For quite some time, sous vide has been a rising item in the consumer items for home cooks.  Most of us are used to cooking at a high temperature for a short amount of time.  Grilling a steak for a few minutes, or quickly cooking some burgers, putting a pork loin into the oven for half an hour, or stirfrying thinly sliced meat and vegetables for just a scant few minutes.  Our lowest temperature and longest time tends to be using a slow cooker for 8 hours.

The difference with sous vide is that not only is the temperature much lower, ranging around 135=145, but that the time to cook is much longer.  A cut of meat that normally cooks for 45-60 minutes in the oven will take 12-48 hours.  Why so long? The low, constant temperature will slowly cook the cut of meat, and will not bring the temperature above this, so the end result is that the cut will not be cooked over this temperature.  Great for cooking something to rare or medium rare, without being too raw on the inside and not too cooked on the outside.

There are a number of resources out there, and I'm not used to this enough to do a full explanation, however, I will explain the parts I'm using and the ingredients I've used used.

I hooked up my handy crock pot and filled it with warm water, then plugged it into a temperature control device that had cost me 75 dollars new, and that I use for a number of items including:  Making yogurt, incubating koji and now, using as a low temperature cooker.  The temperature control device consists of a thermometer probe and a unit that plugs into the wall.  The heating device, in this case the slow cooker, plugs into the temperature control unit, and the thermometer probe is set into the water.  I set the device to cut the power when the temperature reaches 140 degrees, and to start heating as soon as the temperature drops below 135.  

While the water was heating up, I've sliced up a single carrot, a small onion and added it into a ziploc freezer bag along with a small splash of cheap, but drinkable, wine.  Actually it was a Kroger special Pinot Noir.  Unfortunately, I didn't have any other wines to use at the time.  I seasoned a beef sirloin roast with garlic salt and freshly ground black pepper.  The particular cut (which I'll have to check which kind it is in detail), is a fairly solid slab of meat, with little to no marbling or connective tissue which would normally render out fat and flavor into the meat.  Because of this, I had decided to use the vegetables and wine, even at the risk of this becoming more like a stew.

I will be letting this cook over the next two days, and finish it up on a grill, or on my cast iron pan, in order to brown the outside of this small 3 pound piece of lean meat.

Ideally, what will happen tomorrow night, will be slicing some veggies (the remainder of the carrots, onion, garlic and a parsnip) and putting that into the hot water to slow cook, finishing it the next day in the oven.  Unlike meat, I'm of the opinion that root vegetables really need to be cooked at a higher temperature than meat.  Usually around the 185 degree range.  I'm not sure what heating the vegetables up to 140 will do for me

Haven't managed to do anything notworthy on the gluten free side of things lately, plus it's tax season (extensions) which means even less time to do anything.

The mead is still slowly fermenting away at 60 degree's, it's optimal temperature for the particular yeast, and it's still bubbling happily away.

A few weeks back, I also started a sorghum process that was similar to creating sake:  Innoculating steamed grains, and using the enzymes created to convert other steamed grain to sugar.  This process did not happen at all like I had hoped, so instead, I've been trying it like the full sake process.

I had hoped that the Koji creation process would produce enougn enzymes that it could convert more starch to sugar if introduced to a higher water temperature than sake sees.  This was not the case.  Perhaps I may need to innoculate large quantities of grain to do this (all the grain I'm trying to convert for example), as well as crush them into small enough pieces that water at a certain temperature would convert the starches to sugar.
For now, I had added some yeast, 1118EC I believe, a champagne yeast, just to see what would happen.  After all, there were no hop flavorings involved.

After several weeks, I have not yet strained the liquid away from the grain, and really need to.

The mead is still kicking away at 60 degrees, still fermenting, still smelling quite sweet, but soon I'll need to move it out of the temperature chamber.  I recently purchased some beer taps (faucets and shanks) and wish to add these to the freezer that was converted into a refridgerator suitable for kegs.

I've recently (last week) went to the Rennisannce festival and have suffered no ill effects.  It has been quite pleasant, however the only items I can eat are salads and turkey legs.  There is little else that I can really have.