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by Ryder123 1155 days ago
I don’t mean to be an ass, but in no way is a sous vide fundamentally the same concept as a dishwasher.

There is no precision to the temperature or time control of a dishwasher, and there’s no dry cycle on a sous vide.

5 comments

It's water held at a certain temperature, that heats food sealed watertight. It's exactly the same concept.

Yes it goes without saying it's lacking the precise controls, but it's still the same mechanism of cooking in the end.

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.

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.

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.
European machines have only cold water intake and they heat the water. So it is quite precise temp control there.
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.
But can you wash your dishes in the sous-vide?
Add some agitation device or just do it in ultrasound -- maybe? Still need to figure out automated draining and filling.
That entirely depends on how big your sous-vide is and how small your dishes are
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.

What toaster oven do you use? We've put ours away because it hasn't been that great.
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.

The precision and temperature control are what separate sous vide from retort pouches in my mind, which are often heated up with just boiling.
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?

I'm willing to wager that sam was aware of these differences before they made their comment.