English Script Request

In your book, Cooking for Geeks, you describe a lot of interesting, unusual cooking tools. Tell me about them please.

0:08 Well I've got an infrared thermometer, which tells you service temperature, it's great. Um, I also have a container of liquid nitrogen, which I use for making ice cream. You can make delicious ice cream in about thirty seconds, um, you can also make great flavour ones. But probably my favourite thing is actually my sous-vide setup.
0:24 Um, sous-vide is French for "under vacuum", refers to a cooking technique where you essentially cook meats and protein at an ultra-low temperature.
0:34 You can kinda think of it like, well, poaching, but where you set the temperature of the bath of liquid that the sous-vide rig has, you set that temperature to exactly the temperature you wanna cook the foods to. So things like eggs, for example, they begin to cook around 144-158 degrees; like, the perfect soft-poached egg is cooked right between those two temperatures.
0:55 And so if you put that egg into a water bath at that temperature, well then it comes out perfectly cooked. So, for me a sous-vide setup hands down is my favourite setup in the kitchen.

1:05 Here's how to make your own sous-vide rig using a slow-cooker, (a) thermostatic controller, and a thermocouple.
It's really straight-forward. We're basically cutting the power-cord to the slow-cooker and using the thermostatic controller to switch it on and off directly. Let's get started.

1:23 So here's our slow-cooker. You need to make sure that you've got a model that has a switch where you can leave it in the on position the entire time. The reason for this is we're going to be cutting the power on and off on this. And if you get one of the units that's too "smart" and it loses its power, when you cycle it back on it'll stay off. So, in this case, cheaper is better.

1:42 So this guy is the actual "brains", we're gonna replace the brains that are normally in here, which aren't too smart, this one is a lot smarter. The way this works is you basically wire in the thermocouple that you're using to take in data from the actual outside world and then it switches whatever power source you want on and off. In this case I'm gonna wire up an extension cord, just so we can plug the slow-cooker directly into the extension cord receptacle without having to cut the power on the actual slow-cooker itself. This DC power adapter just provides power to the thermostatic controller it doesn't actually provide any power to the slow-cooker.

2:18 So there's our DC power supply, and now we're going to cut this guy so we can plug the extension cord into the slow cooker directly. So, if that's the power coming in, we're going to take one wire, one portion of this, and run that through the thermostatic controller. We just switch that on and off. And this bit we're just gonna wire 'em up together, just so it closes the circuit.

2:45 So this is good to go. At this point, once we plug this guy in to the power of the thermostatic controller, and we plug whatever you want into here, this thermocouple will then switch on and off the power outlet to this.

3:05 So now I have some water in there, it's pretty much plug and play. Grab the power, plug in our thermostatic controller. This actually manages to fit through the lid of this particular unit, you could of course take a drill or something, also or even if you're careful enough you could probably wire this through to ? on your thermocouple.

3:26 This guy's gonna register the temperature of the water in here, cycle us on and off once it actually comes up to temperature. In this case I have it set to 148 (a hundred and forty-eight) degrees Fahrenheit, which is a good temperature actually for making sous-vide eggs.

3:38 So once the water's at 148 degrees F, drop your eggs in, and they need to cook for about forty-five minutes to an hour. An hour later, pull 'em out.

3:53 Mmm, sous-vide eggs!

3:55 So much of cooking is about the science behind it and understanding it. Of course, it's also about the art of turning out a good meal and having fun, expressing affection and love for your friends. But understanding the science really helps a lot. So, kinking out the plane of the hardware is a small bit of it, but a fun bit.