Oliso SmartHub Kickstarter: Another Entrant in the Sous Vide Appliance Field

[gfweb]

Why not pop a circulator into the water bath?

[MisterKrazee]

So I was doing some research on the Brew In A Bag (BIAB) method of home brewing beer. I had the thought that I could use my Anova for mashing one gallon batches. Although, the sugars possibly caramelizing on the heating element and the take apart for cleaning made me a little wary, plus bringing the mash up to 170F for mash out would take a while. This seems like a proper solution. I could hit precise mash temperatures, siphon to my induction safe pot, assuming I can't boil in the Precision Water Bath, and use the induction base for the boil. Performing a precise brew day (more like 3ish hours) with one MULTI-USE machine sounds pretty good to me. 

[rotuts]

""  This seems like a proper solution ""

 

OK nice

 

but why not put your brew in a bag, then in a larger pot and let the Anova move that bag around ?

 

you have the anova  etc etc

[MisterKrazee]

The bag in this situation is a mesh bag that holds the grains so it is easy to drain them from the wort. The wort has a high sugar content and the Anova's coil could possibly scorch the sugars if it's running full blast at times trying to get get the wort from the 150's F up to the 170's F. This is not good for a hefeweizen or a blonde. I haven't found any info on what type of coil the Anova uses yet (high vs. low density.)

[Oliso_Inc]

Hey MisterKrazee,

 

Yep, the SmartHub is great for small batch BIAB style brewing!  It will precisely hit you mash temps and and quickly step between temps if desired.  We've gotten a lot of interest from people doing small batch brewing!

[Chris Hennes]

My Oliso induction hob and water bath arrived a couple of days ago, so I've started running it through its paces...

[Chris Hennes]

My first test was to simply heat 10 liters of water from 66 deg F to 150 deg F: this took 29 minutes. The machine gives a single beep when the temperature has been reached. My Thermapen indicated 151 deg F throughout the bath (recall that it's non-circulating), which is within the margin of error of the thermometer.

 

Overall I like the ergonomics of the water bath: it's well-insulated, with a good lid, and easy-to-grab handles. I was surprised at how loud the induction hob was, however. This device is not any quieter than any of my circulators due to the fans on the hob. It's pretty big, too, about the size of a large crockpot. 

[Chris Hennes]

For long-time/low-temperature cooking, where circulation has minimum importance, I expect the advantages of a well-insulated, well-sealed, no-pump bath to be things that I am not equipped to measure (e.g. energy efficiency), and I expect the end product will be indistinguishable from what I've been achieving with a circulating bath to this point. So I'm not going to bother with "testing" such things, I'm confident the Oliso will perform just fine.

 

One of the areas where a non-circulating bath is actually advantageous, however, is cooking eggs. The problem with a circulator is that the eggs tend to bang around a bit, and I've cracked quite a few in the process. So I figured I'd go ahead and make sure that the lack of circulation wasn't a problem for getting eggs to where I like them (65 degrees C). 

 

Right away I ran into the standard limitation of non-immersion circulators: the fixed bath size. I wanted to cook two eggs, but to get the water to the minimum fill line I needed five liters of water. I tried to go lower than that at first, but it appears that the temperature probe must be somewhere near that fill line because with water well below it the induction hob's temperature reading plunged precipitously when I opened the lid, even though the actual water temperature measured with a Thermapen did not. So, I added enough water to get to the minimum fill line and everything worked as expected.

 

I set the onboard timer and let the egg cook: it beeps three times, relatively loudly, when it is done, and the timer stops at zero. Personally I'd prefer that the timer switch into count-up mode, but honestly I hate on-device timers for sous vide and am unlikely to ever use it.

 

The egg was properly cooked at the end of it, and a couple of quick checks with the thermapen showed the water bath a solid uniform 65C. 

[Chris Hennes]

One item I make where the large liquid volume is advantageous is vegetable stock. When making this sous vide I use gallon bags, which actually don't yield a particularly large amount of stock and are cumbersome to work with (I don't have a chamber sealer). To make the same stock in the Oliso I just dumped all the ingredients into the water bath (scaled to a four-liter yield), set the temperature to 90C, and let it do its thing for a couple hours. I found the stock to be essentially indistinguishable from its "true" sous vide counterpart, and I was able to make significantly more in one batch, without having to mess about with multiple gallon bags full of liquid.

[Martin Fisher]

20 minutes ago, Chris Hennes said:

One item I make where the large liquid volume is advantageous is vegetable stock. When making this sous vide I use gallon bags, which actually don't yield a particularly large amount of stock and are cumbersome to work with (I don't have a chamber sealer). To make the same stock in the Oliso I just dumped all the ingredients into the water bath (scaled to a four-liter yield), set the temperature to 90C, and let it do its thing for a couple hours. I found the stock to be essentially indistinguishable from its "true" sous vide counterpart, and I was able to make significantly more in one batch, without having to mess about with multiple gallon bags full of liquid.

 

I've found that oven bags work wonderfully for relatively large batches of stock made via the Anova or SVM.

[Chris Hennes]

Just now, DiggingDogFarm said:

 

I've found that oven bags work wonderfully for relatively large batches of stock made via the Anova or SVM.

Do you seal them somehow, or just tie them closed?

[Martin Fisher]

27 minutes ago, Chris Hennes said:

Do you seal them somehow, or just tie them closed?

 

I use hog rings only because I have hog rings. I don't think that kind of excessive sealing is essential.

Just a reasonable "sealing" of the bag and keeping that "seal" out of the water would be enough.

Oven bags are freaking tough!!!! I've filled them with air and stomped on them numerous times as hard as I can (and I ain't a small guy) and it's only the seal that's prone to failing.

[Chris Hennes]

Thanks for the tip, I'll give those a shot.

 

In the meantime, I've got a brisket in the cooker doing a 63C 72-hour cook. A quick spot-check of the bath temps around the brisket shows near-perfect uniformity and good accuracy, with the temperature reading either 63C or 64C everywhere I checked. I do have the little stainless tray in place to keep the brisket off the bottom surface, though.

[Chris Hennes]

The brisket was served for dinner tonight:

 

Sous vide is definitely my favorite way to cook brisket, and the extremely long cook time (72 hours) highlights one of the greatest strengths, as well as one of the greatest weaknesses, of the Oliso. The strength is its tight-fitting lid: I had absolutely no appreciable evaporation during this cook. By eye, anyway, the liquid level never changed. Of course there must have been some evaporation through the small hole in the lid, but it was absolutely negligible. The weakness, on the other hand, was the noise. It's not a terribly loud device, particularly when it settles into temperature. But the act of keeping the water bath at the very steady temperature that this device achieves is that it cycles a lot. So it's off for a few seconds, then there is a click and a brief several-second hum of the induction unit, then it stops. Pause a few seconds. Repeat. It's just loud enough to be noticeable, and frequent/infrequent enough that it's never quite in the background. It's definitely more annoying than the gurgle of water from an immersion circulator, in my opinion.

[MisterKrazee]

I've had a chance to play with mine a bit as well. Although, I haven't used it for sous vide yet. My first endeavor was mozzarella cheese. Certainly heated the milk to 90F fairly quick. I had to keep stirring because I was scared it may scorch the bottom. No problem there. The jump from 90F to 110F after the curds formed was a little tricky. Setting the hub directly to 110F did not gradually heat up to temp.I kind of figured that would happen since it's supposed to heat very quickly. I checked the temp of the whey and it had reached 140F at the bottom of the bath before I realized and turned the temp down. I'll give it another try sometime, stepping up the temp a degree or two at a time. 

 

My second test was using just the induction hub for deep frying. I had my 7.5 quart enameled cast iron dutch oven filled with 1 gallon of peanut oil. After over an hour the oil wouldn't go over 345F. That was pretty disappointing. Good thing my pressure cooker stock was finished on the $50 Tatung so I could use it to finish heating my oil to my desired temp. It actually will shoot over 380F if I don't keep an eye on it. I had to keep adjusting the power on the Tatung for the stock. I'll try it on the Oliso next batch. It seems like it has finer controls if you want to heat something that is not extremely temperature sensitive.

 

 

 

 

[MisterKrazee]

14 hours ago, Chris Hennes said:

The weakness, on the other hand, was the noise. It's not a terribly loud device, particularly when it settles into temperature. But the act of keeping the water bath at the very steady temperature that this device achieves is that it cycles a lot. So it's off for a few seconds, then there is a click and a brief several-second hum of the induction unit, then it stops. Pause a few seconds. Repeat. It's just loud enough to be noticeable, and frequent/infrequent enough that it's never quite in the background. It's definitely more annoying than the gurgle of water from an immersion circulator, in my opinion.

 

I noticed the noise as well. I'm thinking some of it has to do with the vibration of the thin stainless of the bath. My dutch oven made very little vibration noise. The induction hub itself didn't seem terribly loud, but I only have the Tatung to compare to.

[Chris Hennes]

I made pommes puree with dinner tonight, and the Oliso was quite handy for the retrograding step since I didn't have to bag the potatoes. I also used it to sous vide a couple of turkey breast tenderloins. I even used the little metal rack it comes with for that. No idea if it made any different, but the turkey was properly cooked.