Scheduled Preheating Sous Vide Machine

[evig]

Hello,

I want to be able to sous vide cook my eggs in the AM. I have enough time to cook them in the morning, but not enough time to preheat the water and then cook them, so I want to have the water start preheating about an hour before I get up. That way I can just toss the eggs into the hot water immediately. Every device I have found seems to only allow you to remotely start the unit using an app, but I'm asleep at that time. Is there any unit anyone has found that can schedule when it turns on?

Thanks!

 

[Braz]

Why not turn it on when you go to bed? Once the water heats up it takes very little electricity to hold temp, especially if you have a closed container.

 

[evig]

Funny, I actually never really thought of that. I do have a closed container but my thought was always that it burns a lot of power holding temp. I actually have a Kill-A-Watt unit, so I could always do a test to see just how much. Thanks!

 

[mosparky]

are you trying to make boiled eggs or poached eggs or what ?
For whatever reason I'm thinking your plan is to make boiled eggs. I respectfully ask you think it thru first if that is the case. If you toss a refrigerator temp egg into already boiling water, I think you will likely have a poached egg. The thermal shock will most likely break the shell. Any egg white leakage could be drawn into the recirculation of the sous vide and make a mess of you unit or damage it.
Vac sealed eggs of course won't have this problem.

 

[daveomak]

http://www.douglasbaldwin.com/sous-vide.html

Above is Baldwin's sous vide guide... He says eggs are totally pasteurized at 135 after 1 1/2 hours... you can look at his pictures of different temps for cooking eggs....
Perhaps, an overnight cook at 140-144 would provide you with a perfect egg... experiment... eggs are cheap... let us know what your results are....

Dave....


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[johnmeyer]

If your unit retains its settings when power is removed, you could use a simple on/off timer like this one:

Mechanical Outlet Timer

Braz is right that you probably would use very little electricity leaving it on overnight. Your Kill-A-Watt will tell you for sure.

BTW, I don't have a true sous vide but instead use my crockpot with an external controller. I mention this because my setup forces me to do something you probably don't ever consider: preheat the water. My crockpot takes forever to get up to temperature, so I simply mix water from my instant hot water dispenser and my sink faucet. I can usually get within a few degrees. You should be able to do something similar. If your water is a little high or a little low for a few minutes, it won't make any difference, so you should be able to put your eggs in within half a minute or so.

 

[flatbroke]

 

[evig]

Thanks everyone for the ideas on this. My goal is to make the 63 degree C egg. I did it once and it came out great, but it just took a lot of time to preheat and then cook for 1 hour. So I'll try the idea of preheating before bed and letting it run overnight then put the egg into the water in the AM and check how much power that used. But all of the other ideas are definitely handy so thank you. Unfortunately the timer idea won't work as the Anova unit I have will retain the temperature setting when powered on and off, but won't actually start. They, and many others I suspect, do that so that you aren't cooking something, have a power outage, only to have it come back on and you wouldn't know that your food was unsafe for x period of time.

 

[dr k]

are you trying to make boiled eggs or poached eggs or what ?
For whatever reason I'm thinking your plan is to make boiled eggs. I respectfully ask you think it thru first if that is the case. If you toss a refrigerator temp egg into already boiling water, I think you will likely have a poached egg. The thermal shock will most likely break the shell. Any egg white leakage could be drawn into the recirculation of the sous vide and make a mess of you unit or damage it.
Vac sealed eggs of course won't have this problem.

I have sou vide eggs according to Baldwin's chart but I like hard boiled eggs steamed for 12 minutes (Thermoworks hard boiled egg tests on their site) Like you mentioned, the cold eggs get thermal shocked, bounce around and can crack when put in boiling water, but that heat shock binds the double membrane to the shell not the white for easy peeling when cold after days in the fridge. So steaming reduces the thermal cracking more vs. putting eggs in boiling water. The whites are tender not rubbery and the yolks are fluffy not chalky. I've tried all kinds of myths with hard boiling eggs to get easy to peel cold eggs (warm is no problem.) It's a toss up getting easy peeling cold eggs from placing eggs in cool water first before boiling because the membranes tend to bind to the whites.