it in the water to cook. They were not supposed to, but it was difficult to police.
We've got a Breville. It's the most valuable cooking appliance in the house: it gets up to 500f very quickly and holds a much more consistent temperature than our pro-grade oven, and the built in timer makes most things fire and forget. I don't think I'd trade the oven for another Breville toaster oven, but if I could get 2 more in exchange for the oven I'd have to think carefully about it.
Sous vide is fundamentally about sealing food and cooking it in water. I wouldn't say the precision temperature control is the central part of the concept.
While the literal translation means "under vacuum", it is generally considered to refer to precise temperature control because that is the benefit of sous vide.
It is possible to sous vide without a vacuum bag in a steam oven, or in certain ovens with temperature probes.
I second this. Precise temperature (with good conduction between the heat source and the food) and time.
I've cooked 'sous vide' under a running hot tap in a backpacker, which worked great. The water temp happened to be close to perfect (I have a method of measuring temperatures > 40c based on how long I can hold my hand under the running water before pulling out from the pain - surprisingly accurate).
The article says cooking in the dishwasher primarily happens in the drying stage, so it's not really cooking in water. It's closer to defrosting in a pot of water then throwing it in the oven.
> Sous vide is fundamentally about sealing food and cooking it in water. I wouldn’t say the precision temperature control is the central part of the concept.
Its about temperature control and efficient thermal transfer; vacuum sealing and using a circulating, temperature controlled water bath are mechanisms of achieving that.
Seal up the food tightly, then circulate a hot fluid (water, steam, or air, usually) around the food to evenly transfer heat into it. Afterwards, remove the food and optionally sauce or sear it.
En Papillote and via Dutch Oven are other similar techniques utilizing the same concept. Maybe I'm overgeneralizing?
No bags, humidity control, replaces everything. Immersion circulators, therma-pens, toaster ovens, microwaves, dishwashers - it won't wash your dishes after you make the salmon in it but it will self clean. :)
Combi-ovens are predominantly equipment that belongs in commercial kitchens, but nowadays, there are a few options (still not very many though) that can actually fit on a home kitchen countertop. The two notable ones are the Cuisinart steam oven (~$250-300) and the Anova Precision Oven (~$700); these are the low and high ends of the price range.
Correct. Although I am incredibly tempted to order a full sized shitty commercial one from China and hack on it.
All that goes on there is an evaporating tray of water and wet bulb temperature sensors (finicky to measure accurately). Imagine an environment similar to a dishwasher or rather, a sauna, where you play not just with the temperature but also the humidity by controlling the steam bath.
The Chinese commercial ones I am referring to use a fill valve with a float (not dissimilar to a toilet tank) to replenish the water from the evaporating tray found at the bottom of the oven. So might get away with an analog circuit.. I digress..
Instead of keeping your food in a plastic bag and recirculating the water through a heating element to keep the temperature you are just constantly boiling water and releasing steam so the entire oven cavity settles at an exact temperature AND humidity level. Hope I didn't bungle that explanation too much.
Anyway GM probably has super fancy home ovens of this nature for $10,000 a premium home gamer version of the sort of thing restaurants/fancy-hotels use. The pros simply front load food trays into them like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cfll7tUcuA
Did you miss a zero? Because all home combi-ovens I've seen in Germany are nearly 10x that price range. Granted, those aren't countertop but regular home oven form factor devices. They're explicitly for domestic kitchens though.
Consistent and excellent results don't necessarily require any tools.
If you've made the same thing a million times, you probably stopped measuring after the 10th time or so, and if you had arrived at the same exact steps without the tools through trial and error there's literally no difference in the results.
Ha! It's sous vide salmon from before there was sous vide.
Funny to think about now, but it's surprisingly clever. The dishwasher just so happens to be about the right temperature and time for salmon specifically.
It's not sous vide, the dishwasher just happens to be above the cooking temp for salmon which is a relatively low ~130F. I'm sure you could also do a steak in your dishwasher too, but steamed steak doesn't taste good.
Dishwashers run at 140°F but have less constant water contact with the salmon so the temperature would seem to work well. But the principle is exactly sous vide -- sealed food held at temperature in hot water.
I don't know where you're getting steamed steak from though. There's no steaming involved anywhere. This is for salmon only. You'd need higher temperatures and longer times for steak, which is why it doesn't seem like anybody invented dishwasher steak. ;)
Originating in the United States, Vincent Price demonstrated preparation of fish in 1975 when appearing at The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Price presented the dish as "a dish any fool can prepare".
Apropos of nothing, Vincent Price only played bad guys because he was such a nice guy that playing nice guys wasn't acting in his mind.
Edit: Wikipedia describes him as an American actor, art historian, art collector, and gourmet cook.
I'm vaguely familiar with Price's roles but the only works I've actually seen of his are "Thriller" (spoken-word only) and "Edward Scissorhands" (his final role). In the latter his character seems fairly benign if not good. But for sure the stuff in "Thriller" is designed to be spine-tingling.
Originating in the United States, Vincent Price demonstrated preparation of fish in 1975 when appearing at The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Price presented the dish as "a dish any fool can prepare".
Here's a clip[0] of that Tonight Show episode, from Nov. 21, 1975. The fish in this case was trout, not salmon, but it -- and some zucchini, etc. -- were cooked in a dishwasher.
(The link below is cued up to just before they walk over to the cooking area, but the earlier part might be of interest too, as they talk about art-forgery, etc.).
FWIW, the guest from the segment prior to Price's said it was the best fish she'd ever tasted.
I recall watching a Mythbusters where Adam and Jamie got Alton Brown to join them to make a dishwasher lasagna. It was an interesting episode, and as I recall it resulted in a perfectly serviceable lasagna.
An experiment (with temperature probe) here. Summary: temperature control is non-existent, temperature doesn't hold, and even if it did get to required temperature, one wouldn't have a way to know. https://youtu.be/dSwzau2_KF8 (at 18:11).
I'd have to imagine the temperature would get much higher in the OP version (just wrap in tinfoil) than the video version (put in a glass jar filled with liquid). Second version seems too insulated.
Neat and probably works on most dishwasher models, but not enough temperature precision for my comfort level. I wouldn't trust it. Rather just pan fry or bake myself a salmon. I don't have a sous vide, but I imagine this is not a replacement for one since the whole point is precision cooking.
> Neat and probably works on most dishwasher models, but not enough temperature precision for my comfort level.
I'm not so sure. IIRC, about a decade or two ago, dishwasher energy efficiency regulations forced design changes that really neutered dishwasher drying cycles. It does seem like they don't get as hot as they used to while drying. I wouldn't be surprised if this recipe worked in older dishwashers that were around when it was first popularized, but doesn't in more modern ones.
I wouldn't worry about it - you can eat it raw after all and the cook time isnt long enough for it to make you sick (due to food borne illness from being in the temperature danger zone.
Side note - sous vide steelhead is incredible, thinner pieces in my experience work out noticeably better
Raw fish served as sushi is generally frozen to -31 F for 15 hours to kill the bacteria before it is served raw. I would not eat grocery-bought salmon raw unless it is "sushi grade".
Unless you're buying locally caught Salmon at a fish market, it was almost certainly flash frozen. Even if it's not frozen anymore when presented in the store.
Sushi grade fish is flash frozen at -40°f - not all fish is frozen this way. Most [0] sushi grade fish in the US is frozen this way before distribution. This is not the case for ALL fish. It would almost certainly have been frozen, just not necessarily flash frozen with the intent to distribute as sushi grade.
Most fish you buy will have a warning specifically saying not to eat it raw if it wasn’t frozen safely in this manner.
A sous vide dishwasher. Now there’s a project some crazy YouTube engineer ought to get on!
Dishwashers are already pretty much air tight. You just need a pump. How strong does a vessel have to be to resist an atmosphere of pressure? But I guess it’s sous vide rather than non vide.
I discovered this when one of the plastic conduits came loose inside my dishwasher in precisely the right way as to spray water directly at the inside bottom of the door. The top and sides have a rubber seal, but the bottom is protected pretty much entirely by the interior shape of the door and the bottom tray.
It makes sense, if you think about it, since you would absolutely want some way for the humidity to gradually equalize if you left it alone with the door closed for a while.
Cooking salmon is mostly about texture. It's usually done around 120, but it takes 145 according to the USDA to actually kill off parasites. Deep freezing kills them instead.
According to a brand of dishwasher detergent, machines run within the food safe danger zone.
So, while it'll improve the texture, cooking salmon actually makes it less safe to eat.
USDA numbers oversimplify, but killing pathogens is a function of both temperature and time. 145 will pasteurize salmon instantly, but you can also hold at 130F for about 1 hour.
Totally. I personally cook salmon until 120F and then sear the skin side. But was addressing the parent poster about the temperature that kills pathogens.
Edit: I now see that parent was talking specifically about parasites. Indeed those are killed by freezing beforehand. But a long bath at >130F kills the bacteria.
Great demonstration that the process of cooking is rather general and encompasses more than most people associate with their concept of cooking.
Cooking is just applying heat to food. Stovetops, grills, and pans conduct that heat to food using metal; ovens conduct it using air; fryers use oil; sous vide uses water. Each provides increasingly precise temperature control. The dishwasher method uses both water and air and doesn’t have much precision of temperature control, but it turns out alright because food is pretty tolerant of imprecise temperatures in cooking.
I like to use the reverse sear method to cook my steak, and I have jokingly referred to it as pas sous vide (“not under vacuum”) because I’m imitating sous vide except using an oven to keep air at a certain temperature rather than using an immersion circulator to keep water at a certain temperature. But in principle you could say dishwasher salmon is pas sous vide as well.
I am failing to grasp the wordplay in pas sous vide, but the rest of your comment sounds very sensible so I think it might be because I don’t speak French. Isn’t almost everything in life pas sous vide? Legacy style lightbulbs excluded.
Sous vide translates literally to “under vacuum” as it involves cooking food in plastic bags that are vacuum sealed and cooked in water baths at precise temperatures. The technique, however, is much more useful for the temperature control elements than the vacuum. The reverse sear method mimics the temperature control element of the technique, but is just done in an oven, so it’s very much not under a vacuum.
> The technique, however, is much more useful for the temperature control elements than the vacuum
The vacuum sealing (which doesn’t actually leave a vacuum, because its not done in a rigid container, so name aside, sous vide cooking is not, in any substantive sense, cooking under vacuum) is a technique in achieving temperature control, because it means the food is in direct contact with the bag which is in direct contact with the water bath, rather than there being air in the bag insulating the food from the water bath.
> The reverse sear method mimics the temperature control element of the technique, but is just done in an oven, so it’s very much not under a vacuum.
In an oven, the food is in direct contact with the thermal medium without a layer in between, but the thermal medium is air rather than water; air has a similar specific heat but much lower density than liquid water at constant pressure, so even if your heat control is as good as in a sous vide system (with most ovens, it is not) you still aren’t really getting the same effect. Reverse sear is a faster, hotter, less even method than sous vide, with the advantage (for steaks, and things where this is an advantage) of producing greater surface evaporation which provides a better sear.
Yes, everything except incandescent bulbs and space stations are pas sous vide. That’s where I find the humour: sous vide is simply an imprecise term for referring to a particular cooking method, but as it has escaped professional kitchens and made its way to home cooks, it has acquired a kind of respect as an arcane art that it arguably doesn’t deserve (and definitely doesn’t get in professional kitchens). I like pas sous vide because it’s an even more imprecise term. (It’s not a very funny joke, honestly.)
My poor man's sous vide is filling a really big pot with water and heating it up to a specific temperature. There's so much volume it doesn't cool down significantly by the food during cooking time. I put my piece of meat in a regular plastic bag and sink it down keeping the ends above water held secure by the lid.
If you get thick well insulated clay(?) pots the granny method is to bring them up to temp, wrap them in towels, smother em with pillows for good measure, and leave the food to cook like that for X hours. :)
Yep, clay. It doesn't really matters (you can use anything) but clay pots have a thick walls and keeps the temp for long, so they are often used for that long after a wood and coal burning stoves became extinct in regular homes. All Eastern Europe has a tons of variations of different recipes for cooking meals in pots.
How much of cooking is just a chase for tastier food? Up in Eastern Europe everyone is hardcore convinced overcooked meat is healthy because no bacteria plus warm food good for stomach. Tons of people still wince at medium rare steak.
Because in eastern Europe it's probably more dangerous to eat rare meat due to more lax regulations.
There's a reason restaurants add an asterisk after meat dishes. There's risk involved in consuming rare foods. The risk is just very small in the US and Europe. Not so small in other countries.
I don’t think this is true at all. I’ve been to dozens of countries all over the world and in each one you will find dirty kitchens as well as clean ones.
You should visit Eastern Europe some time. It’s not just a stereotype.
Born and living my whole life in Romania, I can tell you that this fear is pretty true. Many people, especially from the older generations, don't trust medium or under steaks.
I should say those that it's not so much a question of the cleanliness of the kitchen, but of the confidence in quality control of the meat. Parasites and tainted meat are a lot more common than in more wealthy countries.
Ok so meat controls are bad in Romania. Romania is in Eastern Europe, but so are Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. I would have no qualms at all eating rare meat in either of those countries.
I just think stereotyping “Eastern Europe” as some mid-20th century agrarian backwater is very counterproductive to good discussion.
I would suggest some of those countries are more properly part of Central Europe, and at least in Czechia and Hungary steak tartare is a pretty traditional dish.
It is! Still it’s part of Eastern Europe, by some definitions. See the Wikipedia page for Eastern Europe. All in all it’s a useless moniker these days for most purposes.
Kitchens is one, but there's supply issues. My experience is that quality often is indeed lower (so is the price). I'm sure it plays with safety too.
Also lot of people (rightfully) don't trust the supermarkets - my friends were shocked I just buy raw fish in supermarket - no need to find a personal fisherman!
Actually the regulations here are extremely strict, so much that the restaurants are complaining all the time (stricter than in many Western countries if what they say is true). And having eaten raw meat (tartar steak) many times didn't cause any health problems.
> Up in Eastern Europe everyone is hardcore convinced overcooked meat is healthy because no bacteria plus warm food good for stomach. Tons of people still wince at medium rare steak.
I probably fit into this group, because in my mind it's better to be safe than sorry. While most of the food you'd get in stores is going to have good quality control and should be safe, "most" is still not "all". I recall a story from a number of years back in the news, where a person had found worms in some sushi that they got, for example.
While that's an outlier, there are also many people that enjoy hunting and eating game meat, not cooking which fully would be just asking for trouble, because you could end up with trichinellosis, essentially with parasitic worms in your muscle tissue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinella
Of course, the meat that comes from farms is quite different, but regardless, you only need to get unlucky once to have plenty unpleasant experiences, from food poisoning to worse. So for the foreseeable future, "overcooked" meat it is for me, others can enjoy their raw or rare meats and fish as they please.
Seeing how poorly my folks handle hygiene in kitchen, they are more likely to get infection by washing your chicken or straight up leaving uncovered leftovers for days...
If I offered you irradiated steak or tartare, would you eat it?
> If I offered you irradiated steak or tartare, would you eat it?
I'm not sure what radiation would practically do and whether eating something like that would be safe for me either way.
As for the steak, if I was sure that it was quality meat, I might opt for medium well due to social pressure, otherwise leaning more on the side of well done, which some might view as a social affront. As for tartare, I wouldn't eat it either way, the same way how I don't eat raw salmon or other raw meat like that - while there are people over here that do enjoy that sort of thing, it's a matter of taste or perhaps an acquired taste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radura seems to have such a friendly icon, but would freak people up there too. Majority of people are still wary of microwaves, almost a century after it's invention...
As for raw food - can't acquire taste without trying! Raw salmon per se isn't impressive - so many people get it wrong and are not using the fatty salmon belly. I haven't tried tartare yet myself.
> Majority of people are still wary of microwaves, almost a century after it's invention...
I wouldn't be weary of microwaves per se, but rather their effectiveness in making food safer to eat.
Even if we think just about it heating the food up enough to be safe, I've found that it doesn't heat up evenly, especially in the center of a rotating microwave. I guess that's what you get with standing waves, but it makes me a bit concerned.
I did try looking up more information, but found nothing conclusive, sadly.
> In parts of Eastern Europe, the World Health Organization reports, some swine herds have trichinosis infection rates above 50%, with correspondingly large numbers of human infections.[41]
That may not be totally unfounded. More developed countries have tighter livestock regulations. Not saying Eastern European farms or kitchens are "dirty", but there is just less oversight which leads to more opportunities in the swiss-cheese model of disease prevention.
>both water and air and doesn’t have much precision of temperature control, but it turns out alright because food is pretty tolerant of imprecise temperatures in cooking
Actually my default program in the dishwasher is 55C water temp. Which is brutally overcooked for farmed salmon IMO (I prefer it around late 30-s, early 40-s), but it is precise. you can use it as a poor man's sous vide in a pinch I guess.
My father was a construction worker, running his own crew and company, and often worked with hot mix asphalt.
He is also a recreational fisherman.
He would catch a salmon, filet it, wrap it tightly with butter, aromatics and lemons in several layers of tin foil, and bury it in the middle of the truck full of hot mix asphalt. When they reached the fish, it was time for lunch.
It was an absurd number of layers, to protect the fish from the tar. I think at least 3-4 but it's possible he went all the way to 5-6 full airtight wraps. And they were careful when they got to that part of the truckload, for sure
Less dramatically, when I lived in Germany, where I had radiators for heat, I stored baby bottles of water on top of the kitchen radiator. It kept the water the perfect temperature for my infant with zero risk of it being too hot, so zero risk of scalding. All I had to do was add powdered formula when he got hungry.
Against: Nothing really, I guess the baby might not drink it (in theory they’re expecting warm breast milk). It’s not recommended to use straight tap water here, only filtered, due to bacteria which is harmless to older children/adults but could be a problem for a newborn.
> It’s not recommended to use straight tap water here, only filtered, due to bacteria which is harmless to older children/adults but could be a problem for a newborn.
I’m very currious about the filter you mention. How do you filter bacteria out in a household setting? How do you keep the filter itself clean and how do you QA your solution?
I find it likely that any filtering done by average people is more likely to add bacteria than to remove it. But maybe there is some magical method I don’t know about yet.
Because of two reasons together: charcoal filters don’t remove bacteria[1][2], that is the reason why I don’t expect it to reduce bacterial count. And then any user error (less than pristine pitcher, filter not replaced at the recomended interval) would increase the count.
But there is also a different reasoning. A more philosophical, heuristic based one: The water where I live is treated by professionals with professional grade equipment. They also take regular samples and try to grow the bacteria to be able to tell if they are doing their job right or not. And the quality, at least where I live, is generally good. To improve something from good to excelent you often need to put in as much work as it was already put in to move it from mediocre to good. It is possible of course, but I would expect the process to be either energy intensive, or fiddly, or resource intensive, or require even more specialised equipment. Most likely all four at once. A simple, easy to use, and convenient filter doesn’t pass my sniff test. Like if it is that easy why wouldn’t the pros just do it at the water treatment facility?
Now of course this is just a heuristic, it can go wrong many different ways. And I admit I can be wrong of course. This is very far from my expertise. But this is how I was thinking about the question.
I read the linked NHS document multiple times and I can't see any reference to filtered water. They only talk about boiling the water. Where are you seeing that they recommend filtering?
For infants this is not food safe. The powder should be mixed with water that is at least 70C to kill bacteria that might be present in the powder.
For older babies (6+) then maybe not so important.
In the weaning period when I took over with a night bottle and the wife shut down her boobs I would just sleep with a pre-mixed (not from powder) formula pack next to my body. It would be more or less body temperature and the kiddo would like it :D
However some, in particular Emily Oster, argue that the risk is negligible and that having an overly complicated set of steps for tired parents to follow is counter-productive:
I left my original comment as a fun anecdote in response to another fun anecdote. In reality, I think it's probably not a good idea to cook food in hot asphalt but didn't feel that really needed to be said, so didn't say it. (How many people are even going to have the opportunity to try that?) Now I am feeling like perhaps it does need to be said and cringing in anticipation of people hating on me for saying it and thereby raining on their party.
I looked up the info rather than go "citation needed." My children are grown. They have already survived whatever mistakes I made in raising them and life has changed, so some of what I did worked just fine at the time but is no longer a good idea.
I provided citations and accurate information to the best of my ability and as neutrally as I knew how in the interest of promoting food safety for people currently or in the future in need of actually feeding babies.
I was quoting the staff at the hospital and took their word as granted. It also says so on the box of our Hipp formula powder box (the one meant for 0-6 month old kids).
I am also a bit pragmatic and think that it’s most likely not dangerous. But I liken it to using a seat belt. You don’t need it until you crash.
If I was unlucky and my kid got really sick because I was lazy with water handling I would feel bad.
Your second link makes a very strong argument against boiling water due to the minimal risk posed by unboiled water. Comparing it to putting your child in a car.
The recommendation appears to be just another attempt by the government to coddle and infantilize (no pun intended) their constituents.
I mean, it's not like they're making it illegal, or actually investigating people doing it. I think it's a great thing that we have governmental organizations that are dedicated towards understanding and disseminating health and safety information. I will agree that they can go too far but just recommending extra heating of water that goes into infant food on a website is ridiculously inconsequential when compared with actual governmental overreach. Someone doesnt want babies to die. I think as long as it stays in the realm of pure information and not legislation, it's much better to go a little to far than not far enough.
Unless of course you were being sarcastic, in which case i recommend denoting it as such.
Hijacking this thread to comment on a quote from the CDC article which I’ve also heard in a zillion other places:
> If you do decide to warm the bottle, never use a microwave. Microwaves heat milk and food unevenly, resulting in “hot spots” that can burn your baby’s mouth and throat.
This seems wrong to me. How can any fluid have a “hot spot”? Can’t you just, you know… swirl it a bit and let the temperature even out? Wouldn’t this take no more than 5 seconds?
I diligently followed this advice with my first child and had to wait 5+ minutes every time for my bottle warmer to warm up the milk, while he was crying with hunger and getting both of us stressed out. Now with my second child, I just toss it in the microwave for ~18 seconds for a 4oz bottle, and it’s fine. I swirl it for 5 seconds and drip it on my wrist to be sure.
I sometimes feel like recommendations like these are written for the most braindead possible person, who would put the milk in the microwave for 5 minutes to boiling and feed it to the baby without checking the temp first. I don’t see how the slightest bit of common sense couldn’t prevent any issues here.
Exactly, these types of things _are_ written for the dumbest people. Cause while we here a so cultured and educated (implicit sarcasm), the range of human intelligence goes at least as low. Insert anecdote about designing trash cans for State parks.
I have decorative boxes covering up my radiators. Incidentally, the boxes heat up to the perfect temperature for my cats, who love sitting on them in the winter.
I thought it was super cool at the time because I had never before had radiant heat. German apartments were different in myriad ways from my experience of American housing.
I think America could learn a lot from other cultures about improving quality of life just in terms of housing practices.
Yeah, the US is not a monolith by any stretch wrt heating type. I don't mean to conflate this one type of heating with my generally positive experience of housing in Germany just being overall better in myriad ways.
Bitumen contains polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. I believe the typical exposure via inhaling the fumes was researched with no link to cancer found but I have doubts about that fish.
The roofing of my primary school was under almost constant repair, so the smell of bitumen heaters was a common companion. Hardly experience it these days, but I loved that aroma - still do.
Breath deep, son! That sweet smell of bitumen heaters you loved as a kid? That's the scent of progress! Sure, you don't get to whiff it much these days, but let me tell you, back in my day, we'd huff that stuff like it was the lifeblood of invention. You see, in the world of scientific discovery, a little bit of bitumen goes a long way.
Now, I know what you're thinking: "Cave, isn't that dangerous?" Well, listen up, sport: science isn't all rainbows and unicorn farts. Sometimes, it's polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons! Those big, fancy words might scare the lab coats, but not us. We're the brave souls, the pioneers who push the boundaries and get our hands dirty.
That's the spirit we need to keep alive! Remember, fear has no place in the laboratory. If we're going to make the next big breakthrough, we've got to be willing to take a few risks. So what if we end up with a little cancer? A little cancer never hurt anyone! It's just another challenge for us to overcome in the name of progress.
Considering how many times he's survived cancer, I believe it probably does. He also smoked for ~50 years. The salmon was wrapped tightly enough with enough layers of tin foil there was no exposure to any tar in the food - cancer aside, it would be incredibly unpalatable.
I don't know about asphalt but I've once passed a site with a tar cooker going on that's so extremely pungent I cannot imagine hot asphalt to be particularly appetizing if it is anywhere near that. On the other hand, I know a friend who worked such a machine and he couldn't complain. Also, he smoked cigarettes a lot so cancer was perhaps the least of his worries.
In France, there's a century old custom in the construction industry to cook a "gigot bitume" to celebrate completion of important milestones in the project.
I'm reasonably confident this will only work as described in US dishwashers as the rest of the worlds (as far as I'm aware) machines don't use heating elements to heat the air during drying. (Picked up on a Technology Connections video.)
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadI learned this method from the Surreal Gourmet (as mentioned in the article) as a teenager and gave it a try soon after. It came in handy when I went off to college, because it didn't stink up the apartment and bother the roommates.
If you try it, be sure to use a full, normal cycle. Energy saving and other modes might not get up to the right temperature.
(Is "Tom Scott Did It" going to be the new "Simpsons Did it"?)
It's worth a try - precision cooking is a way for anyone to have excellent results when cooking. Pretty soon you'll have an immersion circulator, a therma-pen, and a kitchen scale!
There is no precision to the temperature or time control of a dishwasher, and there’s no dry cycle on a sous vide.
Yes it goes without saying it's lacking the precise controls, but it's still the same mechanism of cooking in the end.
A sous vide bath won't replicate any of those steps (except maybe the steaming if you run the bath at practically boiling). Sous vide will cook good salmon but it's not a drop in replacement.
Mine is just a single constant temperature the whole time.
There's certainly no high heat much less sterilization, just bringing the water up to temperature and keeping it there, through pre-wash, wash, and rinse cycles. (Only commercial restaurant dishwashers get up to sterilization temperatures.)
And if the salmon is wrapped airtight, there's no conceptual difference between broiling/steaming/baking. It's all just sous vide, which is none of those. Because it's sealed.
If you wanted to be super pedantic about it, you'd say that none of this is anything like "sous vide" because "sous vide" implies "under a vacuum".
At any rate: dishwasher salmon and sous vide salmon are, literally, the same dish.
Of course the workers would surreptitiously snip a bit of choice meat from the carcass, and drop it in the water to cook. They were not supposed to, but it was difficult to police.
It is possible to sous vide without a vacuum bag in a steam oven, or in certain ovens with temperature probes.
I've cooked 'sous vide' under a running hot tap in a backpacker, which worked great. The water temp happened to be close to perfect (I have a method of measuring temperatures > 40c based on how long I can hold my hand under the running water before pulling out from the pain - surprisingly accurate).
Its about temperature control and efficient thermal transfer; vacuum sealing and using a circulating, temperature controlled water bath are mechanisms of achieving that.
En Papillote and via Dutch Oven are other similar techniques utilizing the same concept. Maybe I'm overgeneralizing?
No bags, humidity control, replaces everything. Immersion circulators, therma-pens, toaster ovens, microwaves, dishwashers - it won't wash your dishes after you make the salmon in it but it will self clean. :)
All that goes on there is an evaporating tray of water and wet bulb temperature sensors (finicky to measure accurately). Imagine an environment similar to a dishwasher or rather, a sauna, where you play not just with the temperature but also the humidity by controlling the steam bath.
The Chinese commercial ones I am referring to use a fill valve with a float (not dissimilar to a toilet tank) to replenish the water from the evaporating tray found at the bottom of the oven. So might get away with an analog circuit.. I digress..
Instead of keeping your food in a plastic bag and recirculating the water through a heating element to keep the temperature you are just constantly boiling water and releasing steam so the entire oven cavity settles at an exact temperature AND humidity level. Hope I didn't bungle that explanation too much.
Anyway GM probably has super fancy home ovens of this nature for $10,000 a premium home gamer version of the sort of thing restaurants/fancy-hotels use. The pros simply front load food trays into them like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cfll7tUcuA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJb9cYXo-4g
The Anova thing is basically a tiny toy version of that.
If you've made the same thing a million times, you probably stopped measuring after the 10th time or so, and if you had arrived at the same exact steps without the tools through trial and error there's literally no difference in the results.
Except for the lunatics writing recipes with imperial volume measurements for dry goods of course.
Funny to think about now, but it's surprisingly clever. The dishwasher just so happens to be about the right temperature and time for salmon specifically.
You've never heard of steamed hams? Clearly you're not from Albany.
I don't know where you're getting steamed steak from though. There's no steaming involved anywhere. This is for salmon only. You'd need higher temperatures and longer times for steak, which is why it doesn't seem like anybody invented dishwasher steak. ;)
I use duct tape to keep it all together.
Apropos of nothing, Vincent Price only played bad guys because he was such a nice guy that playing nice guys wasn't acting in his mind.
Edit: Wikipedia describes him as an American actor, art historian, art collector, and gourmet cook.
(Although in his case, "RIP" would involve quite a bit of mischief!)
Here's a clip[0] of that Tonight Show episode, from Nov. 21, 1975. The fish in this case was trout, not salmon, but it -- and some zucchini, etc. -- were cooked in a dishwasher.
(The link below is cued up to just before they walk over to the cooking area, but the earlier part might be of interest too, as they talk about art-forgery, etc.).
FWIW, the guest from the segment prior to Price's said it was the best fish she'd ever tasted.
[0] https://youtu.be/aqORoVYCUIY?t=502
I'm not so sure. IIRC, about a decade or two ago, dishwasher energy efficiency regulations forced design changes that really neutered dishwasher drying cycles. It does seem like they don't get as hot as they used to while drying. I wouldn't be surprised if this recipe worked in older dishwashers that were around when it was first popularized, but doesn't in more modern ones.
Side note - sous vide steelhead is incredible, thinner pieces in my experience work out noticeably better
Most fish you buy will have a warning specifically saying not to eat it raw if it wasn’t frozen safely in this manner.
[0] http://factmyth.com/factoids/most-sushi-is-previously-frozen...
Tapeworms do not develop from bacteria.
Dishwashers are already pretty much air tight. You just need a pump. How strong does a vessel have to be to resist an atmosphere of pressure? But I guess it’s sous vide rather than non vide.
It makes sense, if you think about it, since you would absolutely want some way for the humidity to gradually equalize if you left it alone with the door closed for a while.
According to a brand of dishwasher detergent, machines run within the food safe danger zone.
So, while it'll improve the texture, cooking salmon actually makes it less safe to eat.
Edit: I now see that parent was talking specifically about parasites. Indeed those are killed by freezing beforehand. But a long bath at >130F kills the bacteria.
As with dishwasher cooking, the food is wrapped in aluminum foil.
Turkey in a dishwasher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5Y4RV8pcY0
Turkey in a car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niegc7QcilM
I wonder if anybody's tried cooking in a lithium battery fire yet?
Oven at 400F. Season to taste. Cook 12 minutes +/- until fish flakes apart but not dry.
Topping: mayo with fine diced onion. Sprinkle dill, black pepper, ad a drop of red wine vinegar, mix. A slice of fresh lemon on the plate.
Presto! Perfectly cooked salmon every time. Your dishwasher won't taste like fish, and your fish won't taste like dishwasher.
Cooking is just applying heat to food. Stovetops, grills, and pans conduct that heat to food using metal; ovens conduct it using air; fryers use oil; sous vide uses water. Each provides increasingly precise temperature control. The dishwasher method uses both water and air and doesn’t have much precision of temperature control, but it turns out alright because food is pretty tolerant of imprecise temperatures in cooking.
I like to use the reverse sear method to cook my steak, and I have jokingly referred to it as pas sous vide (“not under vacuum”) because I’m imitating sous vide except using an oven to keep air at a certain temperature rather than using an immersion circulator to keep water at a certain temperature. But in principle you could say dishwasher salmon is pas sous vide as well.
The vacuum sealing (which doesn’t actually leave a vacuum, because its not done in a rigid container, so name aside, sous vide cooking is not, in any substantive sense, cooking under vacuum) is a technique in achieving temperature control, because it means the food is in direct contact with the bag which is in direct contact with the water bath, rather than there being air in the bag insulating the food from the water bath.
> The reverse sear method mimics the temperature control element of the technique, but is just done in an oven, so it’s very much not under a vacuum.
In an oven, the food is in direct contact with the thermal medium without a layer in between, but the thermal medium is air rather than water; air has a similar specific heat but much lower density than liquid water at constant pressure, so even if your heat control is as good as in a sous vide system (with most ovens, it is not) you still aren’t really getting the same effect. Reverse sear is a faster, hotter, less even method than sous vide, with the advantage (for steaks, and things where this is an advantage) of producing greater surface evaporation which provides a better sear.
I imagine if you tried to cook in an actual vacuum, you'd end up with dessicated food instead, as all the volatiles will evaporate.
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/what-...
Or better known as 'The Battle of Sous Vader'
Yep, clay. It doesn't really matters (you can use anything) but clay pots have a thick walls and keeps the temp for long, so they are often used for that long after a wood and coal burning stoves became extinct in regular homes. All Eastern Europe has a tons of variations of different recipes for cooking meals in pots.
There's a reason restaurants add an asterisk after meat dishes. There's risk involved in consuming rare foods. The risk is just very small in the US and Europe. Not so small in other countries.
I should say those that it's not so much a question of the cleanliness of the kitchen, but of the confidence in quality control of the meat. Parasites and tainted meat are a lot more common than in more wealthy countries.
I just think stereotyping “Eastern Europe” as some mid-20th century agrarian backwater is very counterproductive to good discussion.
It’s still a useless term.
Also lot of people (rightfully) don't trust the supermarkets - my friends were shocked I just buy raw fish in supermarket - no need to find a personal fisherman!
I probably fit into this group, because in my mind it's better to be safe than sorry. While most of the food you'd get in stores is going to have good quality control and should be safe, "most" is still not "all". I recall a story from a number of years back in the news, where a person had found worms in some sushi that they got, for example.
While that's an outlier, there are also many people that enjoy hunting and eating game meat, not cooking which fully would be just asking for trouble, because you could end up with trichinellosis, essentially with parasitic worms in your muscle tissue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinella
Of course, the meat that comes from farms is quite different, but regardless, you only need to get unlucky once to have plenty unpleasant experiences, from food poisoning to worse. So for the foreseeable future, "overcooked" meat it is for me, others can enjoy their raw or rare meats and fish as they please.
If I offered you irradiated steak or tartare, would you eat it?
I'm not sure what radiation would practically do and whether eating something like that would be safe for me either way.
As for the steak, if I was sure that it was quality meat, I might opt for medium well due to social pressure, otherwise leaning more on the side of well done, which some might view as a social affront. As for tartare, I wouldn't eat it either way, the same way how I don't eat raw salmon or other raw meat like that - while there are people over here that do enjoy that sort of thing, it's a matter of taste or perhaps an acquired taste.
As for raw food - can't acquire taste without trying! Raw salmon per se isn't impressive - so many people get it wrong and are not using the fatty salmon belly. I haven't tried tartare yet myself.
I wouldn't be weary of microwaves per se, but rather their effectiveness in making food safer to eat.
Even if we think just about it heating the food up enough to be safe, I've found that it doesn't heat up evenly, especially in the center of a rotating microwave. I guess that's what you get with standing waves, but it makes me a bit concerned.
I did try looking up more information, but found nothing conclusive, sadly.
But purpose of microwave heating it is not for sanitisation, it’s for taste
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinosis
That may not be totally unfounded. More developed countries have tighter livestock regulations. Not saying Eastern European farms or kitchens are "dirty", but there is just less oversight which leads to more opportunities in the swiss-cheese model of disease prevention.
Actually my default program in the dishwasher is 55C water temp. Which is brutally overcooked for farmed salmon IMO (I prefer it around late 30-s, early 40-s), but it is precise. you can use it as a poor man's sous vide in a pinch I guess.
- rinse salmon thoroughly under cold water
- put salmon in a dish
- Add Salt and pepper
- cut a few very thin slices of lemon and cover salmon with it
- add fresh rosemary on top and around the fish
- add a spoon if crème fraîche and some butter on top
- cover with serin wrap
Microwave it at slightly lower power than max power. For 4-5 minutes. Check salmon and cook more if needed in bursts of 30/60 seconds.
The first time you make this in your microwave, cook in bursts of 2-3 minutes to make sure the microwave power isn’t too high.
Typical household microwaves I’ve run into generally didn’t offer me to change the wattage, but instead had a number between 1-10 to choose from.
Just start at a 1/6th power or less if you’re worried and see if the fish cooks at all.
Also not to be outshined by coffeemaker rice if you don't enjoy ingesting heavy metals from mostly American-grown rice (soil issue).
https://www.instructables.com/Cook-Rice-in-a-Coffee-Maker/
I'd like to know, too... for the record.
He is also a recreational fisherman.
He would catch a salmon, filet it, wrap it tightly with butter, aromatics and lemons in several layers of tin foil, and bury it in the middle of the truck full of hot mix asphalt. When they reached the fish, it was time for lunch.
Less dramatically, when I lived in Germany, where I had radiators for heat, I stored baby bottles of water on top of the kitchen radiator. It kept the water the perfect temperature for my infant with zero risk of it being too hot, so zero risk of scalding. All I had to do was add powdered formula when he got hungry.
Took almost no time to train and a tap is usually available.
Against: Nothing really, I guess the baby might not drink it (in theory they’re expecting warm breast milk). It’s not recommended to use straight tap water here, only filtered, due to bacteria which is harmless to older children/adults but could be a problem for a newborn.
I’m very currious about the filter you mention. How do you filter bacteria out in a household setting? How do you keep the filter itself clean and how do you QA your solution?
I find it likely that any filtering done by average people is more likely to add bacteria than to remove it. But maybe there is some magical method I don’t know about yet.
But there is also a different reasoning. A more philosophical, heuristic based one: The water where I live is treated by professionals with professional grade equipment. They also take regular samples and try to grow the bacteria to be able to tell if they are doing their job right or not. And the quality, at least where I live, is generally good. To improve something from good to excelent you often need to put in as much work as it was already put in to move it from mediocre to good. It is possible of course, but I would expect the process to be either energy intensive, or fiddly, or resource intensive, or require even more specialised equipment. Most likely all four at once. A simple, easy to use, and convenient filter doesn’t pass my sniff test. Like if it is that easy why wouldn’t the pros just do it at the water treatment facility?
Now of course this is just a heuristic, it can go wrong many different ways. And I admit I can be wrong of course. This is very far from my expertise. But this is how I was thinking about the question.
1: https://www.livestrong.com/article/193977-what-do-carbon-fil...
2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC242697/
The filters are things like this https://www.tommeetippee.com/en-gb/product/perfect-prep-repl...
For older babies (6+) then maybe not so important.
In the weaning period when I took over with a night bottle and the wife shut down her boobs I would just sleep with a pre-mixed (not from powder) formula pack next to my body. It would be more or less body temperature and the kiddo would like it :D
https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/InfantandToddlerNutrition/form...
Edit: This also seems like a recent development. My children are grown.
https://foodpoisoningbulletin.com/2022/timeline-chronobacter...
The NHS in the UK for example, says to do so (under "Reducing the risk of infection"):
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/baby/breastfeeding-and-bottle-...
However some, in particular Emily Oster, argue that the risk is negligible and that having an overly complicated set of steps for tired parents to follow is counter-productive:
https://archive.is/c5lC5
From my understanding the current general advice from public health authorities is to use 70C/160F water.
I left my original comment as a fun anecdote in response to another fun anecdote. In reality, I think it's probably not a good idea to cook food in hot asphalt but didn't feel that really needed to be said, so didn't say it. (How many people are even going to have the opportunity to try that?) Now I am feeling like perhaps it does need to be said and cringing in anticipation of people hating on me for saying it and thereby raining on their party.
I looked up the info rather than go "citation needed." My children are grown. They have already survived whatever mistakes I made in raising them and life has changed, so some of what I did worked just fine at the time but is no longer a good idea.
I provided citations and accurate information to the best of my ability and as neutrally as I knew how in the interest of promoting food safety for people currently or in the future in need of actually feeding babies.
I am also a bit pragmatic and think that it’s most likely not dangerous. But I liken it to using a seat belt. You don’t need it until you crash.
If I was unlucky and my kid got really sick because I was lazy with water handling I would feel bad.
The recommendation appears to be just another attempt by the government to coddle and infantilize (no pun intended) their constituents.
Unless of course you were being sarcastic, in which case i recommend denoting it as such.
> If you do decide to warm the bottle, never use a microwave. Microwaves heat milk and food unevenly, resulting in “hot spots” that can burn your baby’s mouth and throat.
This seems wrong to me. How can any fluid have a “hot spot”? Can’t you just, you know… swirl it a bit and let the temperature even out? Wouldn’t this take no more than 5 seconds?
I diligently followed this advice with my first child and had to wait 5+ minutes every time for my bottle warmer to warm up the milk, while he was crying with hunger and getting both of us stressed out. Now with my second child, I just toss it in the microwave for ~18 seconds for a 4oz bottle, and it’s fine. I swirl it for 5 seconds and drip it on my wrist to be sure.
I sometimes feel like recommendations like these are written for the most braindead possible person, who would put the milk in the microwave for 5 minutes to boiling and feed it to the baby without checking the temp first. I don’t see how the slightest bit of common sense couldn’t prevent any issues here.
I think America could learn a lot from other cultures about improving quality of life just in terms of housing practices.
Now, I know what you're thinking: "Cave, isn't that dangerous?" Well, listen up, sport: science isn't all rainbows and unicorn farts. Sometimes, it's polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons! Those big, fancy words might scare the lab coats, but not us. We're the brave souls, the pioneers who push the boundaries and get our hands dirty.
That's the spirit we need to keep alive! Remember, fear has no place in the laboratory. If we're going to make the next big breakthrough, we've got to be willing to take a few risks. So what if we end up with a little cancer? A little cancer never hurt anyone! It's just another challenge for us to overcome in the name of progress.
Let the fumes fuel your passion for innovation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigot_bitume
Those are the water temperatures. I have no idea if it circulates hot air in the drying cycle, but I don’t think it does.
50 is great for salmon and tuna. 65 might be better for white fish
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=zAEXuONMJCQ