I'm an avid home cook, and love experimenting with different cuisines, foods, styles, etc. Last year, I got into cooking sous vide, and even built my own home-immersion circulator, which, when combined with my local butcher (beef palace baby!), yields some most excellent results.

I've noticed a some espresso machines have temp controls on them... can these machines be operated "open" ? A few seem like they would be good sizes and could act as dual-use machines; i.e. immersion circulators. I have limited space, and this could help me get rid of extra, single purpose stuff like the Igloo icebox, and the tangled immersion circulator mess into a single box, that, mind you, could also serve espresso!

Thoughts?

Nope. The temperature controls are only for the internal sealed boilers. Then you have other boilers that are maintained by pressure instead of temperature. You can however do others things that cannot be done anywhere else. For example, if you put two tablespoons of Nutella in a frother, and then add milk and froth everything together, you'll get a very good and aromatic hot chocolate.

Cheers

Bummer, okay then. I have a bellman stovetop steamer now, at least I could consolidate that - thanks for the tip on hazelnut cream, sounds yummy.

What about some of those espresso machines where people add a pid controller to it? Or are those limited to the high 200F +/- temps?

Found a variation on the immersion circulator where someone took apart a cheap espresso machine for the pump and heating elements, maybe using that I could consolidate mine into a smaller box, instead of having a spaghetti mash of wires and tubes.

Such a pump would die very soon if it is set to pump hot water.
La Peppina and the Caravel are the only machines I know of that are suited to be controlled via a PID for Sous-vide cooking. Other machines have the piston in the middle of the boiler, have only a very small entry hole or have completely closed boilers.

I have a La Peppina plugged into a PID consisting of a Watlow 76 and a SSR inside an external enclosure with a thermocouple wire dangling inside the kettle of the open boiler of the espresso machine. I can and have, on one occasion, use the PID in a crock pot to play with Sous Vide. It wasn't optimal as I didn't have a water circulator, but it was fun to try. I didn't re-tune the PID for the crock pot as it was going back to the La Peppina afterwards. I have heard that you can Sous Vide an egg or something else small inside the La Peppina boiler, but I decided to pass on that.

You may want to check into Auber Instruments and look at their plug-n-play controllers that could be used for sous vide and an open boiler espresso machine like the La Peppina.

You may want to look at this DIY Sous Vide blog entry on Kymos if you haven't already seen this.

Finally, you may want to see this H-B thread on low temperature sous vide cooking with PIDs.

I'm still waiting for the day when you pull down a temperature probe from your range hood and dip it in the pot on your ceramic cooktop and just program in the temperature profile that you want. We've had temperature probes in ovens for how long?

Yakster, thanks for the links

I am well seasoned with sous vide cooking - my favorite experiment was a 10lb brisket done 48 hours at 160F, and my favorite meal was surprisingly last week (prime NY strip from Beef Palace, 133F for 2 hours, then thrown on a glowing red hot pan in the BBQ with dallop of butter just to sear for the maillard - had flames 5ft high ).

I followed a few DIY articles and built a couple of my own immersion circulators, just looking now to consolidate some equipment to make room. Looks like the espresso machine idea won't really work unless I take apart the machine, so I'm now considering using a dishwasher pump (designed for high heat to begin with), thereby allowing me to simply have a single box that has a couple hoses sticking out. The pumps can be had pretty cheap, too. It's fun

jedovaty wrote:What about some of those espresso machines where people add a pid controller to it? Or are those limited to the high 200F +/- temps?

PID units take an input, and feed an output to change the system being measured. As long as you can sense the temperature, and can control the heat (or cooling) you can control the temperature with a PID, be it 2000 degrees F or 2.

In fact, PID controllers are also used for controlling motion with inputs from servomotors or other sensors, not just temperature.

As long as an appliance can produce the temperatures without damage, a PID can control it.