
Sous-vide startup wants to take the tech-industry’s kitchen darling mainstream - Tomte
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/sous-vide-startup-wants-to-take-the-tech-industrys-kitchen-darling-mainstream/
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tptacek
It will be hard to get more mainstream than it is now. Breville, for instance,
now owns PolyScience. What I mostly see in new products is gimmickry ---
elaborate wifi controls, machine learning to identify what kind of food you're
cooking, attempts to temperature-control pans instead of water baths. You can
(and should) just buy an Anova, Poly, or Sansaire unit for about $100.

Major kitchen equipment manufacturers are all going to have low-temp cooking
appliances within the next few years.

This article, meanwhile, is pretty annoying. For instance: the "until
recently" shot of older lab-style circulators is entirely bogus: for more than
5 years, even the PolyScience units --- even the restaurant-grade pro ones ---
have been approximately as slick as the Sansaires and Anovas. Nomiku was an
early entrant to the market, but they've pretty much been lapped.

The "next" thing to watch for is probably home-compatible combi ovens (combi
ovens cook in temperature controlled steam baths instead of water baths).
There are already some products here, but I don't know how good they are yet.

~~~
MegaDeKay
I've been listening to Dave Arnold's Cooking Issues podcast a lot recently.
He's just announced the Spinzall centrifuge. It is a bargain for what it is,
but still too much for the use I'd get out of it. And once you've got a
centrifuge, you of course have to get a rotovap, a Vitaprep, and a chamber
sealer. Not that you need all this stuff to get good use out of the
centrifuge, but just because.

And as I noted in another comment, the "until recently" bit is partly because
this article is from 2014.

~~~
tptacek
I find myself hoping that he's not going to say something on an upcoming
Cooking Issues that is going to make me want to buy a Spinzall, because, like
you, I can't really think of any kind of routine use I'd get out of it, and I
need fewer not more gadgets in my life.

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fencepost
Despite the date showing for the article it's actually from 2014 - possibly a
mistake in correcting something minor led to the date being changed.

That said, I could see a nice use for a connected device like this used in an
insulated container - prep food in the morning, then leave it in an ice water
bath. At an appropriate time turn the heater on remotely. As long as there's
water present to be heated and circulated it should be fine for quite a while.

~~~
tptacek
Ah, shit. I didn't see that. That almost completely moots my complaint.

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heyalexej
May be anecdotal: I have several friends who got really excited about this and
bought anything from DIY kits to industrial grade Sous Vide immersion
circulators. All of which are now collecting dust after using them 3 times.
Reminds me of the phenomenon of sandwich makers in Germany somewhere in the
90s. Must have been 15 years since I've seen one since.

Edit: After all these replies, my evidence seems to be in fact anecdotal.

~~~
x43b
I bought an ANOVA 18 months ago and two more people have bought one after
eating food from mine.

We all use ours several times a week. It turns out so good and so consistent,
I basically use it for all beef, chicken, pork, and lamb.

~~~
krisroadruck
Bought one a year ago, been sitting in a drawer ever since. Just don't find it
anywhere close to convenient =/

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x43b
I do not ever intend to stop using my Anova. But in terms of going main
stream, I feel like it is already or it is not and the ship has sailed.

I bought my Bluetooth(rarely use that part, just set and walk away) cooker for
$125 over a year ago. Why would this competitor make it go mainstream.

I am all for more consumer options, but how is this different/better?

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moonka
Finally dipped my toes into it with the recent black friday deals on the Anova
for $100. It came yesterday, and I used it to make eggs. Creamiest scrambled
eggs I've ever had!

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MegaDeKay
The title of this article should be changed to reflect the fact that it a
couple years old.

"we thought we'd resurface our look at one of the early smart sous-vide
machines from August 2014."

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huhtenberg
Erm. A bit late for the party?

Larger companies _are_ working on Anova-like devices and some of them are
already popping up. Just saw [1] last week in a grocery store here, in
Switzerland. It's as mainstream as it gets.

[1]
[https://www.bettybossi.ch/de/Angebote/Detail/12168232977?tit...](https://www.bettybossi.ch/de/Angebote/Detail/12168232977?title=Sous-
Vide-Garer-Profi-Set)

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analog31
If sous vide catches on, I wonder if the next step in the progression is pre-
packaged or even pre-cooked sous vide meats. Isn't that how the restaurants do
it? It's more sanitary because it eliminates the handling of raw meat.

I also wonder if a low power microwave oven would be an alternative to a hot
water bath. I don't know how the two methods would compare for efficiency.

~~~
sjwright
> I wonder if the next step in the progression is pre-packaged or even pre-
> cooked sous vide meats.

Coles supermarkets in Australia have been selling pre-cooked, pre-sauced sous
vide meats for a couple of years now, though they don't say "sous vide" on the
packaging but rather "slow cooked for N hours". But the actual product is
clearly cooked sous vide – the interior packaging is a vacuum sealed bag and
the results are exactly what you'd expect.

> Isn't that how the restaurants do it?

In my experience it's more common in the restaurant world but still not
pervasive.

> I also wonder if a low power microwave oven would be an alternative to a hot
> water bath.

Poorly. An immersion circulator is probably the simplest and ultimately
cheapest form of the idea; engineering-wise they're not much more complicated
than an electric kettle. It just needs economies of scale to really kick in.

A microwave would also be highly impractical for all but the shortest cooks.
Sous vide often takes multiple hours or even multiple days – I do 10 hour pork
belly and 72 hour lamb shanks. For the latter I usually set it up in the
laundry and switch from a stockpot to an esky (cooler box). Very easy to do
with an immersion circulator.

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shalmanese
Sous Vide is an interesting market because quality is very much a binary
quantity. Either it works or it doesn't, there's not "better" sous vide or
"worse" sous vide. All the other dimensions under which the product competes
(size, noise, reliability, UI) appear to be hygiene factors (ie: we just care
that they're good enough. Beyond that, we're indifferent).

As a result, there's very little room for differentiation in this space and a
rapid descent into commoditization with very little room for profits. The big
players in the market are betting their hope on apps which seems misguided.
Expect to see Chinese competitors come in and ruthlessly undercut on price and
leave the current players in the dust. Those no-name Chinese brands are going
to be the real people who will take SV mainstream.

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_ph_
I love my Anova cooker. Not only is it dead simple to get meat prepared
exactly to the point you want, it is also much more tender, as over time, any
tendons slowly dissolve. And I have gotten much more critical of any
preparations of meat which ended up too dry because the meat had been
overheated.

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krzat
Someone should make instant-pot like device with integrated magnetic stirrer
and accurate temperature control.

~~~
tptacek
Why would that product be better than the current generation of "sous vide"
products, which can clip onto any pot or cambro?

~~~
x43b
>>Why would that product be better than the current >>generation of "sous
vide" products, which can clip onto >>any pot or cambro?

They are fundamentally different cooking techniques. Immersion cooking, "sous
vide", is cooking food in a sealed bag in a water bath.

"instant pot" are more like smart cockpot/pressure cookers where the food is
contained a pressurized (sometimes) vessel in air.

Which is better depends on the type of food and cooking technique you wish to
utilize.

~~~
tptacek
Oh, I misunderstood what you were suggesting --- I thought you were proposing
a new packaging for "sous vide" style cooking.

I get what I can do with a pressure cooker that I can't do with a circulator.

I do not get what I can do with an unpressurized "smart crock pot" that I
can't do with a circulator.

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pfarnsworth
Do the chemicals in the plastic bags not leach into the food? That's always
been my greatest fear, given that things like BPA weren't understood until
someone decided to analyze it. Has there been a test ensuring that boiling a
plastic bag doesn't emit chemicals into the food that it's holding?

~~~
MegaDeKay
a) You aren't boiling the water, not even close most of the time. Most meats
are cooked around 135F - 150F. You might take veggies up to maybe 185F, but I
don't think most people SV vegetables anyway.

b) Dave Arnold on his Cooking Issues podcast got the SC Johnson folks to
confirm that their ZipLoc bags are safe for this application. In fact, I
checked one box of mine and it says "BPA free".

c) FoodSaver bags are safe as well, but I don't have a reference handy.

~~~
pfarnsworth
Thanks for the info. However, BPA isn't the only plastic that leaches
chemicals. Even the non-BPA plastics emit chemicals as far as I know.

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halcyondaze
There's this, Anova, Joule, etc. Why are there >3 high tech sous vide
companies right now, I honestly don't understand.

