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Using Your Sous Vide Rig as a Bain Marie


Chris Amirault

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First off, yes, I realize that a water bath is a water bath.

Now that we've taken care of that: how do people cook recipes designed for oven water baths in their SV rigs?

Most recipes requiring bain maries report inches of water, boil first or not, temperature of the oven, and time, or some combination of same. I can't quite figure out how to translate those. In addition, it seems that it should be easy enough to get the ramekins or flan mold or whatever to sit on a shelf in the water bath, but I'd be interested to see photos of how people do it.

Chris Amirault

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If I recall, Sous Vide Supreme had information or a discussion about doing this. I think they had a Richard Blais recipe that used a SVS as a water bath. Vaguely, I think they (or someone) suggested an elevated platform so water covers the minimum depth and placing ramekins on the shelf. Maybe it was putting other empty ramekins on the bottom and placing the perforated bottom plate on top of them.

Edited by JBailey (log)

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[font="Trebuchet MS"]Over here is a recipe for a ginger crème brûlée cooked in a SV waterbath. I can certainly vouch for the recipe (my rendition is down the bottom of this post - I recommend tempering the eggs rather than pouring all the hot cream into them as the recipe says), but I wasn't able to find anything suitable to use as a shelf in my rice cooker so I did them in a traditional way in a water-filled roasting dish in the oven.

The same site uses the SV Supreme for parmesan custards. Based on these two recipes, Chris, I'm sure a man of your capabilities can figure out some rules.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I use my Clatronic EKA 3338 preserving boiler combined with my sous-vide magic controller regularly as a precision water bath. (I have yet to sing its praises in the Sous-vide equipment topic - an excellent and versatile piece of kit.) It is huge, has a convenient grill elevated a few centimeters from the bottom, so placing my favorite cast aluminium pot on it is easy enough. The last thing I made was dulce de leche, water temperature set at 90 Celsius, one liter whole milk combined with 500 grams sugar and a vanillia bean in the pot placed on the grill, I covered the boiler with its lid (it leads back the evaporated moisture along the walls) and in six hours I had dulce de leche without the need of any intervention. (No canned condensed milk here, that's why I had to use real milk and sugar.)

The only thing I needed to do was to put three mugs filled with water around the pot to keep it away from the walls, as I knew from previous experience that once the milk started to condense the pot would actually float in the water, and I did not want it to touch the PID sensor.

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Chris

If I recall, you may have a SVSupreme. As I said above, put a support under the perforated bottom plate so that plate is elevated to a height for your ramekins. Maybe you can use ramekins, a couple glasses or other support. That is what I believe their support line might recommend.

"A cloud o' dust! Could be most anything. Even a whirling dervish.

That, gentlemen, is the whirlingest dervish of them all." - The Professionals by Richard Brooks

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