In January I bought a Carlisle StorPlus Food Storage Box - 26" x 18" x 9" to use as a water bath vessel using an Anova circulator with a full size polycarbonate pan for the milk. I never used it because it was just to many things to do to make it work. I started to list the pan on Ebay just to get rid of it but I thought about giving a a second chance. I purchased some 3/8" thick 40 duro silicone and cut it to fit my griddle surface. The pan I had had ribs on the bottom so I had to cut kerfs in the silicone to fit the ribs as you see in the picture.
Tests with 10 gal. water in the pan showed that at a griddle setting of 400F the silicone / pan interface stayed constant at less than 230F, well withing the safe limits of polycarbonate. Heat-rise rate was pretty good at 3 min per deg F when at curd cooking temperatures. So basically at the highest setting of the griddle you have a 10" x 20" 220F heating pad on the bottom.
Next step was to make cheese. I made Caldwell's Caerphilly-style using 8 gal. milk with the setup. It was a good test for it because of the curd cooking and cheddaring. I'll post the "cheese making" part separately but as for the pan I was extremely pleased
, and there is just something about using a clear pan and seeing the curds progress.
(note the last picture was with a wide angle cam so it's a bit distorted).