View attachment 16878 As part of something I'm doing elsewhere I have made a Sous Vide cooker, designed and made a force-displacement device for measuring elastic modulus of material, and cooked some meat for a long time.
This thread will contain lots of information about all of these things. You might be interested in one or more of them and I would be happy to discuss them in the discussion thread (
https://www.electronicspoint.com/sous-vide-cooker-elasticity-and-meat-t267512.html#post1600675).
I intend to break this up into several parts:
1) Overview (what I'm doing and why)
2) Force-displacement device (design, manufacture, calibration, and use)
3) Sous Vide Cooker (design, calibration, programming, and use)
4) Steps in the cooking of the meat (from raw to meal in about 50 hours!)
5) Raw data (data logging, weight, stress, strain, time, etc.)
6) Results
1) Overview (what I'm doing and why)
I've wanted to cook using the sous vide method. However these things are pretty expensive where I live, so I decided to make one instead.
This also worked well with a course that I was doing where I needed to do a final assignment, so I worked them in together.
The first step was to determine how to make and calibrate the controller for the sous vide cooker. This is not as trivial as it seems because the slow cooker has a large thermal mass which introduces a large delay, PID control works, but it's tricky to get it to both stabilize quickly *AND* come up to temperature within a reasonable time.
After I had managed to control this enough to use the cooker at a constant temperature, I needed to determine an appropriate experiment.
I decided to look at elasticity of meat and how it changes over time in low temperature sous vide cooking.
This is interesting because there are some statements made about maximum cooking times which (when one eliminated food safety issues) seem to be based more on myth than science.
An early generalization about sous vide was that it was impossible to overcook food. That is clearly wrong when you look at things like fish which can easily be cooked to the point at which they become mushy (although I've never done this). Various web sites make the same claim for beef, and because beef is a more robust product it is easier to measure the elasticity. In addition to this the cooking time for fish can be so short that it would be hard to get enough readings taken.
A cooking time of 33 hours...
