I’d be worried about hot spots.
Got to admit, my first reaction also was “why wi-fi” but it makes sense. The device itself only has the most basic brain and interface in it. With wi-fi, you can use a more robust interface on your tablet or traditional computer to program the device. Instead of always entering time and temperature, you could enter the food and have the interface program look up and set the right parameters.
You can also set up programs to make it hold a specific temperature for x hours and then change to a different temperature for y hours. Since sous vide is all about what reactions happen for specific parameters, there may be new recipes made possible by chaining different reactions together.
The app is cutely named “Tender”
Well the price is right, but as a backer of their long delayed V1 nomiku I have doubts they’d meet their estimated delivery date.
I love sous-vide (or constant temperature, more accurately) cooking and have been doing it for many years at this point, but the idea of a wifi enabled sous vide device seems frankly silly to me. Even when I have been doing a long (let’s say my 72 hour short ribs) cook, I’ve never even considered needing such a feature. I’d love to hear a valid use case, but I suspect that both nomiku and anova did it “because it’s cool”.
Mellow is a self-contained wi-fi controlled & programmable sous vide cooker/cooler planned for 2015.
400$ gets you a preorder. Disadvantage - bulkier. Advantage - can keep raw ingredients cold until they have to be cooked, then cook them. I wonder how it’ll turn out.
What’s the engineering equivalent of a backronym?
It’s easy to come up with outlandish ideas about how a silly idea might be used, but you’re just adding complexity to an item - the sous vide - and a process - cooking - that should be both be simple.
Go into a commercial kitchen. The never have all that crap you see advertised on late night TV - the avacado keepers, the silicon garlic skinners, the stone cook non stick pans, and so on. The have a set of good quality, sharp knives, and a good set of pots and pans, plus some industrial mixers, but only a few single-use tools for needed for specific cooking techniques.
All a sous vide needs is a temperature setting. Anything else is pointless complexity, added for it’s own sake. Complexity that will be used once then ignored in favour of just setting the temperature directly, based on the instructions in the recipe you have to look at anyway.
It’s not just bulkier. It’s significantly bulkier. It goes from being something you can stash in a cupboard, to something that ends up on your counter all the time. Even when you don’t need it.
Also, it doesn’t have a circulator. So you don’t have as even of a temperature throughout the water bath. Instead, you end up with a gradient, and convection cells forming in the bath. This leads to poorer results.
I’ll stick to my Sansaire that’s half the price, and can be shoved next to my blender in the cupboard.
I have the impression that cooking time is less important with sous-vide. True? If so, it may be less necessary to have refrigeration.
Do you know how sansaire compares to anova?
I don’t cook in a commercial kitchen. I cook in my kitchen, which already has a Sous Vide Demi. It’s nice but does have its limitations. One of which is the annoying human interface that seems to have been perfectly designed to make sure you always overshoot the temperature you’re going for. If you have no use for wi-fi, don’t use it. But don’t play the “stop liking what I don’t like” game and tell everyone else what they should and should not use. You’re not the entire market.
It’s less important, but not unimportant. You can leave your steak in to cook for 2 hours instead of one… but you can’t leave it to cook for 12 hours. You’d end up with a steak that’d literally fall apart on your fork. I think their model is that you drop the stuff in before you leave in the morning, and come back to have dinner ready. But you can do that without needing the refrigeration. you just need to choose your dinner appropriately. If you want steak, just drop it in when you get home, and eat in an hour. It really takes only like 2 minutes of prep and maybe 2 minutes of paying attention post cook that way (searing the meat after cooking). If you want to drop something in for a 12 hour cook, choose a tougher cut, like skirt steak, that benefits from longer cooks.
The Sansaire and 2nd Gen Anova are pretty similar. AFAIK, there’s no significant differences between the two, besides UI. I dunno about the new 3rd Gen Anova though.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
