****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I am new to sous vide cooking. I never knew about this until about two months ago and have been doing research since then. I've amassed a small library of recipes and have been eager to try them out with this amazing cooker.If you are not aware, sous vide is a slow cooking in a water bath method. It allows you to cook at lower temperatures over a longer period to preserve flavors and juiciness that is otherwise lost in traditional cooking methods. For eggs, vegetables, chicken and fish, this method will produce flavors and textures you have not experienced. You can do steak too, but you will still be searing at the end to give you that caramelized outer texture and color. The rare or medium rare cook will be like nothing you've ever seen before.This unit is really terrific in the volume of water it can handle. It will heat and circulate just under eight gallons of water. You can pack a lot of food in an eight-gallon container making this ideal for a full meal. Another great quality of sous vide is the ability to precook things in advance for use in the next two to five days. With this unit, you can cook a week's worth of food in advance for easy warm-up serving.This is Bluetooth enabled and links together with the Vesta app. You can control this unit through the app and send recipe time/temp settings directly to the cooker. The halibut recipe looked particularly good, look forward to trying that one.This is beyond simple to operate, power on, select the desired temperature/time and hit the play button. Once the water bath hits temperature you are ready to add your food. For the photos I did a simple poached egg recipe. The cooker brought the temperature up to 167F in about five minutes and I was ready to drop the eggs. I was a little concerned while cooking that it would not maintain that and always seemed to drop to 166.3 to 166.7. Because of this I let me eggs stay in for about a minute more than the recipe called for. My bad, my yolks were firmer than I wanted, should've trusted the unit and the recipe instructions.This unit moves a serious amount of water and the stock pot I was using jostled my eggs around so much that it cracked one in the pot. Still a usable egg, but I had to clean out the cooker due to the egg leak. You should use this in a larger sous vide container to reduce the turbulence. If you are a fan of poached eggs, this produces the silkiest textured yolk you've ever had. I will never go back to dropping an egg in a boiling pan of water now.This is an incredible cooker, but I have no point of reference to compare this with. I know there are other units available for much less than the $299.00 as tested price tag. Those units stand upright in the steam though which makes it difficult to operate the controls if you need to change anything mid-cook. That this unit clamps to the outside of your container just makes more sense to me. Those other models will not heat the volume of water that this unit does either. Despite my lack of previous experience, I have to say that I think this is a good value considering the design and capacity of this unit.
