Question

Sous vide cooking Is a method where you seal food in a bag and cook it in a water bath at a precise temperature for a long time. It's great for keeping the food moist and flavorful. Chefs love it, but it’s expensive. A engineer wants to make a less expensive one for use at home. It has criteria including it has to be 18 ins or less on each side, has to hold one pound of food, quickly heat up to 185 degrees and more. Water is a higher heat conductivity then oil, what would be better to cook a potato in the engineers invention, a small or large potato? The engineer chooses to use the oil, he bakes potato’s and results come in all the potato’s temperatures were under 185, did the engineers invention meet the criteria? If not what can he do to make it meet the criteria?

Answer 1

The engineer's sous vide machine did not meet the criteria because it failed to heat the potatoes to the required 185°F. Improvements could include using water instead of oil, cooking smaller food items, enhancing the heating element, or incorporating a pressure system to increase the achievable temperature.

Step-by-step explanation:

Sous vide is a cooking technique that involves cooking food in a sealed bag submerged in a water bath at a precise temperature. A student engineer is designing a home sous vide machine with specific criteria. The food, in this case, a potato, must be cooked at 185°F. When the engineer used oil in the invention, the temperature of the potatoes did not reach the required 185°F, indicating that the sous vide cooker did not meet the criteria.

To improve the design and ensure the sous vide machine heats up efficiently to the desired temperature, several steps can be taken. Considering that water has a higher conductivity than oil, switching to water as the cooking medium could facilitate more efficient heat transfer to the food. Additionally, the size of the food item matters. A smaller potato would heat up more quickly than a larger one because it has less mass for the heat to penetrate. Improvements could also involve refining the insulation of the cooker, increasing the power of the heating element, or using a pressure system to raise the boiling temperature of the liquid to allow higher cooking temperatures.

To achieve the target temperature of 185°F, particularly when cooking in water, using a pressure cooker approach could be effective. Higher pressure within the cooker allows the boiling point of water to increase, facilitating cooking at temperatures above 100°C without reaching a boil. This mechanism allows for quicker cooking, similar to the enhanced efficiency seen in pressure cookers used in culinary settings or even for sterilization purposes like autoclaves.