this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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Sous vide cooker needed (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hello there!

Any recommendations for a sous vide thermoplongeur, like this one? It should be available in Europe, temperature from 30 - 60°C (90 - 140°F) and have a cooking time of up to 36h. Its main purpose will be yogurt making.

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[–] quixotic120 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Anova is all around pretty good and should be available in the EU

That said these are simple machines. I’ve been using immersion circulators for cooking since around 2011 with a home built setup. They’re just a heater, a thermocouple, a relay, and a PID controller to adjust the temperature as needed based on input from the thermocouple. Don’t submerge it and it should last ages

Since then I’ve gotten a few proper ones and they all work about the same because they’re pretty simple. My anova works well but I also have a Chinese no name one that was $13 and works about as well. A bit harder to use as the controls are weird, it feels cheap, and it can’t do huge tubs of water like the anova can but that’s not common to utilize.

Whatever you buy make sure it’s somewhat easy to clean (generally you should still clean and dry it throughly after each use, especially so if you ever have a failure where the bath gets contaminated obviously) and look into how the stick mounts to whatever you plan to use as a vessel for the bath. I generally just use stockpots or whatever for shorter cooks but I also have the plastic tubs as well and some options don’t clip on to everything well, apparently

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I have an Anova, and I like it, but I wouldn't consider it BIFL. After a few years, the manual controls are getting dodgy and it's getting difficult to use without the app, which they've started charging for:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/smart-sous-vide-cooker-to-start-charging-2-month-for-10-year-old-companion-app/

But I think you're spot on with your other general recommendations.

[–] quixotic120 4 points 1 day ago

Sad to hear. I have the og version and it runs like a tank, the one with the big wheel. I never use the connectivity options

I can’t in good faith recommend a company that is hostile to their consumers, so fuck anova

[–] Hugin 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'd stay far far away from Anova. Their build quality has massively dropped.

In the last two years I've seen plastic cracking, touch screens failing, and panels falling off because the glue couldn't handle the upper temp limit of the machine.

If you are willing to spend big for buy it for life get a PolyScience MX-CA11B. It's what restaurants that run them non stop for years use. If you are not willing to spend that much get one of the other PolyScience machines.

[–] quixotic120 1 points 22 minutes ago

Sad to hear, my og one still runs fine but it’s old at this point from like 2014 or so

The polyscience is definitely a workhorse but it’s wild overkill for 99% of users. I will again point to I have a chinese no name one I’ve had for like 8 years now that has held up fine and was $13 from AliExpress because I wanted a backup. I have used it quite a bit for whenever I host a large meal and need to cook 2-3 baths at once

And honestly for what the polyscience costs you don’t get the value, imo. I have read people who have had them fail on the Chefsteps forums, it does happen. I don’t hold this against polyscience of course, failure is inevitable, but frankly for $1200 you should get a significant warranty period. You don’t get that, it’s like 12 or 24 months. If and when it breaks you’re hosed and on the hook for (very expensive, given brevilles track record) repairs

What you’re buying with polyscience is very strong power and a high degree of precision. The first point is why restaurants use them; if you’re preparing 30+ portions at once you need a circulator that can heat a significant amount of water. And to this point a lot of commercial kitchens doing this now use external heaters on the bath like this so that the circulator doesn’t need to be as powerful. The other thing polyscience does (or at least did) is higher precision on the thermocouple but this is unnecessary for culinary applications. It was necessary for laboratory circulators that they were making before this was popularized but with culinary applications you really just need accuracy within .1 degree C, which is not all that precise

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I don't know how much room you have in your kitchen or cupboards but a sous vide machine does only one task. If you don't have one already or you have any use for a pressure cooker, there are ones that have a sous vide mode. So you can have one machine that multiple uses instead of a single use appliance.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

On the other side of the coin, large electric pressure cookers get kind of enormous. If you use your immersion circulator to do large batches, like 30 individual cheesecakes for a party or large cuts of meat, you'll run out of room very quickly, which means batches which would take forever. Whereas an immersion circulator can be stuck in a cooler or even the bathtub and cook a lot of food at once. A small pressure cooker and an immersion circulator is a lot less space than a large pressure cooker. If you only ever cook for a few people a combo unit would be fine, but I find myself pulling out the immersion circulator much more often for events.

I say this as someone who bought a large pressure cooker because it was a really good deal and now struggles to store it, lol.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I just have a 6 quart countertop one. I can make a pretty big stew in it. It has yogurt making function and sous vide mode as well. Way more functions than I will ever need. I just want it to last as long as my last electric pressure cooker, it lasted 20+ years before it melted down.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, I think the ones my friends have are about that size. I wound up with the next size up and it's just obnoxiously large so I try to warn people, lol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I would take a larger one if I could. More stew fits in, less cooking to do.

[–] Alexstarfire 2 points 1 day ago

They aren't looking to get a full machine, but the plunger/stick.