3d Printer Steak, Dishwasher Salmon, and other cursed engineering student foods
Sues vide is a method of slow cooking that involved putting meat in vacuum sealed bags in precisely temperature controlled water to ensure a perfect internal temperature. Fortunately, a 3d printer heated bed offers very accurate temperature control and zip lock bags can work in a pinch.
I cut the pieces of steak into 4 inch chunks and mixed them in ziplock bags with a marinade made of lemon, steak seasoning, paprika and a pinch of garlic.
My printer is an CR10S with a borosilicate glass plate. I set the bed temperature to 70C to try to achieve a water temperature of 61C and made a curve fit of the heating data while I was waiting (R = 0.9988):
This steak turned out really good, all things considered. The main thing I noticed is the steak tasted much better after blowtorching a metal rod and searing the top and bottom slightly. The uniform and perfectly cooked steak tastes somewhat unnatural and a little bit of charring on the edges adds a familiar steak crunch.
I was pretty impressed with the results, but it generally makes sense. A sues vide machine is not doing much more than keeping the water at a very constant temperature for a while, and the 3d printer was able to hold 61C+/-1C for 4 hours.
Dishwasher Salmon
Salmon in a dishwasher is broiled, steamed and baked as the dishwasher goes through its wash and dry cycles. While this can come in handy if you have a dishwasher and no oven or stovetop, the salmon comes out somewhat mushy and tastes mediocre overall.
A bag of 10 salmon chunks from Aldi is as low as $8 in some parts of the country. These are the perfect size and cost for this fish cooking method. I double wrapped the fish and didn't run it with any dishes or lemon soap because I'm a coward.
As a control, I also oven cooked a few salmon samples and they turned out way better. The dishwasher makes the salmon loose its consistency a bit and turns more into a homogenous salmon flavored mushy blob. That being said, I can't help but being somewhat impressed - it came out of a dishwasher and it tastes like salmon.
Other amazing recipes
3d printer eggs - taste good but most hobby printer beds only go up to 100C so the eggs take a while
Rice cooker brownies - sticky mess, comes out as goo rather than brownies. Not recommended
Rice cooker mac and cheese - slightly worse than traditional mac and cheese. The tricky part is getting the exact right amount of water in at the beginning of the mix so it perfectly boils off and the rice cooker shuts off when the mac and cheese is done
Angle grind / tuna can / 5 gallon bucket cotton candy - the strategy here is to spin a tuna can with little holes on an angle grinder inside a 5 gallon bucket. Sugar can be melted in a metal bowl heated gently with a blowtorch. The setup to this is surprisingly hard to get right and it didn't feel very safe. I was able to get some wisps of cotton candy, but overall not recommended.
