Kitchen Hacks: Home Made Meat Smoker

November 23, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

[Matt] noticed an overabundance of sous vide builds in the past week, so he decided to throw his Home made meat smoker into the ring. There’s not many things more delicious than a nice cut of smoked meat, and the fact that it’s very similar to the sous vide hacks we’ve seen is an added bonus.

[Matt] decided to build a ceramic smoker like a Big Green Egg. He took a cue from [Alton Brown] and used two terracotta planters and a hot plate for the smoker. For controlling the hot plate, the cheap $35 PID controller we’ve seen in a few sous vide builds was used. The PID can’t control the 7 amps of AC that the hot plate needs, so [Matt] used a solid-state relay he had lying around.

A stainless steel mixing bowl was placed on the hot plate for wood chips. So far, [Matt] has run his smoker for more than 12 consecutive hours, and the results are really promising – there wasn’t much change in temperature between the chill of the morning and the heat of afternoon. [Matt]’s build is great and perfect for venison jerky now that deer season is coming up.

Kitchen Hacks: Sous Vide Builds Don’t Need To Cost An Arm And A Leg

November 22, 2011 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

It’s not that we haven’t seen inexpensive Sous Vide builds. It’s just that we enjoy the fact that [Kelvin’s] Sous Vide machine gives new life to unused things. The cooking vessel is a crock pot which he acquired for just $3. He housed it in a large Styrofoam box which he got for free through his local freecycle program. The circulation pump is a $0.99 fish tank part that pushes about ten gallons per hour.

He even hunted around to find the best prices on the control circuitry. The PID controller is obviously the most important part, as it will regulate the cooking temperature. He found a greatly discounted module that set him back just over $30. It even has a self-learning feature that sounds like it’s handy (not sure if all of these have that though).

Check out the video after the break. We like the use of his old RAM heat sinks to help dissipate heat from the solid state relay that drives the heating element. Since that SSR is inside of the foam box we could see heat becoming an issue. This way it’s dissipated, but not wasted.

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Kitchen Hacks: Microwave Plays YouTube Videos Matched To Your Cooking Time

November 18, 2011 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

Behold the uWave, a microwave oven that plays YouTube videos while it cooks. [Kevin] and three classmates at the University of Pennsylvania developed the project for the 2011 PennApps hackathon. It uses a tablet computer to replace the boring old spinning food display microwaves are known for. Now, an Arduino reads the cook time and sends that information to a server via its Ethernet shield. The server then searches YouTube for a video that approximately matches the cooking time, then pushed that video to the tablet to start playing. The video demonstration embedded after the break shows this, as well as the tweet that the machine sends at the beginning of the process.

It’s an interesting concept, and we think the code used to push a video to the tablet has a lot of other applications (we’re keeping this one bookmarked). On the other hand, we wonder how long it will take for public microwaves to become ad-supported? We’re thinking it’s hard for companies selling antacids, acid reflux medicine, Cup ‘o Soup, and Hot Pockets to resist this opportunity.

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Kitchen Hacks: An Android Bartender

November 17, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

[Nick] just finished up bis barbot build that is named after our favorite bartender. It’s an impressively capable even if it was done on the cheap.

The user chooses a libation for iZac to make via an Android tablet. This drink is interpreted by an Android ADK to have the mechanics of the robot swing into action and start making a drink.

The part of the build that moves the fluid was inspired by the Evil Mad Scientist Labs’ Drink Making Unit 2.0. Instead of pumps pulling the liquid through tubing, [Nick] attached an aquarium air pump to an Erlenmeyer flask. A siphon tube draws liquid out of the flask because of the difference in air pressure. The liquid is controlled by a few laser cut pinch valves that he designed.

Once a user selects a cocktail, the robot swings into action and dispenses liquid into a glass sitting on a load cell. Since the glass is being weighed at all times, iZac knows exactly how much alcohol (and in what proportion) is in the cocktail. [Nick] tested out iZac at the Sydney Hackerspace with soda water and flavoring. iZac proved very popular and we’re wondering if we could build something like this in a liquor cabinet.

Ice On Your Turkey Makes It Tender, Apparently

November 16, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 51 Comments

Turkey day is fast approaching and for those of us not cool enough to be rocking the deep-fried turkey this year we’ll have to suffer though a potentially dry oven-roasted bird. Chef [Justin] came up with a great way to prevent dried out white meat on a turkey using ice of all things.

The enemy of moist and tender breast meat is heat. Cooking meat for too long will dry it out. There’s a problem, though: the breast is the thickest part of the bird which means it will take longer than the legs or thighs to reach the necessary 160 degrees. [Justin] figured that if he could cool down the breast with ice, it will take longer to cook and both the white and dark meat will come out perfectly.

[Justin] set up a test with two 15-pound birds. Both turkeys were allowed to come up to room temperature, then ice packs were put on the breast of one bird for 15 minutes. This lowered the temperature of the experimental breast by a few degrees. Both birds were then thrown into the oven.

After coming out of the oven, both birds looked great. The bird treated with ice packs appeared to be more tender and moist. Sounds like the perfect thing to pull out of our bag of tricks next week.

Solder Reflow Toaster Oven

November 15, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

[Sebastian] needed a small solder oven so he bought himself a small toaster oven (Spanish, Google Translate). It’s not the kind of thing we’d make our breakfast in now, but for soldering it’s a very nice oven.

After a little bit of research on Google, [Sebastian] discovered that the best technique when dealing with reflow ovens and solder paste is following a specific temperature curve. Ideally, Tin/Lead solder needs to preheat from room temperature to 150 degrees C, then level off so the flux can activate. After that, a quick jaunt above 183 degrees C makes the solder flow. To get his toaster working optimally, [Sebastian] stuck a thermistor in the toaster and measured the temperature profiles of different ‘modes.’

The correct temperature curve was calculated using different heater elements and [Sebastian] was off to the races. He did have a few problems on his first few boards – solder bridging, mostly – but that’s not the fault of the oven. An LCD display (translate) was added recently so accurate real-time temperature monitoring is available.

Kitchen Hacks: [Dino’s] Egg Tricks

November 14, 2011 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

[Dino’s] latest weekly hack plays right into our Kitchen Hacks theme. He’s sharing some obscure tips and tricks involving eggs.

It should come as no surprise that he knows a thing or two about using eggs. After all, he keeps chickens and you’ve can’t just let good eggs go to waste. Which is where his first tip comes in. Eggs will keep for weeks, but if you don’t know if they’re still good you can put them in a bowl of water before cracking them. Eggs that float are on the way out!

Need some scrambled eggs but don’t have a pan to cook them in? His next feat is to cook up a breakfast of steamed eggs using the steamer nozzle on his espresso machine. It’s messy (egg seems to be flying everywhere) but the final product does look appetizing.

The rest of the video (embedded after the break) shows his methods of making Hollandaise sauce for Eggs Benedict, and how to blow the innards out of an egg-shell.

Now we have a picture in our minds that [Dino’s] daily routine is surrounded by eggs… like the egg farmers in Napoleon Dynamite.

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