On the bge?

[MBMorgan]

MBMorgan Fair enough. I edited my post above before you replied where I still believe that sous vide and cooking in air are the same. However I really hadn't been thinking about the bag. We thinking about the bag, I do agree that it conducts heat. In addition the bag should remove the evaporative cooling effect that would slow the cooking process from convective heat transfer. If anything wrapping the meat in foil vs cooking sous vide in a plastic bag should be the same thing with just different heat transfer properties ie., water vs air, plastic vs aluminum / butcher paper.

And yes I'm a mechanical engineer but my speciality is not heat transfer so while I understand it and studied it, I'm by no means claiming to be an expert on it or docblonder .

FWIW, in addition to the purely heat-transfer angle, we geo-types often tend to think of convection more as a state of circulatory equilibrium powered by thermal disequilibrium. Examples would be giant convection cells in the mantle acting as a set of "rollers" that we think are responsible for moving tectonic plates around ... or convection cells in the crust composed of circulating heated water that carries dissolved minerals upward to be deposited and left behind as the water cools before it descends again to be reheated before it picks up more minerals and heads upward again. And that blasted sous vide circulator prevents thermal disequilibrium in the bath. That's just wrong ... ...

[josht138]

Interesting. I work in nuclear power and that sounds a lot like reflux cooling. Whereas in pressurized water, the nuclear reaction heats the water, the water turns to steam, and at the top of the steam generator the steam cools, condenses, and flows back into the source, cooling it.

[MBMorgan]

Yep ... exactly the same thing. As a side note, one thing that makes the small barrel cookers (PBC, WSM) so ridiculously effective, is that their diameter is too small to allow a convection cell to be established ... hence effectively even temps throughout.

[tbob4]

Sous Vide is a method of cooking that utilizes INFLECTION to cook the food. An example: I put a couple of steaks on the grill. My daughter and wife stand out in the background yelling about the doneness of the steaks. My daughter shouts "I know you have cooked it too long, it's going to be brown in the middle!" My wife yells "What are you doing? You are taking the steaks off just because our daughter told you to? It's going to be pink in the middle. Leave it on!" The meat reacts to the heat and tone of the cook. Nothing ever turns out exactly right. With Sous Vide, the steak goes into a bag in water for a couple of hours at a rare temp. There is no yelling in the background which keeps the steak from seizing up and becoming tough/bitter. Every so-often I look at the water and whisper, "you are so nice. I have to just brown one of you on the flame and cook the other on the fire. No yelling, no over-the-shoulder critiques. Sometimes my steak is in the water bath, sometimes it just goes on the flame to medium rare. I talk nice to it, too. Inflection has not been discussed much in this forum but I think Meathead and Dr. Blonder would agree that it is an oft forgotten principle of cooking.