Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack

Pretty easy once I got all the parts together. Assembled it all over the course of one night. Hardest part was drilling the hole into the side of the hotel pan for the water heater. Luckily my neighbor is an electrician and had a step bit that worked perfectly, took about 45 minutes.

Oh, and the Radio Shack relay mentioned didn't work for me when hooked up to my PID's solid state relay (different PID then used in the link). The switching voltage wasn't enough but eventually got a relay that only needed 5V to switch. Short term I used the internal relay which worked fine, but was noisy and I wasn't comfortable driving that amount of amperage through it.

Actually, what gave me the confidence to use the 1500 watt heating element was when I searched for the PID I was buying on google, I found a lot of links to home-brewers who used these heating elements drilled into the side of big aluminum/stainless steel pots. They were using even higher wattage units to get quicker boil times.

Wouldn't a propane burner be several times faster? Do you need it to work indoors?

You pretty much describe exactly what I built. It's all installed in a wooden box I created that sits on my counter, the top has the PID display, on either side is a wall outlet, one controlled by the PID and one direct 120V current for the water pump. The temperature controller is on a long wire that just comes out of a whole I drilled on the front, though you can build the fancy headphone attachment as detailed in the link. All the other wiring is in the box too, including the relay which is nice since it muffles the sound of the relay switching on/off.

I tried using it with the rice cooker I had and the results weren't great. I found the temperature fluctuations too erratic but didn't really investigate too much since my rice cooker was gonna be too small for anything but eggs.

Not really, to either interpretation of that question:

(a) There's no crock pot I can think of that controls the temperature of what's in the pot; in other words, fill the pot with water, and there's no crock pot that keeps the water at 130f.

(b) Crock pots are (allegedly) hard to control with PID controllers (that's why everyone uses rice cookers); the "low" setting on the crock pot is apparently still too hot.

It's also getting harder and harder to find crock pots that don't have digital controls, which is a dealbreaker if you want to use a cheap PID controller.

That's some pretty impressive FedEx service, too!

Do you live between the Auber factory and a FedEx office?

Except for poached eggs. Cooked in nearly boiling water. Quite excellent.

Ah yes, I forgot to mention: watch your eggs very closely, or they turn slimy (which is as gross as it sounds, yes). If you get them out in time though, they taste basically like an omelet cooked in a pan. Then again, I was a teenager last time I did that, so maybe I'd have a different opinion if I tasted them now :)

That's not entirely true. If you for instance "cook" meat at 100 degrees you'd end up with more bacteria than you started with. You do need to cook at a temperature that is hot enough to actually kill the bacteria. It's not a numbers game at all, it's understanding a little microbiology.

Nothing is completely safe, but food poisoning is also not fun.

Beef is ideal to sear just before SVing, not only does it seal in the moisture, but the most dangerous bacteria on beef is on the surface, and just slapping the beef down in a very hot pan, flipping and removing is enough. This is why you can have a blue steak that is cold on the inside (not in many restaurants however) and cooked on the outside.

Searing your steak before cooking would likely aid in the hacked SV as a lack of vacuum sealing means some moisture may be lost, but searing prevents this. It also protects the average, less experienced, cook from giving themselves a wicked case of food poisoning.