Neil Turner

Cooking with a slow cooker

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A photo of our Instant Pot, which we use as a slow cooker. In front of it are several slow cooker cookbooks

Typically every other week, we have a slow-cooked meal at home. Along with sous vide cooking, which I wrote about last month, slow cooking a form of low temperature cooking where the food isn’t heated as much, but cooked for longer.

We use our Instant Pot as a slow cooker. During my blogging hiatus, I wrote on Medium why a multi-cooker is a good slow cooker. The gist of it being that you can use its timer features both to delay the start, and reduce the cooking temperature at the end to keep the food warm. However, the Instant Pot’s sauté mode is also helpful, if you need to pre-fry ingredients before starting the slow cooker timer. It’s not perfect, and there are some things that you need to bear in mind when using an Instant Pot as a slow cooker, as the temperature modes are not always comparable.

We used to have a dedicated slow cooker, but it was basic, and took up space that we needed for the more capable Instant Pot. The most basic models have one heat setting and turn on as soon as they’re plugged in, but many include multiple temperature settings and timers now.

Benefits of using a slow cooker

To me, there are several benefits of using a slow cooker over cooking meals using ‘traditional’ high heat methods.

The first of these is cost. Generally, it will cost less to run a slow cooker, even for several hours, than a hob or an oven for a shorter period. This is especially true for us, as we have solar panels – a slow cooker lets us do the majority of cooking during daylight hours with our free solar energy. In the winter, it’s dark when we get home after work and, even with a home battery, the amount of energy needed to run an oven means that we have to pay to use grid energy. I suspect that the cost of living crisis is one reason why slow cooking has become more popular in recent years.

Many slow cooker recipes simply require you to put the ingredients in the slow cooker, and leave it. They’re therefore quick to prepare, with no need to stir or keep an eye on a pan. You can put the ingredients in and turn the slow cooker on before leaving for work, and come home to a delicious meal that doesn’t require any work. If I’m working at home, I tend to put slow cooker meals on during my lunch break. Friends of mine who have issues with chronic fatigue find slow cooker recipes really beneficial, as it means they have something to eat at the end of the day which doesn’t require preparation, even when they’ve run out of spoons.

As with other low temperature cooking methods like sous vide, slow cooking is great for tenderising tougher cuts of meat like brisket. Coincidentally, these tend to be the cheaper cuts, and so you can save money this way too.

Not just soups and casseroles

There’s a perception that you can only use slow cookers for liquid-based meals like soups, stews, curries and casseroles. That’s not actually the case, and you can cook a wide variety of meals if you layer the ingredients correctly. In some cases, you essentially steam-cook ingredients that sit on top of others. Some recipes allow you to add rice, noodles or pasta shortly before the end, so that you can cook an entire meal in one pot.

That being said, one thing you are not going to get from using a slow cooker is anything crispy. That crispiness comes about thanks to the Maillard reaction, which usually requires cooking temperatures of at least 115°C. Even on their highest settings, slow cookers do not get as high as that. As such, some recipes call for ingredients like meat to be flash fried before or after slow cooking.

Slow cooker cookbooks

Last summer, I wrote about our go-to cookbooks, which included Nathan Anthony’s Bored of Lunch book (sponsored link). He has also written a follow-up – Bored of Lunch – Even Easier (sponsored link) which I’ve included in the photo above. We don’t use this as often as the first book, but there’s a nice recipe for Butter Chicken in there which uses yoghurt rather than cream. We also picked up his latest book, 6 Ingredient Slow Cooker (sponsored link), last weekend. It looks good but we’ve not attempted any of the recipes in there yet.

The first slow cooker book we bought was Slow Cooker Heaven by Lorna Brash (sponsored link) which is published by The National Trust. There are some good recipes in there, but they’re quite involved – some of them require a lot of preparation prior to turning the slow cooker on, or ask you to make your own spice mixes from scratch.

More recently we’ve picked up Poppy Cooks – The Actually Delicious Slow Cooker cookbook (sponsored link) by Poppy O’Toole. Poppy is apparently the ‘potato queen of Tiktok’, and used to be a professional chef before ending up out of work due to the Covid lockdown in 2020. Her recipes are generally also quite simple, and a little more authentic. We’ve cooked quite a few recipes from this book recently – Honey Garlic Chicken Thighs probably being my favourite.

For us, slow cooking tends to work best if I’m either working at home, or if Christine is working on a weekend. In the latter case, she can be held up and may not finish until 7pm, in which case it’s great coming home knowing that dinner can be ready and on the table within a few minutes, and with little effort.

How many British Prime Ministers have you lived through?

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I had an idle though recently about the number of people who have been British Prime Minister in my lifetime, and how that compares to people older or younger than me.

I was born in 1984, when Margaret Thatcher (urgh) was Prime Minister. She was first elected in 1979, and was around until 1990, when John Major took over. Then in 1997, Tony Blair came to power for 10 years, followed by Gordon Brown, until the general election in 2010 which saw David Cameron take over.

Following the Brexit referendum, Cameron stepped aside to allow Theresa May to take over for 3 years, and then we had 3 years of Boris Johnson. In 2022, we had Liz Truss for all of six weeks before Rishi Sunak took over, and then when Labour won last year’s General Election, Kier Starmer took over. And that’s where we are now.

So, in my 40 years of being alive, I’ve known 10 British Prime Ministers. A simple mean average of a new Prime Minister every four years then.

However, let’s compare that to our nine-year-old, born whilst David Cameron was Prime Minister. In their lifetime, there have been six Prime Ministers so far, for an average term of 18 months.

What about my Dad, who is in his 80s? He’s known 19 Prime Ministers (I’m counting Winston Churchill’s non-consecutive terms as one here), so an average of four and a bit years.

The point I’m trying to make, I suppose, is that historically Prime Ministers have lasted around four years on average, until very recently. Sure, Liz Truss only having been in power for six weeks has skewed things quite a bit. But Rishi Sunak also had a comparatively short term, and Gordon Brown, Theresa May and Boris Johnsons’ terms were all around the three year mark. The political upheaval we’ve seen in Britain in recent years is therefore unusual.

As for how long Keir Starmer will remain in power? I would be surprised if he’s not still Prime Minister in 2029, which is when the next election is due. That would make five years, and so would push the average up a bit. Whilst last summer, I was confident that Labour would win the 2029 general election, I’m not so confident now.

Learning French and Welsh with Duolingo

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A screenshot of my Duolingo profile.

Considering the millions of people who already use it, I probably don’t need to tell you about Duolingo. It’s arguably the most popular app for learning a new language, and I’ve been using it daily for over three years now.

Until now, I’ve been learning French. Now, I studied French for seven years at school and college, obtaining a Grade A* at GCSE, and then a Grade D at A-level. But my A-levels were in 2002, and my opportunities to practice French were limited in subsequent years.

I first dabbled with Duolingo in 2018, when we were due to go to France on holiday. I kept a streak for a few weeks to brush up my French, but didn’t manage to keep it up. I tried again the following year, as we went to France again in 2019, but I couldn’t keep the momentum going. Then lockdown happened and I couldn’t go anywhere.

Super Duolingo

However, we did book a France holiday for 2022. And coincidentally, on the 1st January 2022, Duolingo offered a year’s premium membership for £48, which was 60% off the standard price. So, I took advantage, and, apart from one day in 2023 (ironically because we were in France), I’ve kept my streak going. Having Super Duolingo made a big difference – not having to sit through repetitive adverts, and having unlimited retries, made it a more pleasant experience. I think that’s why I’ve stuck with it.

Indeed, as per the screenshot, I’ve managed to remain the Diamond League for 114 weeks – which is more than two years, if you’re counting. I have managed to come top of the Diamond League a few times, although I’ve yet to come top of the Diamond Tournament.

In terms of progress, my Duolingo French score is currently 105. On the CEFR, that puts me at the lower end of the B2, or ‘vantage’ scale. A high B2 score would probably be enough to study a degree course in French, should I ever have the desire to. Currently, the maximum obtainable Duolingo score for French is 130, which is high B2. In future, the maximum score may go up to 160, which would be C1, or ‘Advanced’ on the CEFR.

Switching to Welsh

Whilst my aim is to complete Duolingo’s French course up to a score of 130, I’m planning to switch to Welsh for a while. Our summer holiday this year will be in Wales, and it would be nice to learn a few phrases to use. And yes, I’m fully aware that almost every native Welsh speaker also speaks English, but so far all I know is ‘Bore Da’ (hello) and ‘Diolch’ (thank you). And Welsh is technically one of the UK’s official languages, albeit one that is little used outside of Wales.

The Welsh course on Duolingo is significantly shorter than the French course, and it apparently hasn’t been updated since 2023. It’s therefore possible that I may complete it before our holiday in July, at which point, I can go back to finishing the French course.

What’s next

After I’ve completed French and Welsh, I would have to decide what to do next. A while ago, I stopped doing the ‘legendary’ levels on Duolingo in French, so I could go back and re-do those. Or, I could switch to another language entirely. Alongside my A* in French GCSE, I also got an A* in German, having studied both, so maybe I could start the German course. After 25 years, I only remember small bits of German, and so I would probably still have to do the course essentially from the start. I’ve also never actually set foot in a German-speaking country (apart from a very brief visit to Switzerland in 1992), although I would like to.

Springing into March

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A photo of some spring daffodils at East Riddlesden Hall near Keighley.

Spring is here – probably. A time for getting out and poisoning pigeons in the park. Or not.

Hopefully, the arrival of Spring means that the weather will be nicer, and we can get out and have some more days out. Last month, we only managed a visit to Magna. We’d hoped to go to Nostell, as their half term activities looked good, but we could have only gone last Sunday when the weather wasn’t really conducive to being outside. Now that it’s been saved from closure, we may pop in to the Abbey House Museum at some point as we haven’t been for a while.

The other big planned activity this month is going to Sci-Fi Weekender in a couple of weeks. Once again, we’re going with friends, and though there are a few changes this year, I’m hoping it’ll be another good weekend. It’s just a shame that it’s at the end of such a long and boring drive across the fields of Lincolnshire to get there. On the plus side, it won’t be me doing all the driving this time as Christine will be able to do some of it; she passed her driving test at the end of last year.

Mid-March will also be five years since the UK went into lockdown. I have vivid memories of a day out to St Ives Country Park on Mother’s Day, which happened to be our last full day of freedom. So much has changed since then – I still haven’t worked a full five day week in the office since.

Grouping devices together in Home Assistant

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A screenshot of a Home Assistant dashboard showing a light group set to 50% brightness and a green colour

If you have several devices of the same type, and want to be able to control them all together, then it’s possible to group them together in Home Assistant. The integration is simply called ‘Group‘, and once configured, it creates a helper entity that will perform the same action on all grouped devices.

Last year, I picked up two Zigbee colour-changing LED strips from AliExpress. One was to go in our nine-year-old’s bedroom and the other in the living room – the idea being that we could set the colours depending on the time of year. Rather than having Christmas lights that we put up in December, and took down in January, these lights could stay up all year round. For example, they could be pink around Valentines Day, or green at Halloween.

That was the theory. However, despite ordering 3 metre long strips, they were too short. Our house is about 100 years old with tall ceilings, and consequently, tall windows. In the end, two LED strips together, totalling 6 metres, were long enough just for one window and so they’re both in our nine-year-old’s bedroom. Because they’re two separate strips, they appear and work as separate Zigbee devices.

Creating a group in Home Assistant

You can start the process of creating a group either on the Integrations or Helper screens of Home Assistant’s settings. First of all, Home Assistant will ask you what type of devices you are grouping – all the devices must be of the same type, so you can’t group a switch and a light together.

Well, actually you can – but first you need to create a ‘Change Device Type of a Switch’ helper. Say you have a smart plug controlling a light; you can then create a Helper that appears as a Light, and then that can be grouped with other lights.

Anyway, in my example, I selected Light, gave it a name, and then selected the entities that needed to belong to the group – i.e. the individual lights. There’s also a ‘Hide Members’ option, which will hide the devices you’ve selected from the list of entities in Home Assistant. If you’ll only ever want to interact with the lights as a group, then tick this. However, if you still want to be able to manage individual lights as well, then keep it unticked.

On my Home Assistant dashboard, the icon shows that the new group helper is for multiple lights. The good news is that, even with colour changing lights, all the lights in the group will respond the same way together once grouped.

I also make these lights available in Apple Home and Google Home, and again, I make sure that Home Assistant is exposing the group, rather than the individual lights. As such, when I use Google Assistant to turn them on and change the colour, both lights change simultaneously.

Let’s make the Bradford Playhouse accessible

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A screenshot of the Bradford Playhouse crowdfunder page for accessibility improvements

It was almost 11 years ago that I asked my blog readers to help save the Bradford Playhouse. The good news is that it was saved, and is still open. Unfortunately, being as it is a theatre from the 1920s, it’s not accessible – but its management team want to change that.

For anyone who can’t manage stairs, the building is essentially a no-go. There are stairs up to the main entrance, and once you’re inside, more stairs up to the seating or down to the bar. There is no lift, nor has there ever been one.

The good news is that planning permission has now been granted for accessibility improvements. There’ll be a new entrance, that much needed lift, and a facelift for the front of the building to restore its original art-deco appearance. In even better news, most of the money has been found to fund the improvements, partly thanks to Bradford being City of Culture for 2025. But there’s still a bit more money needed, and that’s where you can help.

Crowd funding

There’s a Crowd Funder, which needs to raise £10,000 by the 16th April. At the time of writing, they are 19% of the way there. Even if you can only spare £10, if another 800 people do the same, it’ll be enough to meet the target.

As regular readers will know, accessibility is something that is important to me and I include a section in all my newer days out reviews. Installing a lift at the Bradford Playhouse will open it up to many people who can’t manage stairs – not just wheelchair users, but others with mobility issues, and parents with prams. That way, more people can enjoy shows there, and it makes the venue more attractive to producers who currently may be deterred by its lack of accessibility. It would be fantastic if the funding target could be met, and the work completed before the end of Bradford’s year as City of Culture ends in 10 months time. I’ve already contributed; if you can, please contribute as well.

Homeway – easy remote access to Home Assistant

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Screenshot of the Homeway web site home page

Being able to access your Home Assistant instance outside of your home is useful, and there are many ways to do it – I’ve used several, including SWAG, an nginx proxy and more recently Nginx Proxy Manager. Today, I’m reviewing Homeway, a third-party service.

Setting up Homeway

Of all of the ways that you can enable remote access to Home Assistant, Homeway is one of the easiest. You sign up for an account on the Homeway web site, install an addon on your Home Assistant instance, and then you should be ready to go. Setting up the Home Assistant Companion App for iOS and Android is also supported, albeit with a little more work. If you don’t run Home Assistant OS or Supervised, and can’t install addons, then there’s also a Docker image or CLI client you can install.

Once up and running, it works well – you log in first to Homeway, and then into your local Home Assistant instance. It’s all done over SSL, without needing to set up DNS, port forwarding or reverse proxies.

Homeway also supports easy integration with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. Having done it myself, setting up Google Assistant manually is a chore, and even when it’s up and running, I found it slow and unreliable. Using Google Assistant this way is much easier, as you don’t need to create a developer account. I also found it to be much faster, and I haven’t had any issues with devices showing as offline.

If you want to use Home Assistant’s voice control feature, then Homeway also provides access to an AI large language model for processing commands. Its chatbot is called Sage, and behind the scenes it uses ChatGPT 4 and Anthropic’s Claude services. For speech-to-text, it can also call on Google Gemini and DeepSeek R1, and there’s a choice of 25 voices from the various services it uses. As I use Google Assistant, I haven’t set this up myself.

What about Home Assistant Cloud?

What Homeway offers is very similar to Home Assistant Cloud. Home Assistant Cloud is provided by Nabu Casa, who employ many of Home Assistant’s developers and support the Open Home Foundation. So why should one use Homeway instead of Home Assistant Cloud?

The answer is price. I’ve compared the prices in a table:

Monthly priceAnnual price
Home Assistant Cloud£6.50£65
Homeway£3.49£29.88

As you can see, Homeway is less than half the price of Nabu Casa’s Home Assistant Cloud. And, it should be noted that Homeway offers a free tier, if you just want remote access, albeit with data limits. You only need to pay for heavy usage and Google Assistant/Alexa access. There isn’t a free or lower-priced tier for Home Assistant Cloud.

That being said, as of January, Home Assistant Cloud now includes backup storage as well, which Homeway doesn’t currently offer. It’s also worth reiterating that some of the money from Home Assistant Cloud subscriptions goes to paying staff to work on Home Assistant development. As such, Homeway is a little controversial, and I noted that the Home Assistant Community on Reddit seems to block the word ‘homeway’ from posts.

For me, the best feature about Homeway is the Google Assistant support, which works well. I already have good remote access set up using Nginx Proxy Manager and will continue to use this.

The Earth Centre, Conisbrough

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A photo of some of the Earth Centre buildings, taken in 2008 by Trevor Willis

In last weekend’s post about Magna, I mentioned that it had escaped the fate of another nearby Millennium Project, The Earth Centre, further down the Don Valley. The Earth Centre opened in 1999, but closed just five years later.

Thankfully, unlike Transperience (another failed museum near Bradford that I wrote about in 2010), I did manage to visit the Earth Centre whilst it was open. That being said, my visit was around 25 years ago. I don’t think I still have any photos of my visit, and even if I did, they would’ve been shot on photographic film as I didn’t get a digital camera until 2003. The image above is from Geograph and re-used under this Creative Commons license. This also means that my observations are from rather old memories.

The Earth Centre was a visitor attraction to showcase ways that we could be more sustainable, and reduce our negative impacts on the environment. There was a large solar panel array, and I remember there being a building with a small wood burner that could generate heat from fast-growing willow trees on-site. There were also play areas and things for kids to do. The architecture was modern too, and the buildings were designed to be highly energy efficient – many with grass roofs. A series of reed beds ensured that any sewage produced could be cleaned up before being discharged into the River Don.

It was quite a large site, and as well as walking around, I remember there being a kind-of ‘bike bus’ where every passenger could also peddle, so it didn’t consume any diesel.

Getting there

The Earth Centre was located near the town of Conisbrough in South Yorkshire, on the site of a former coal mine. The site was within walking distance of Conisbrough railway station, and visitors were encouraged to use sustainable forms of transport to get there. Indeed, the relatively small car park was located some distance away. That may have been one of the reasons why it struggled – getting there wasn’t easy. I know we went there by train, but whilst Conisbrough station is on the line between Doncaster and Sheffield, only local stopping services call there. Again, I can’t remember how frequent the trains were back then, but nowadays Conisbrough gets just one train an hour in each direction.

Reasons for failure

The main reason why the Earth Centre closed was a lack of visitors. In its later years, it closed to the general public and was only open to pre-booked groups (e.g. schools), but even that wasn’t enough. I’ve mentioned the difficulties getting there, but I also remember Jeremy Clarkson giving it a hard time on his TV talk show, Clarkson, which ran from 1998 to 2000. He was filmed taking his son there, and made it out that the Earth Centre was some kind of really boring theme park.

But I also think it was maybe ahead of its time. Our knowledge about the environment, and the effects of climate change, have significantly increased in the 20+ years since the Earth Centre closed. Maybe a similar attraction would do better if opened today – especially if it was built somewhere with better transport links.

Over in Wales, there’s the Centre for Alternative Technology which is kind-of similar, and indeed pre-dates the Earth Centre. Sadly, like the Earth Centre was in its later years, it’s now only open to pre-booked groups.

As for the Earth Centre’s fate following closure? For a while, it became an air-soft arena, was used as a filming location, and then in 2011 it became an outdoor activity centre. Although the company that now owns it went into administration last month, so who knows what will happen in future.

I remember my trip to the Earth Centre quite fondly, and for a while later I had a t-shirt from the gift shop which had been made from unbleached cotton (again, a novelty at the time). It was a shame that it closed.

Many more photos of the site are available on this article from the 20th Century Society.

Playlist of the month: 2000s Student Union Rock night

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Screenshot of the 2000s student union rock night playlist

Last month’s playlist was all about electro swing, and this month I want to go back 20 years to my time as a student. Here are 10 songs that you would probably hear if you went to a student union rock night in Bradford in the mid-2000s – as I did many times. As usual, you can listen along on Spotify.

  • ‘My Own Worst Enemy’ by Lit. Lit have actually released 7 albums, but the massive popularity of this song means that they’re sometimes seen as a one-hit wonder. Indeed, it’s been streamed on Spotify 10 times more than any of their own songs.
  • ‘Diamonds and Guns’ by Transplants. This always went down well as dancefloor filler. Transplants were a supergroup made up of members of Rancid and blink-182, and were a punk rock/hip hop crossover.
  • ‘Chop Suey!’ by System of a Down. Another popular one for fans of heavy metal.
  • ‘Take On Me’ by Reel Big Fish. Organisers of ‘rock’ nights also needed to keep fans of rock-adjacent genres happy, and so you would usually get at least a few ska tracks in there too. This is Reel Big Fish’s cover of the a-Ha classic.
  • ‘Fat Lip’ by Sum 41. More punk rock, opening with a really powerful guitar riff.0
  • ‘The Rock Show’ by blink-182. A blink-182 song was usually guaranteed at some point. If it wasn’t this one, then it would be ‘What’s My Age Again?’ or ‘All The Small Things’ from their previous album.
  • ‘Basket Case’ by Green Day. I’m convinced there was some secret law that required all student unions to play this song at least once a month. I must’ve heard this song thousands of times by now.
  • ‘Smooth Criminal’ by Alien Ant Farm. Although the Michael Jackson original has more Spotify streams, this version seemed way more popular at the time. Alien Ant Farm are still going incidentally, with a new album out last year, but this is far and away their most famous song.
  • ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ by Good Charlotte. I really liked Good Charlotte’s first album when it came out, and again, this song was everywhere for a while.
  • ‘Want You Bad’ by The Offspring. This isn’t their most streamed song, but nor is the breakthrough hit Pretty Fly (For A White Guy), surprisingly. I’ve included it as it best fits the theme. And yes, they’re still going after 35 years.

Sous vide cooking in an Instant Pot

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An Instant Pot Duo Plus set to sous vide mode with 29 hours and 49 minutes left to run

If you have one of the higher tier models of Instant Pot, then you may well have a ‘sous vide’ button on it. We’ve used sous vide cooking a few times with our Instant Pot Duo Plus to make tasty meals, as it’s relatively easy to do.

Sous vide is French for ‘under vacuum’. Essentially, to cook something using the sous vide method, you put it in a vacuum-sealed bag, and then put it in a heated water bath (also known as a bain marie) inside your Instant Pot. Depending on the recipe, this can be quite quick, or take many hours. In the photo example, we were cooking some beef brisket for 30 hours.

There’s some instructions for how to set your Instant Pot to sous vide here. As well as setting the cooking time, you also need to set the temperature, using the buttons or dial on the front of your Instant Pot. Once it’s going, we use a glass lid (sponsored link) that we bought separately rather than the pressure cooker lid, so that you can see inside.

Sous vide without an Instant Pot

The sous vide cooking technique has been around since 1974, when it was pioneered by a French chef (hence the name). But the need to keep the water at a constant temperature means that it’s a difficult technique for home cooks to adopt without specialist equipment. You need something that forms a feedback loop between a temperature gauge, and the heat source. Of course, you could probably have a thermometer inside the bain marie and constantly adjust the heat yourself, but this isn’t feasible for recipes that take a long time. Thankfully, many models of Instant Pot will provide this feedback loop as part of their sous vide feature, so you can set and leave it.

If you don’t have an Instant Pot, or you have a more basic model without a sous vide mode, Amazon will sell you a sous vide wand (sponsored link) for around £50 that you can pop in your bain marie. The wand will provide the heat and measure the temperature. More advanced models can be configured with a smartphone app – a friend has such a model. It lets you set how well-cooked you want a piece of steak, for example, and sets the time and temperature accordingly.

Vacuum sealing

The other aspect of sous vide cooking is that you should vacuum seal your food, before it goes in the bain marie. We bought our vacuum sealer from the middle aisle of Lidl, of all places – in fact, it was a Lidl in France, and so we have to use a UK plug adaptor with it. Again, if you need a vacuum sealer, Amazon will sell you one for around £23 (sponsored link), and expect to pay £11-£15 for two rolls of bags.

If you don’t want to buy one, then you may get away with just a regular plastic food bag with as much air squeezed out of it as possible.

What we’ve cooked using sous vide

I’m mentioned that we’ve cooked beef brisket using the sous vide technique, and indeed we’ve done so more than once. Brisket contains a lot of connective tissue, and so you need to use slower cooking methods to allow this tissue to break down. Sous vide is perfect for this, and after 30 hours, you’ll end up with a very meaty piece of meat.

We’ve also done duck confit this way, which then went into a cassoulet. Again, this was a long and slow recipe, taking around 12 hours with the cooking temperature set to 75° C.

It’s worth noting that, whilst you can cook steak using the sous vide method, you won’t get any browning on the outside. If this is something you want, then you’ll still need to flash fry the meat at a higher heat after it’s come out of the bain marie.

In summary, sous vide cooking, whilst requiring some forward planning and investing in the correct equipment, is also relatively easy. You can prepare some really tasty food ahead of time, and have it cook slowly at a regulated temperature. Plus, because the food is vacuum sealed, it’s a less messy way of cooking too. We don’t do it very often, but the few times we have done it have always been worth it.