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We’ve read through this guide, and stand by our recommendations. Our most recent round of testing took place in 2019, and we continue to long-term test our picks.
If you like to experiment in the kitchen, you might have fun with a sous vide cooker, a device that lets you cook foods slowly and precisely to the perfect temperature—think custardy eggs and effortless medium-rare steak. After testing dozens of models over the past six years, we think the Anova Precision Cooker Nano is the best sous vide immersion circulator for home cooks. It’s the smallest, most affordable model from a company that’s consistently made some of the best-performing cookers we’ve tested. And its precise temperature control and quick heating are on a par with that of much more expensive machines.
This immersion circulator is accurate, impressively easy to use, and affordable.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $100.
The Anova Nano’s Bluetooth connection allows you to set and control the cooker from your phone, and use Anova’s app to set the time and temperature from preset recipes onto the circulator. The cooker also has controls on it though, meaning you don’t need to use your phone if you’d prefer not to. Like just about every sous vide circulator we’ve tested, the Anova cooker is accurate enough for even the most exacting of cooking techniques. This is crucial because even minor variations can foil your attempt at perfectly runny egg yolks with just-set whites.
This cooker is one of the smallest and most powerful we tested, and it works with less water, but it lacks physical controls.
The Breville Joule relies exclusively on a smartphone for all controls adjustments; it doesn’t have onboard controls. If you’re okay with that, this cooker is in many ways equal or superior to the Anova Precision Cooker Nano. It’s physically smaller, it’s just as accurate, it heats water faster, and it can cook with less water in a pot thanks to a magnetic base and a unique pump system. We love the app, which works over either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
This model is not the most elegant option, but it is efficient and inexpensive.
Monoprice’s Strata Home Sous Vide Immersion Cooker 800W is louder than other cookers we tested, but it is less expensive and reliable, making it a great entry-level option for someone just getting started with sous vide cooking. It’s not as advanced as the circulators from Anova or Breville, because it lacks any sort of wireless connection. But in our tests, it got to temperature quickly and held the setting properly. At around $70, its typical street price is less than half that of our other picks.
The TS8000 browns meat faster than the competition and is less expensive.
May be out of stock
Sous vide cooking is only the first step when it comes to meat. After you’ve cooked the protein through, searing creates a delicious, crispy brown exterior. Although you can finish your food in a pan, we found Bernzomatic’s TS8000 to be the fastest tool for searing. It attaches to a standard camping propane tank and is easy to use.
This immersion circulator is accurate, impressively easy to use, and affordable.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $100.
This cooker is one of the smallest and most powerful we tested, and it works with less water, but it lacks physical controls.
This model is not the most elegant option, but it is efficient and inexpensive.
The TS8000 browns meat faster than the competition and is less expensive.
May be out of stock
We’ve been reviewing and recommending sous vide devices for the home since 2012. Our long-term testing has given us a look at how the technologies have changed over this period—and it has also helped us figure out what’s important and what isn’t.
Nick Guy has been interested in the intersection of food and tech since middle school, when Emeril Live was appointment viewing for him. He has been cooking sous vide since November 2014, when he first got his hands on the Anova Precision Cooker (if you don’t count his pretty successful attempts with hot water and a cooler!).
Tim Barribeau has written for Wirecutter since 2012, covering both gadgetry and cooking tools. In that time he has interviewed James Beard Award–winning authors and chefs, performed blind taste tests with Japanese chefs, and persuaded ice cream parlors to spend hours slinging ice cream with different sizes and shapes of scoops. He also makes a mean sous vide salmon.
A home sous vide cooker is mostly for food lovers and experimental cookers. It’s for people who love cooking and playing around with new recipes and techniques, and are willing to wait for hours for food to finish cooking. Over the past few years, sous vide cooking has blossomed into the public consciousness. Thanks to the technique’s prevalence in the kitchens of high-end restaurants as well as a glut of demystifying literature, demand for home-use sous vide circulators has soared, and many inventors have been using Kickstarter to fund the creation of affordable machines.
Now a mainstay of cooking shows and Internet discussions, sous vide involves using a tool, such as the immersion circulators we tested here, to heat water and keep it at a set temperature. Then you seal your food—ideally within a vacuum—and immerse it in the hot water for hours at a time until the entire thing reaches a uniform temperature. The result? Steak that’s a perfect medium rare throughout (no cold, raw centers or overcooked outsides), chicken so tender that you don’t even need a knife, and eggs the consistency of custard. That’s what sous vide can do. And for the most part, making that happen is easy.
The best of these devices are very simple to use and allow you to expand the margin of error in creating the perfect piece of food. They’re like a more controllable version of slow cookers, and they can give you some pretty interesting food outcomes thanks to their accuracy.
Steak that’s a perfect medium rare … chicken so tender that you don’t even need a knife, and eggs the consistency of custard.
Over the past few years, sous vide technology has come into its own, and the price has dropped significantly. If you’ve been curious about the technology, now is the perfect time to give it a try. Thanks to recent interest and competition, sous vide devices are now more affordable and easy to use.
You can find three main types of sous vide cooker: the immersion circulator that can simultaneously heat and circulate water, the all-in-one but less precise water bath, and the bring-your-own-heat controller. For most people in most situations, the immersion circulator is the perfect sous vide cooker. This style latches onto the side of a vessel—be it a pot, a plastic tub, or even a cooler—and not only heats the water but also uses an impeller to circulate it around the container, ensuring that the temperature is more even throughout the entire vessel. Immersion circulators also tend to be smaller than some of the alternatives, priced decently, and easy to use.
When you’re shopping for a sous vide cooker, you have four traits to look for:
A more powerful heater warms water faster and rebounds from the addition of cold food more quickly, but it isn’t any more efficient in the long run, and it is more likely to flip a breaker in your kitchen. Power versus utility is a balancing act—but keep in mind that you can always give a lower-wattage circulator a boost with some hot water from a kettle. Right now, most of the circulators operate at around 1,000 to 1,100 watts (about the same as a full-size microwave) or 750 to 800 watts (about the same as a mini microwave). This isn’t a serious drawback, but it is something to take into account if you know that the breaker for your kitchen gets flipped easily.
We’ve been testing sous vide cookers since 2014 (our most recent round of tests took place in 2019, and we continue to long-term test our picks). In every round, we’ve paid attention to a number of factors that affect how easy it is to use: How does the cooker attach? How precise does the water level have to be? How big is the machine? How big of a container does it need? How loud is it? Is it easy to use? Does it have audible alarms to indicate when it’s at temperature? These things can separate the great sous vide machines from the good.
We’ve also tested speed, accuracy, and consistency using the following method: With each sous vide cooker, we heated 1½ gallons of water—enough to fill a stockpot—from 69 to 135 degrees Fahrenheit (the temperature for steak cooked to medium), measuring the temperature at both points with the ThermoWorks Thermapen Mk4 (an accurate instant-read thermometer) and recording the time to get to temp. We covered the pot with foil to prevent evaporation, and we continued to let the circulators run for 12 hours—a longer time than your average recipe, but a good indicator, we felt, of the machine’s ability to hold a set temperature indefinitely.
This immersion circulator is accurate, impressively easy to use, and affordable.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $100.
The Anova Precision Cooker Nano is the best bet for most home cooks due to its accuracy, low price, relatively small size, and flexibility. It’s one of the cheapest ways to get into sous vide cooking, and it works with a huge range of containers, meaning you probably don’t need to buy any new hardware. The Anova Nano has an intuitive touchscreen interface. It also offers a beep alert when water has come to temperature, it has circuit-saving lower wattage, and is quieter than much of the competition.
About the height of a wine bottle but even skinnier, the Anova Nano is smaller than pretty much anything else available, including the older Anova models, by about half; the Breville Joule is the only exception. The 750-watt heating element in the Anova Nano is low enough that it shouldn’t trip any breakers in your kitchen but powerful enough to keep your water at the right temperature, even over long cooking times. Anova promises temperature variance of +/- 0.2 °F. We tested to the whole degree, which is accurate enough for any home sous vide cooking, but Anova’s cookers have been consistently accurate in our past testing.
Anova’s simple touchscreen interface is easier to use than any other we’ve tested. Three on-screen buttons allow you to toggle between the current temperature, the target temperature, and a timer, with the data displayed in big numbers below. You can use the “+” and “-” buttons to toggle these figures up and down, and a big play button between them starts the cook.
The Anova Nano is very quiet. When we tested it in a quiet room (ambient level of 38 decibels) and used a digital sound level meter to measure volume, the Anova Nano produced about 49 dB when we measured right against the circulator itself; the result dropped to just 42 dB, about the level of the background noise in a larger room, when we measured it from a foot away. Although the Anova Precision Cooker was comparable in volume, only the Joule was quieter in our testing.
In contrast to the Monoprice Strata, the Anova Nano alerts you when it comes to temperature, so you don’t have to hang around the kitchen waiting for it. The Anova cooker beeps when it’s just under the desired heat level, so the temp should be just right by the time you get yourself over to the kitchen.
The Bluetooth pairing process is painless, handled through the Anova app (iOS or Android). Once the unit is paired, you can set the temperature and timer from your phone, or use the preset recipes in the app to send over that data with one press. This means that instead of having to take the separate steps of finding the recipe for what you’re cooking, and then manually entering it on the Anova Nano’s touchscreen, you can just find the cooking instructions and press a button to get it started.
The app works well, and Anova adds more content on a fairly regular basis. Currently you can find cooking guides from J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats, plus specific recipes from a variety of chefs. Some recipes let you choose the meat’s thickness and doneness when calculating the time and temperature, while others just give you a set number. You can, of course, manually set these figures instead.
If you’re thinking of getting a vacuum sealer to go with your immersion circulator, Anova makes a decent one that you can buy together with the Nano. We’ve tested it for our guide to the best vacuum sealers and recommend it for anyone with limited space: It works well and fits in a drawer, but it’s pretty bare bones in terms of features. However, buying the vacuum sealer and the Nano as a package deal won’t actually save you any money, and you don’t really need a vacuum sealer to cook sous vide.
Anova warranties its sous vide cookers for two years, and offers a 100-day money-back guarantee.
We’ve been cooking with the Anova Nano since it was released in August 2018, and it continues to work as well as it did then. It heats water just as quickly and keeps it at temp. The price has increased since we first recommended this sous vide device, but it’s still the best option.
The relatively low price of the Anova Nano comes at the cost of some functionality. Most obviously, the 750-watt heater takes longer to warm water than some of the more powerful models. Bringing a 1½-gallon vessel from 69 °F to 135 °F took 21 minutes, compared with 15 minutes for the Breville Joule, although it wasn’t any slower than the larger Anova Precision Cooker Wi-Fi. You can always give the heater a bit of a boost by using hot water from your kettle to preheat the bath.
The Anova Precision Cooker Nano has a smaller maximum clamp opening than the Precision Cooker (0.7 inches vs. 1.25 inches), but it’s still wide enough that it will fit most common kitchen vessels. Because that clamp doesn’t slide up or down like it does on the other Anova model, you have a little less flexibility in the depth of the water or container you can use. If you find yourself using larger or thicker vessels, the Precision Cooker is a good upgrade that will deliver slightly faster heating performance as well. Also, the Anova Nano goes up to only 197 °F, compared with above 200 °F for some other models we tested, but the only thing we know of that requires temperatures that high is decarbing weed, which you can do at 203 °F.
Because it has a less powerful motor, the Anova Nano can only circulate up to five gallons of water, compared with 10 for the Joule. Though that’s a big difference, five gallons is a lot of water, and it’s unlikely that most home cooks will use that much. The Nano also requires a minimum of 5 inches of water (though you’ll need different amounts of water depending on what vessel you’re using, and taller vessels will need more), which again, sounds like a lot compared with the Joule’s 1½ inches, but you’ll usually need about 5 inches to cover what you’re cooking anyways.
The lack of Wi-Fi might be a problem if you plan on starting cooks from outside of your kitchen in a big house, but for most people who are simply using the app to set the temperature while next to the unit, it won’t be a big deal.
This cooker is one of the smallest and most powerful we tested, and it works with less water, but it lacks physical controls.
The Breville Joule outperforms the Anova Precision Cooker Nano in a lot of ways, including a smaller body and faster heating times. But Breville’s more expensive circulator lacks physical controls, meaning it doesn’t work without your phone. For all of the great things it has going for it, that lack of buttons is a big enough omission that we can’t recommend it as our top pick.
The most obvious advantage of the Joule is its size. At 11 inches long and 1.85 inches in diameter, it’s about 60 percent the volume of the Anova Nano unit and about half the weight, at only 1.28 pounds. This thing is impressively tiny—it can easily fit in pretty much any utensil drawer, whereas the Anova is too large to fit in most.
The Joule is also more powerful, with a 1,110 W heating element. In our tests, it heated water a full six minutes faster than the Anova Nano, raising the temperature from 69 °F to 135 °F in only 15 minutes. And despite the higher wattage, it used less power over time: In 12 hours, the Joule drew only 0.44 kWh, compared with the Precision Cooker Nano’s 0.78 kWh. Based on the US Energy Information Administration’s August 2016 national average of the price of electricity, that’s a cost of less than 6¢.
Another way the Joule preserves resources is by requiring less water. The Anova Nano needs at least 5 inches of water in which to operate, while the Joule needs only 1½ inches. The Joule pulls in water through an opening just above the base, heats it, and then spits it out through an oval-shaped opening that doesn’t have to be submerged. The device also has a magnetic foot that lets it stick to the bottom of some pots and other vessels. We were able to use a Dutch oven for sous vide cooking with the Joule, which would have been difficult with the Anova Nano because of the shape of the pot’s curves and its relatively short walls. The Joule just stuck right to the bottom, and we were ready to go.
The Breville model is just as quiet as the Anova Nano cooker when the output spout is totally submerged, measuring 52.7 dB at the cooker and 44.3 dB a foot away. When the opening isn’t underwater, it sounds like a fountain that might be used for white noise, and is noticeably louder at 73.2 dB up close and 61.6 dB from a foot away.
Breville’s app experience (iOS and Android) is particularly great. Pairing with the Joule is no issue, and once you’re connected, cooking is a breeze. As of this writing, the app offers dozens of preset recipes, organized by food type. When you choose the kind of meat, the app asks what temperature you’d like it to cook (with full-screen videos in the background showing the doneness), after which it asks you to indicate whether the protein is fresh or frozen, and how thick it is. From there it calculates how long to cook, and it starts heating the water when you’re ready. The experience is similar for eggs and vegetables. Of course, you can also set the temperature and time manually yourself. And Breville offers an Amazon Alexa skill that allows you to control your Joule with an Echo or another Alexa-enabled device.
The downside to the app is that it’s the only way to control the Joule. Other than the top cap, which you can use to stop the cooking, the Joule has no buttons or displays. With the Anova Nano, you can use the touchscreen to set your desired temperature and hit the start button. With the Joule, you must pull out your phone or tablet and set everything from there. This is the single reason the Breville Joule isn’t our top recommendation. We know that for many people, the app-based control scheme will be just fine, but for others it’s a dealbreaker. A version of the Joule with onboard controls, if Breville were to make one, might just be the perfect sous vide machine.
In an October 2016 review of the Joule for Serious Eats, J. Kenji López-Alt calls it “the new standard on the market.” He writes that the magnetic foot is “an ingeniously simple solution to what was previously a perennial problem,” and says that he found the small size the handiest of all the features. The lack of hardware controls is his biggest reservation. Ultimately, we agree with his conclusion, in which he finds “the Anova and the Joule [to be] equally attractive tools designed for slightly different audiences.” He continues, “Choose whichever one suits your needs best—you can’t really go wrong.”
Breville offers two versions of the Joule: the original with a stainless steel cap and foot, and a less expensive model that uses polycarbonate on those components, as on the rest of the body. We tested both, and they’re functionally identical, so we recommend going with the less expensive version unless you love the look of the steel.
In July 2019, kitchen-appliance maker Breville acquired ChefSteps. The prices for both the steel-capped and polycarbonate models of the Joule increased in late 2019, with the new parent company telling us: “After acquiring the Joule product line last year, Breville made a number of specification and technical updates that necessitated a price increase on the original model launched by ChefSteps in 2016.” Neither model appears to have any new features or outward improvements, but the steel model now includes a ChefSteps Premium membership, offering “access to exclusive content, recipes and classes.”
This model is not the most elegant option, but it is efficient and inexpensive.
If you’re just getting into sous vide cooking and you’re not sure if you’ll take to it, or if you’re looking for an inexpensive gift for someone who loves to cook, Monoprice’s Strata Home Sous Vide Immersion Cooker 800W is the best option. You have to give up some features and design elements for the lower price, but the Monoprice circulator does what it’s supposed to: This cooker gets water hot and keeps it there.
The Monoprice circulator does what it’s supposed to: This cooker gets water hot and keeps it there.
The Monoprice cooker looks similar to older Anova models, including its adjustable clip and wheel for setting the temperature and timer. For its budget price, you give up any sort of wireless connection; you control everything on the unit itself. In our tests this model took 20 minutes to bring the water to temperature, about the same as the Anova Nano (but five minutes more than the Joule), and its temperature was accurate when we measured the water with a thermometer. The Monoprice cooker beeped right before reaching its set temperature. We don’t like how loud this circulator was in our tests, reaching 50.3 decibels from a foot away, but can accept it for the price.
Cooking your meat sous vide gets you only halfway. The water bath brings the protein up to the proper temperature but leaves the outside the same color as the inside, without any of the tasty and texturally pleasing outer crust you’d get from other cooking methods.
We tested four torches along with the skillet method by cooking five New York strip steaks to medium-rare using the Breville Joule. We then dried them off—burning off extra moisture slows down browning—added salt and pepper, and got to searing. Three Wirecutter writers then tested the steaks, focusing on the taste of the steak and its cook level while ignoring the actual service temperature (because we had to cook five steaks, some of them were colder than others when we sat down to eat).
The TS8000 browns meat faster than the competition and is less expensive.
May be out of stock
We tested five searing methods and found that the best searing tool for most home cooks is the Bernzomatic TS8000, paired with a small propane tank. It seared our New York strip steaks faster than most other methods (in about a minute and a half), and it didn’t leave any tastes from the gas. It’s less expensive than most of the competition, too. In our tests, the high-powered flame made quick and easy work of the process. The TS8000 also has a flame-control adjuster.
We also tried what is perhaps the most well-known searing device, Booker and Dax’s Searzall. It’s not a standalone torch, but rather a cone-shaped attachment for the TS8000. Two layers of wire mesh at the end help spread out the flame, so you can cook more surface at once. It also slows down searing: In our tests, browning time doubled with the Searzall. We liked the results, but not enough to justify the extra cost. Because it’s an add-on to the TS8000, we suggest starting with the torch by itself and upgrading only if you’re looking to take your searing to the next level.
We had to disqualify one of the torches almost immediately. The Bernzomatic ST2200T is not intended for searing, but we wanted to give it a try. Unfortunately, once we got going, it was very clear that this torch, which may be okay for soldering or even brûléeing, simply isn’t powerful enough to sear meat. After three minutes and almost zero browning, we gave up on this one.
The easiest, least costly searing method produced poor results in our tests. We seared one of the steaks in a ripping-hot cast-iron skillet with canola oil. (Normally, we’d add butter for flavor, but we were attempting to control for taste, and canola oil is considered neutral.) After a minute and a half, as most recipes suggest, our steak was still not yet crusty. By the time we reached a nice browning—after four and a half minutes—the steak was overdone, with a large gray ring underneath the crust that detracted from our perfect medium-rare doneness. For many people this method may still be fine, especially if you’re just getting started with sous vide and aren’t ready to invest in extra tools for better results. The biggest drawback is that pan searing is a smoky process—you’ll want to open any windows you can, turn on your range hood if you have one, and warn your family that you are not, in fact, burning the kitchen down.
As mentioned above, in order to cook with a sous vide machine, you need to put your food in a bag and eliminate all of the air around it. Some people swear that you need a vacuum sealer to do this, but you also have a free way of doing it with a simple Ziploc bag that’ll work just as well in most situations.
Here’s how it works: Put the food in the pouch and almost completely seal it, with just a small section remaining open. Immerse the pouch in a bucket of water, leaving the opening just above the water line. Allow the air to escape, slowly pushing the entire thing under, and then seal it just before you submerge the opening. You can see more discussion of how to do this here and here. In some cases, this method is even preferable to vacuum sealing. For example, the vacuum sealer can compress the meat in your burger, leaving you with less of a burger and more of a meat brick. However, your food might take on a little water while cooking with this method. We ran a test by cooking something with no water in it (a couple of small containers filled with rocks for weight) in a Hefty freezer bag over the course of 12 hours. It took on 38 milliliters of water—not a huge amount, but if you’re worried, you can double-bag. In reality, if your bags seem to take on a lot of liquid while cooking, it’s most likely coming from inside the food.
If you’re worried about leakage, or about cooking your food in a plastic bag (though for what it’s worth, Ziploc bags are BPA-free), you can also use a silicone Stasher bag, our pick for the best reusable zip-top bag. It’s a little more difficult to get all the air out of them using the immersion technique, but they’re sturdy, heatproof up to 400° F, and leakproof in our tests.
This affordable vacuum sealer has the suction capability of models costing twice as much. It has multiple controls, too, so you can adjust how you seal your food.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $93.
If this seems like too much trouble, you should consider getting a vacuum sealer. After spending 50 hours sealing countless pork chops, ground beef, nuts, crackers, and chips, we think the Nesco American Harvest VS-12 Vacuum Sealer is the best vacuum sealer for most home cooks. It has all of the features we look for in a great vacuum sealer: powerful suction, several useful control options, an accessory port (for using attachments to seal jars or marinate meat), and the ability to create a single or double seal on bags. Plus, the lid is easy to lock in place, so you know you’ll get a secure suction every time. The Nesco comes with two starter bag rolls in the box and works with vacuum-sealer bags from any brand.
Anova also makes a vacuum sealer that we recommend if your kitchen space is tight. It has fewer features than the Nesco and is less powerful, but it’s less expensive and very compact. If you’re mainly interested in occasionally sealing food for sous vide cooking, it might be all you need.
Because sous vide cooking in the home has been so heavily driven by innovative people putting things together piecemeal and experimenting in their kitchens, you can find a lot of fantastic recipes online. But if you want the best technical breakdown of sous vide cooking that’s available at no cost online, Douglas Baldwin’s excellent A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking is your best bet. It’s a fantastic look at the science of sous vide, offering details about proper handling, cooking times, and various other techniques. If you’re interested in diving deeper into the science of cooking and other advanced techniques, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking and Modernist Cuisine at Home are two bibles. They’re expensive but immaculately researched (and gorgeously photographed).
It’s also worthwhile to check out Serious Eats’s sous vide recipes and how-tos, as well as the recipes from the people behind the SousVide Supreme (which are just as applicable to other machines), or—if you’re into the no-carbs thing—from Nom Nom Paleo.
Anova’s Precision Cooker, which replaces an earlier version with the same name, offers moderate improvements over the Precision Cooker Nano for twice the price. It’s exactly the same size as the Nano, and has the same touchscreen controls. Rather than having a fixed-position clamp, though, it has an adjustable one that can slide up and down the removable metal collar. The clamp can also expand out to fit on vessels up to about 1.2 inches in thickness, a little less than double what the Precision Cooker Nano can attach to. In our tests the Precision Cooker heated a water bath 5 minutes faster than the Precision Cooker Nano. All these hardware features, the faster heating, and Wi-Fi connectivity are nice, but they don’t justify the higher cost. If this model is on sale, though, or any of these features are particularly important to you, you’ll be well served by the Precision Cooker.
Anova’s Precision Cooker Pro is the company’s high-end sous vide machine, designed for career chefs. The 1,200-watt circulator can keep up to 100 liters of water at a set temperature, cook for up to 10,000 hours (416 days!), and is advertised as being accurate to within 0.09 degree Fahrenheit. But for day-to-day home use, it doesn’t offer any notable advantages. It took 14 minutes to get from 69 to 135 degrees (the same as the Joule), didn’t use any less power than our favorite cookers, and wasn’t any quieter. For specific, advanced cooking needs, it may be worth the high price, but for most people we recommend spending 75 percent less and choosing the Precision Cooker Nano instead.
Kitchen Gizmo’s Simplified Sous Vide Immersion Circulator was our previous budget pick. It heated the water and held the temperature properly in our tests, and was whisper quiet. But it’s more expensive than our current budget pick, without any additional features.
The VacMaster SV1 Immersion Circulator was both the largest circulator we tested and the most expensive. Although it got to the set temperature fast (after only 15 minutes, thanks to a 1,500 W heater that could potentially trip circuits), it had a few serious drawbacks, including inconsistent temperature, difficult-to-use buttons, and an annoyingly shrill alarm.
PolyScience’s Sous Vide Professional Creative Series is built like a tank and extremely accurate. However, it isn’t intuitive to use—it’s huge and heavy. It can’t calibrate the temperature, and it doesn’t really offer anything that you can’t get from a model that’s half its price.
After looking forward to its release for almost three years (it finally started shipping in late 2017), we’ve decided not to test the Mellow countertop sous vide. Controlled via smartphone, and boasting a neat built-in refrigeration feature, the Mellow piqued our interest. But it costs several hundred dollars, and other sites that have tested it (like CNET) found that the app isn’t all that easy to use, especially when cooking your own recipes, and the size of the food container is too small.
Yes, Ziploc freezer bags are BPA-free and generally leakproof. You just need to get all the air out. There’s a trick to this: Once you’ve put the food in, seal the bag most of the way but leave a small section open. Then immerse the bag in a large container of water, leaving the opening just above the water line. As you lower the bag, all of the air will be pushed out, and you can then seal the opening.
A sous vide machine can’t “overcook” a piece of meat the way you can in a pan. (Since the water bath never exceeds a set temperature, your steak will remain medium-rare for hours.) But it’s still a bad idea to leave your food in for longer than the recipe recommends. Over the course of hours, your meat will become mushier and more unappealing.
A sous vide machine allows you to cook food slowly to a precise, uniform temperature. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of preparing a perfectly medium rare steak, a juicy chicken breast, or a just-runny-enough egg. That kind of control also gives you more room to experiment and try new things in the kitchen.
Pablo Escolar, SideKIC: Sous Vide Review (Accuracy/Stability), Medellitin, February 23, 2012
J. Kenji López-Alt, Equipment: We Test the $199 Sous-Vide Circulator From Anova, Serious Eats, September 24, 2013
Anova Sous Vide Immersion Circulator Product Review, The Black Peppercorn
John Biggs, Hands On With The Anova Automatic Sous Vide System, TechCrunch, September 9, 2013
Eric Pepple, Sous Vide Fajitas, Happy Valley Chow, October 29, 2013
Beusho, Anova Sous Vide Circulator (Part 1), eG Forums, July 29, 2013
Douglas Baldwin, Sous Vide Cooking, DouglasBaldwin.com, December 25, 2014
Vacuum Sealers (subscription required), Cook’s Illustrated
Tim Barribeau is the editor in charge of pets and carry coverage (the latter is anything you might take with you on the way out the door to work). He has been with Wirecutter since 2012, and previously headed our cameras section. A man with too many hobbies, he’s currently engrossed in leatherwork, and he might make you a wallet if you ask nicely.
Nick Guy is a senior staff writer covering Apple and accessories at Wirecutter. He has been reviewing iPhones, iPads, and related tech since 2011—and stopped counting after he tested his 1,000th case. It’s impossible for him not to mentally catalog any case he sees. He once had the bright idea to build and burn down a room to test fireproof safes.
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