Re:Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
by entropie on Monday February 24, 2025 @07:46PM
(#43166760)
You can do sous vide without plastics. For example I infuse oil via sous vide with biomaterial in weck jars.
Re:Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
by kjs3 on Tuesday February 25, 2025 @08:00PM
(#43179464)
Yeah...what a weird derail. My sous vide has a small maybe 3"x0.5" plastic cap at the end and rest is stainless steel. I could have gotten a different one without the plastic I'm sure (maybe more expensive?), but I can read the science and be reasonably sure I'm not going to die horribly from that much exposure. Stainless steel or aluminum[1] pot and you're blissfully plastic-death free.
[1] I shouldn't have said that...the 'aluminum pots give you Alzheimers' crowd could descend at any moment.
Re:Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
by Wistar on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @12:25AM
(#43180901)
It’s not the SV circulator but the plastic vacuum bags folks are most worried about.
Re:Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
by kjs3 on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @09:09AM
(#43183711)
Which you don't have to use either, but that makes more sense.
Re:Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
by Wistar on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @04:59PM
(#43188719)
It is hard to not use plastic vacuum bags for sous vide. Although there are re-usable silicon bags, such as stasher, they are — personal experience here — not very good for sous vide.
Re:Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
by kjs3 on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @07:14PM
(#43189859)
Yes, I too have used a couple of different silicon bags as alternates. The stashers are barely usable, and the cheaper but more sous vide friendly are ok but are hard to clean if you're trying to reuse them. But is it about the heat transfer and stable temp, so anything that keeps what your cooking completely in liquid and can tolerate thermal expansion should work, right?
Re:Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
by bigstrat2003 on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @10:35AM
(#43184611)
Or you could not worry about it, like most people do, and be just fine.
It won't matter much if you don't eat out all the time / don't do sous-vide at home, but otherwise, yeah.. best avoided.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3222987/
> Results: Almost all commercially available plastic products we sampled—independent of the type of resin, product, or retail source—leached chemicals having reliably detectable EA, including those advertised as BPA free. In some cases, BPA-free products released chemicals having more EA than did BPA-containing products.