I'm looking for something that can roughly do the job of a commercial
or laboratory bain marie -- maintain food at a fairly precise set
temperature in the range from room temperature to boiling. Most slow
cookers I've seen offer choices like high/low/warm. The ones that
bill themselves as "programmable" are mostly talking about a
programmable timer, so that you can, for example, cook at "high" for 6
hours then switch to warm. I don't care about the timer, I want to
program the temperature, and I don't want to be limited to a selection
of 3-6 different temperatures either -- I want to be able to select
any temperature up to boiling to a precision of +/-2F or so.
Something with a probe that can be inserted into the food to determine
food temperature would be an added bonus.

I have considered getting a cheap countertop roaster oven, but the
temperature controls on those things (a simple knob) are not precise
enough, nor do they have the right range (most seem to start at
"warm", which looks like about 160F to me). I have electronics
experience, so I could rip the thing apart and replace the thermostat
with my own digital controls, but that sounds like a Project, and if I
can just buy something reasonably priced I'd rather do that.
(Commercial/lab bain maries that can do what I want are in the $600+
range, maybe less on ebay. I'm thinking <$100 for my purposes.)

Anybody know of such a thing? I keep searching online, but it's often
impossible to tell exactly what the capabilities of a slow cooker are
from reading the descriptions. "Programmable" always refers to the
timer AFAICT. I've seen at least one model at Target that had a
temperature probe, but I couldn't tell from the outside of the box
what your options for temperature control were, and I didn't feel like
getting permission to open the box and get the manual just then.

TIA,

--
Randall