Has anyone had success with boiling roughed out bowls and then drying? If so, what were the steps involved?
What works for one person might not work for another, due to wood specie, climate, conditions in your shop, etc.
I'm in the moist Pacific Northwest as well, and find boiling helps with woods prone to cracking on drying - for me that means most fruitwoods and particularly Pacific Madrone, especially burl, but I also boil even straight-grain madrone if there's even a hint of twist or swirl to the grain. Once I get going, anything that moves goes into the boiling pot. The picture is a madrone burl roughout that was boiled and a chunk of cutoff from the same piece of burl about the same thickness and dried under about the same situation. These have both been sitting in my shop for about 8 weeks.
The procedure isn't particularly time consuming or difficult, at least the way I do it - yet it seems to work. Get my prepared blanks together, setup the boiling pot (100 Qt stock pot on a propane turkey cooker). Takes about 10 - 15 minutes to get setup. Start roughing and coring the blanks, chucking the roughouts into the pot as I go. About an hour in, the pot is at a slow boil. Keep on roughing until everything is roughed out and cored. Depending on the size of the blanks, I can get 12 to 24 roughouts in the pot at the same time. If I need room, I take out whatever has been in there the longest (its usually been boiling for at least a couple of hours by then). As you might have noticed, I don't approach the process with a slide-rule and clipboard; sometimes they'll sit in the pot for several hours before being pulled out.
At the end of the day's work, pull them out, stack them on edge somewhere with good air circulation until they're surface dry. Some people quench them in cold water first, but I haven't seem a benefit. After the initial surface drying (sometimes a couple of days, they are stacked rim down with plenty of separation for air circulation on the shop floor. There they sit - checked on once in a while - until they're ready to turn. I use the smallest cores to check on MC - just turn them and let them dry and see how much they move. I've played with the idea of letting them sit in the cooling pot overnight, but have found that it seems to promote mold growth on the blanks while they're drying.
With this 'process' I haven't lost a madrone burl piece in a very long time. Perhaps a DNA soak would do the same thing, but why mess with success? If I'm roughing other species along with madrone or even maple burl, I'll chuck everything into the pot - don't know if it helps much with all of it, but it doesn't seem to hurt and I loose very few roughouts to cracking. It's just part of the roughing process for me.