Cooking sous vide style is not a new practice — Michelin starred chefs from around the globe have been warping flavor and food with it since the late ’90s and early 2000s (though it was invented decades before).
Upon the introduction of home kitchen sous vide circulators, it appeared to be of interest only to the amateur culinary scientist (a rather small crowd) or marketed toward the steak-minded home cook. This move proved to be fairly self-limiting.
We know now it is useful for far more than that — cooking straight from frozen and as the money-saving savior of cheap cuts of meat among the few we’ve harped on in just the last month.
Getting into sous vide requires a circulator, and for that there are two choices that most reviewers and customers lean toward — ChefSteps’ Joule and Anova’s Precision Cooker. Both have apps to control temperature on your smartphone (the Joule’s app is undeniably more robust, complete with hundreds of self-guided recipes and doneness guides), and the Joule is slightly more compact, but Anova’s circulator has buttons to control the device on the actual device, a feature lacking on the Joule.
The choice between the two is mostly one of preference — do you prefer controlling everything from your phone entirely, or is manual control important to you? — but today the split decision goes the way of the Anova Precision cooker, which is 35 percent off at Best Buy today (and, for what it’s worth, Anova’s smaller Nano Precision Cooker is also on sale, albeit less so).
