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from the Cleaner-food-cleaner-living-dept dept.
Innovation abounds in our modern society with brave souls venturing forth to squeeze every last use of existing hardware. A recent innovation is using a dishwasher to cook food:
The dishwasher is every home cook's best friend after dinner is served. But did you know you can use it to prepare that dinner as well?
[...] There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to imparting the wisdom of dishwasher cooking, there was even a Mythbusters episode dedicated to it.
[...] An experiment, conducted this month by Australian consumer advocacy group Choice, looked into this bizarre phenomenon to determine whether or not it was safe to cook stuff in your dishwasher.
The company's white goods tester whipped up a meal of honey soy salmon, coconut rice, an Asian style spinach and mushrooms, and a darling little custard and fruit compote.
The verdict? "Delicious!"
The article provides practical considerations of how to prepare food for cooking in the dishwasher as well as what foods are or are not good candidates.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday January 27 2019, @10:43PM (3 children)
First off, as noted in another post here, these ideas have been around for years.
More importantly, the problem with this is unreliable temperatures. There's also a very good reason why most modern ovens have a minimum temperature (usually around 160-175F), because within the range of error, you need to keep food above around 130F to stop bacterial growth and avoid creating a biological hazard in your kitchen. If you want to cook to temps below that, you need to be careful and use precise times.
If you really want to experiment with low-temperature cooking and food in plastic bags, buy a sous vide circulator (they get cheaper all the time) and you can actually cook your salmon to exact temperatures and times rather than guesswork with a dishwasher.
Even if you can't afford that, it'd be safer (and have more consistent results) to just put warm water to whatever temp you want in a small cooler and "cook" in the low-cost sous vide way.
This was a fun silly way to cook things at relatively low temp a couple decades ago when people didn't have better options for low-temp cooking. With loads of info online about sous vide with proper times and temperatures to cook anything safely, why bother with the trouble of a dishwasher?
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Monday January 28 2019, @02:00AM (2 children)
Understandable, but downright annoying! Many is the time I have wanted to use my oven to keep things warm overnight (fermenting, usually).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @03:30AM (1 child)
Lack of a low temp setting kept me from curing epoxy in the oven. Had to set up something with a heat gun instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @10:29PM
Lots of people "mod" ovens by sticking a thermocouple in them, adjusting the knobs on them on to max then and regulating the temperature by adjusting the duty cycle of the mains power input.
This is popular for doing crude reflow work at home as it can be very quickly built with just a handful of cheap parts (I'm sure you can find kits too), and works with basically any cheap oven.
I've seen chest freezers modded in the same way used to make homebrew lager.