It's Here!: WiFi Nomiku Edition

My first real culinary immersion circulator was the original Nomiku, which I received from backing their first Kickstarter campaign.  Prior to that I was using an old surplus Fisher Scientific lab circulator that I had bought off Ebay and would constantly trip the GFCI if I plugged it in to a kitchen outlet.  I found the original Nomiku to be easy to use, well designed and had a lot of fun with it.  Later when Anova launched a Kickstarter for a bluetooth enabled Precision Cooker I jumped in for one.  The Anova Precision Cooker is a nice circulator but I found the bluetooth connectivity very limiting, to utilize the feature you have to be in close proximity and it's just as easy to adjust the settings on the circulator itself.  I liked the idea of being able to remotely control a circulator but wanted something that would allow controlling from further away than bluetooth would allow, so when Nomiku announced their new WiFi enabled circulator in mid August 2014 I was in.  As soon as I heard about the campaign I logged in to Kickstarter, made my pledge and became backer #40!

The original delivery date was in March 2015, but of all the projects I've backed on Kickstarter not a single one has shipped on time.  The original Nomiku was supposed to be delivered in December 2012, actual delivery happened quite a bit later than that but they did deliver so I wasn't too worried.  I'm happy to report that my WiFi Nomiku was finally delivered today!

When I opened the box I was surprised to find the circulator packed with a shirt, I had completely forgotten about that!  The box itself takes up much less space than the original model which should make it easier to store when not in use.

Here is the WiFi Nomiku attached to a 12 quart Cambro filled with 10 liters of water.  Unlike the original Nomiku (and the Anova Precision Cooker), the screen faces away from the bath.  This is something that several people had suggested when giving feedback about the original model and something I was pleased to see implemented.  The new model also doesn't have the external power brick that the original model had, I never minded it that much but others thought that it could be easy to inadvertently splash water on it damaging the circulator.  Local controls are pretty simple, there is a menu button below the screen to the left with a action button immediately the right.  Without reading the manual I was able to figure out how to connect to WiFi, entering the router password is a little clumsy since you have to scroll though all the lowercase letters to get to uppercase and scroll all the way through those to get to numbers/symbols.  It can take a while if your router password is strong with a mix of upper/lower case and symbols/numbers.  It would be nice if this could be done automatically like the Google Chromecast works.  Once the circulator was connected to WiFi I was having problems pairing it to my phone, I eventually had to uninstall the Tender app and reinstall.  After that it seemed to work fine.  Tomorrow when I'm out I'll see if I can turn the circulator on from standby and heat up the bath, the ability to have the bath already heated up when I get home from work will save me a lot of time!

The only testing I had the time to do today was to see how fast the WiFi Nomiku can heat up the water bath.  I filled the Cambro with 10 liters of cold tap water (I know, I usually fill it with hot but this was a test!), the initial temp was 52.4°f and I set the circulator to heat it to 130°f.  Yesterday I did the exact same thing with my Anova Percision Cooker, it took 50 minutes to go from the same starting temp of 52.4° to 130°, the WiFi Nomiku did the same thing in 27 minutes and 36 seconds!  Both baths were uncovered, I expect the time to go down a little once I cut the Cambro lid to fit the new circulator.

So far I'm really liking this new circulator, even without the WiFi connectivity it's a solidly build piece of equipment and I foresee it becoming my go-to circulator.  That being said, I think the clip could stand to be improved.  I've been thinking of a way to make a bracket that I could use to attach the circulator to the side of a beer cooler without having to make permanent modifications.  If I come up with something I'll put DIY instructions on the blog.

Whole roast chicken sous vide.

From time to time I like a good roast chicken for dinner, so when I was walking through my local supermarket recently and saw they had a sale on whole chickens I picked one up.  This was kind of an impulse buy so I really didn't have a plan and I was looking at a pretty bust week ahead at work so I needed to think of a way to get most of the work done ahead of time so I could quickly finish the cooking when I got home.  Sous vide turned out to be the answer.

The first part of the cooking was done on a day I wasn't working.  Everything in the cavity was removed and the chicken was rinsed and patted dry.  I mixed together some salt, pepper and poultry seasoning in a small bowl and generously seasoned the cavity and outside of the bird, then stuffed the cavity with some Land O' Lakes garlic herb butter, rosemary and quarters of onion.  The whole chicken was slid in to a Foodsaver bag I had cut earlier and vacuum sealed (a bird bigger than 4 pounds would have probably been too big for the bag).  Prior to prepping the chicken I had set up my Nomiku on a 12 quart Cambro with the bath filled up to the low mark on the circulator and set the temp to 62.8C (145F).  Adding the bagged bird to the bath brought the water level almost up to the high level mark on the circulator, I put on the lid and let the chicken soak for 6 hours while I went about my day.  After the soak I let the chicken cool down for 20 minutes at room temperature, then chilled down completely in an ice bath before throwing in the refrigerator.

A few days later it was time to finish the chicken.  When I made it home I placed the bagged chicken back in to the bath with the temperature set to 60C so it could start to re-therm while the oven heated up to 475F (convection).  I placed a bunch of asparagus in the bottom of a casserole dish with a cooling rack on top.  The chicken was removed from the bag and placed breast side down on a piece of parchment paper on top of the rack, all the juices from the bag were poured over the asparagus.  As you can see below, it was a little on the pale side. 

 The bird was patted dry with paper towels and placed in the oven for 10 minutes for the first side to brown, I also did a few minutes under the broiler to speed things up.  After turning the bird breast side up it was returned to the oven for another 10 minutes followed by a little time under the broiler.  Here is the final result...

All of the white meat was perfectly cooked and wonderfully juicy.  The dark meat good but a little on the red side for some tastes.  Next time I may break the chicken down and cook the white and dark meats separately at different temperatures.  The asparagus cooked in the bag juices under the chicken was amazing.

Nomiku Immersion Circulator

I was first introduced to sous vide back in culinary school, but it wasn't quite the same technique that's popular today.  Sous vide is french for "under vacuum", and what they covered in class was the "boil in bag" method of vacuum packaging pre cooked items at a central commissary to be reheated on site by immersing the bags in simmering water, unbagging and plating.  The sous vide technique that's popular today is a low temperature cooking method where items are vacuum bagged in a raw or almost raw state and cooked by immersing in a water bath maintained at a precise temperature using rather specialized equipment.

Back in 2009 I first became interested in playing around with the low temperature version of sous vide.  I started lurking around on Ebay until I was able to pick up an old Fisher Scientific immersion circulator in 2010 at a good price.  It was pretty dirty when it arrived and needed a lot of TLC to get working.  I took everything apart, cleaned all the electrical connections, descaled and scraped off a lot of gunk and was rewarded with a (mostly) working immersion circulator.  I say mostly because there is some issue that I haven't been able to remedy which causes the circulator to trip any GFCI protected outlet, like all the outlets in the kitchen.  Because of this I had to do all my sous vide cooking out in the dining room.  I wanted something a bit more reliable and modern, but new immersion circulators suitable for kitchen use were all in the $500-$1000 range.  That changed in June 2012 when a Kickstarter campaign started for a low cost immersion circulator for the home cook called the Nomiku.  For a mere $299 contribution a backer would receive one of the first Nomiku units, which were supposed to ship out by November 2012.  I jumped at the chance, knowing that there was no guarantee I would ever see anything.

The Nomikus were originally estimated to ship in November 2012, but that month came and went with no Nomiku.  The founders of the company had to deal with repeated delays, changes and roadblocks along the way but they persevered, and on October 1st I came home from work to a brand new Nomiku sitting on my doorstep!

The Nomiku is a much more attractive circulator than my old Fisher Scientific model, it consists of the circulating/control unit and a separate power supply.  In the box is a user manual, an illustrated "getting started" sheet and a sous vide primer.  The circulator feels solidly built, the only thing I noticed was that the green ring that you rotate to set the target temperature seems a bit loose but that seems to be by design.  I grabbed a large stockpot (about 28 quart capacity), attached the Nomiku and started filling until the water level reached the "Max" level indicator on the stem of the Nomiku.  That took 14 liters of water.  Normally I would fill the bath with hot water from the tap, but since I wanted to stress the unit to shake out any bugs I used cold water (about 20°C).  The reason I like to stress new equipment is that it allows my to find any faults early on that may require the item be replaced while still under warranty.

As the inaugural dish I decided to make sous vide carrots, this required a 90°C water bath that should be the hottest I'll ever need.  After filling the bath with the 14 liters of 20°C tap water I plugged in the Nomiku and tapped the screen to turn it on.  The desired bath temp is set by rotating the green collar around the screen, which I did until the display showed 90°C.  It took a LONG time for the bath to heat up.  At the 2 hour mark we were just getting up to around 76°C, so I tried to improvise a lid to help reduce the effects of evaporative cooling.  That helped, but I needed something a bit more effective so I ended up covering the pot with s sheet of aluminum foil and covered that with a dish towel.  That turned out to be effective and by the 2 hour 40 minute mark the bath had reached the desired 90°C temperature.  I made a simple preparation of carrots, just the vegetable, some butter, a little cumin and salt.  This was bagged using a Food Saver Vacuum Sealer and dropped into the bath for about 20 minutes.  As long as I had the foil top on the pot the Nomiku was able to maintain the bath temperature within +/- 0.1°C of the target point, I could see the light over the stove dimming as the heating element cycled.  Once the 20 minuted was up the bag was removed from the bath and I lowered the set temperature on the Nomiku to let it start cooling down.

If you've never tried sous vide carrots I suggest you give them a try.  The technique allows all their natural sweetness to some out and they retain an intense flavor.  The Nomiku performed like a champ, I think I can definitely get by with a smaller bath size for most applications and finding a bath container with a cover that I can cut to accommodate the circulator unit will help reduce the energy spent maintaining temperature.  Since I will be able to use my Nomiku in the kitchen I'll be able to pre-heat the bath water rather than let the circulator do that extra work on its own.  Now that I have a circulator that is so much easier to set up that my old one I'm going to be able to really play around with sous vide cooking.

One of the things I often hear from people is that sous vide cooking of meats is dangerous because you aren't raising the internal temperature to what the USDA recommends.  People need to understand that the USDA recommendations are based on a short exposure time at that temperature while pasteurization is a function of both temperature AND time.  A longer exposure at a lower temperature will kill pathogens just as well as a short exposure at a higher temperature.  Douglass Baldwin has an excellent sous vide guide including pasteurization tables located here.

Visit the Nomiku website for more information.

Edit:  I heated up another bath of 14 liters from 20°C to 90°C with the pot covered in foil and a dish towel from the start, this knocked almost an hour off the heating time (1 hour 45 minutes down from 2 hours 40 minutes).