Customer Reviews

SousVide Supreme Sous Vide Water Oven

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Our interest in sous vide cooking grew from being lucky enough sporadicly to sample food prepared this way in a few restaurants. Nothing as fancy as The French Laundry, but still wonderful, memorable food. The sous-vide process is very easy for any cook - just season the raw meat or veggies; seal in a vacuum bag (not included, but our FoodSaver works great); cook at the listed temperature for the recommended time; sear to put a nice color on the outside of the food, if desired. The advantage of the method is that as the food is sealed in a bag, it loses very little moisture during cooking. Most items take about 1-2 hours with zero supervision, but you can sous vide cook them months in advance and then freeze them. When you want a delicious meal, just defrost and sear them to rewarm and finish, making the method a really nice time-saver for midweek gourmet cooking. The food is reliably cooked to perfection, incredibly moist and totally delicious. Timing is very forgiving, so it is gratifyingly difficult to overcook your expensive steaks! This makes preparing the rest of the meal very easy. Before the Sous Vide Supreme became available, we went to the lengths of obtaining a laboratory water bath, but, we weren't sure how clean it was and it was much too big to keep in the kitchen. Having spotted a recent mini-review of Sous Vide Supreme cooker by Cooks Illustrated, we decided to try one risk-free from Amazon. The results have been nothing short of miraculous - I will never cook a steak any other way, if I have the choice! We have also had repeated outstanding successes with t-bone lamb chops, pork loin chops, duck legs (confit-style) and duck breast (medium-rare), diver scallops, shrimp, eggs and chicken breasts.

Specifically about this machine:

Pros:

1. Compact - doesn't take a lot of counter space about 11.5" wide x 14.5" deep x 12" tall

2. Good starter recipe book, but the curious chef will want Douglas Baldwin's book - also available from Amazon

3. Simple to use - out of the box only takes about 5 minutes to learn how to set it up and start cooking

4. Easy clean-up

5. Very accurate temperature maintenance - doesn't vary by more than 0.5 degrees, even without a re-circulating pump

6. Much cheaper than commercial units, and much safer than used laboratory units!

Cons:

1. No vacuum bag sealer in the box. They are not that expensive to buy separately, but you definitely need one

2. Heavy to lift when full of water - can be awkward to fill and move to cooking location, or when you have finished, heavy to lift to the nearest sink and empty of water.

In summary, if it broke tomorrow, we would have to buy another one. It saves times and produces totally delicious food with much less obsessive use of a food thermometer. The fact that food can be frozen and reheated is a huge bonus for us.

You should be careful to distinguish in reviews the commentary on the product itself and the technique of sous vide. Sous vide is simply awesome, and far better chefs than I have proven that. If you haven't experienced it yet, you should spend the $400 on a couple of trips to the French Laundry or Alinea or WD-50 instead. If you already have, then you know what you're looking for, and the real question is how close does this device come to giving the results obtained by a Fischer Scientific immersion circulator.

I was little concerned about whether the device could maintain temperature without circulation. After playing with it and an thermometer, I can tell you that there is some gradient, but it was about a degree, which honestly is perfectly acceptable for food. After bringing it to 135 F and turning it off, 15 hours later it was 95 F, so the insulation works well. Essentially that's all there is to a sous vide machine. I can tell you that my poached eggs are perfect or that the flank steak was unlike any meat I had ever tasted, medium rare, tender, and incredibly beefy, but most of that is due to the technique, and this device competently executes the technique. As far as the user experience goes, it's silly that the lid has an insulation pad instead of built in insulation, you have to hold the button too long to turn in on and off, but the built in handles are cleverly placed.

The only negative review here so far claims that the price is too high for what it is, and compares to a different product. I disagree. For this type of cooking you have 3 choices: high end chemist's rig for $1500, water ovens like this machine, and bubblers and crock pot hacks. Most of us are not willing to spend as much as a high end stove for this, and hacking a crock pot sounds fun until you can't find your soldering iron. The SousVideMagic mentioned explicitly in that review is a bubbler, essentially an immersion circulator without the circulation. With no insulation and no circulation, the temperature gradient will be large. Plus, although the base price is $139, that doesn't count the "1500D controller and an air pump". The whole kit costs $300. It is interesting to note that the same company has also come out with a "water oven" like the SousVide Supreme, and it's $430. Check out the website here: [...] .

Sometimes there's a sweet spot in the price/performance ratio, and this machine is in it.

I had seen this type of cooking on Top Chef and thought it was like the TV dinner food I had as a kid in the 1960s. Then I saw it was being talked about like the latest food trend used in high end restaurants. So, I thought I'd give it a try, as a gift. I bought it as a graduation gift for my son (Baking & Pastry, Johnson & Wales 2010). Before we left for graduation, I seared some beef ribeye steaks on a charcoal grill. Once seared, not cooked, I vacuum packed them, individually and froze them. We took them to the graduation and gave them, along with the machine, to my son. We put them in the machine and went shopping. A few hours later we had one of the best steak dinners I've ever had! So juice and tender, perfectly medium-rare. It's expensive, but, I love it! Now I have to buy another one for myself.

I'm overall very happy with my purchase of the Sous Vide Supreme. It does what it promises -- it silently hits temperatures precisely and holds them there. Other reviewers have already stated the obvious (no vacuum sealer included, etc..) but there are enough niggling problems with the physical design that they're worth calling out for potential buyers to be aware of.

First, the lid design is disappointing. It's a flimsy 1-ply piece of stamped stainless steel. For a tool intended to hold temperatures, it should really be insulated to give the most stable temperature possible while consuming the least energy -- and the SVS folks know this, as they've included an "insulating mat" with the lid. It's essentially a cheap piece of rubber like you'd find in a mousepad from 1995, cut to the shape of the lid. It doesn't sit flat and it looks/feels very cheap for a $400+ appliance.

The lid also is completely flat on the underside. During regular operation, a great deal of condensation collects on the bottom, and there's no place for it to run to. This means when you remove the lid, water splashes all over the place. If the underside of the lid were simply slightly creased to slope towards a point in the middle, all the condensation would collect there, making less mess.

The lid doesn't attach to the base unit in any way. Every time you remove it, you need to carefully try to lift it up with one corner down, pulling it to the center of the basin, to prevent condensation from flying all over, then you need counter space to put it down. Since the top of the lid is unadorned stainless steel, scratches on the top are inevitable.

The basin itself has no means for removing water when you're done cooking. It's fixed into the bottom of the unit, and the only way to get water out is to rig up a siphon of some sort, or to lift the whole thing up and pour (hot) water down the sink. A tank of warm water that sits around for long periods of time and is difficult to empty/clean is a recipe for a very grungy appliance in no time.

The controls on the front are cheap membrane buttons. Think the clicky plastic bubble type buttons on cheap microwaves from the early 90s. It's functional, but it feels very cheap and setting a temperature and timer takes tons of clicks.

The wire racks included for the inside are fairly crooked and wobble on a flat surface. It's not causing me any problems, but it is annoying to get this when you just shelled out $400.

The included power cable is comically short. Fortunately it's a standard AC cable so you can replace it easily.

It sounds like I hate the thing from all of this, but I really do like my SVS a great deal. It performs very, very well. The people behind it just need to increase focus on their industrial design -- if a competitor like Breville swept in with a similar product it would not be hard to outclass the SVS on form factor and look/feel.

I got my Sous Vide Supreme yesterday, and within 15 minutes of taking out of the box I was warming up the water for my first test: frozen filet mignon. I put a little bit of salt and pepper on the steaks, then put them in ziploc's vacuum bags. 2 hours at 138F and we had the best steaks I've ever made in my life. They were perfectly uniformly cooked all the way through, and a quick sear in a cast iron skillet gave them the browned crust that makes a steak even more delicious. My wife said it was the best steak she's ever had, and she usually orders her steaks medium-well at restaurants because she wants to make sure they're not undercooked in the middle.

For 3 weeks my SVS worked like a charm. I cooked and enjoyed everything, duck confit, steak, short ribs, pork tenderloin, fish and shellfish, chicken, eggs, fruit, vegetables and desserts. Not everything was a huge success, but most of my experiments were either satisfactory or sublime. Two days ago the digital display indicated wide swings in temperature. I had set the temperature at 183 for several packages of vegetables after a few minutes it started to climb dramatically (well beyond 200). I dropped a probe into the tank to see what was going on, but my read was 136. It did the same thing the next day, so I just packed it up and shipped it back. I'm so disappointed, but wary of ordering another one.

This thing does what it says it will do. Heats up quickly and maintains temp well enough with about a 1.5 degree swing over a long cooking time. It holds an amazing volume of food.

Some tips-

Watch meat thickness carefully. Doubling the thickness at least quadruples the time at a given temp.

I don't vacuum seal things that I'm going to cook and eat right away. Fancy vacuum units are needed to keep a marinade around meat without sucking the marinade out with the air. A regular old Food Saver won't cut it. You do have to get nearly all of the air out for even cooking, but absolute vacuum is only needed if you are going to store the food once cooked. A zip top bag works great if you then immerse it in water up to nearly the top. The water acts to press out all the air in the bag, which then is pressed closed.

I have both a Sous Vide Profession by Polyscience as well as the Sous Vide Supreme.

I like the Sous Vide Supreme because it looks good enough to keep on my counter at all times. Also, I cook often enough with it that I really want it to be available at all times. I actually use it more than I use my toaster, but less often then I use my microwave.

Being a self contained cooking appliance, there is no setup. For the Sous Vide Professional, I have to dig it out of storage, attach it to a cooking container, fill the container with water and plug it in. The Supreme, I just keep on the counter, always filled with water, and always plugged in.

On the negative side, the Supreme cooks so much less then the Professional can cook. It can really only cook 3 vacuum sealed envelopes using the rack that they give you. You can get 5 envelopes using the rack, but then you have 2 envelopes touching the sides and I worry about poor water circulation. Cooking sous vide is a cooking technique on which you health depends on precise temperature control.

Also, I measured the temperature of the Sous Vide Supreme against a calibrated digital thermometer. The Supreme was off by 3 degrees. It was probably a thoughtful decision that if the temperature had to be off, then it would be safer if the actual temperature is always higher then the displayed temperature -- like it was in this case.

The Sous Vide Profession was dead on with the temperature. Of course, The Professional was $800 as compared to the Supreme's $400. You get what you paid for.

I'm please with my purchase of the Sous Vide Supreme. I can keep it out all the time and the means less setup time when I do want to use it. While it cooks less food volume then professional alternatives, I can still cook 3 Chicken Cordon Bleu and serve 3 people. This is normally good enough for me. I suppose if you had a large family, you'd be using a faster cooking method anyway and avoid Sous Vide cooking except for special occasions.

The temperature problem isn't really a problem as long as the error is always in favor of a higher temperature rather then a lower one. Otherwise you'd be looking at food poisoning if the cooking times are for more then 4 hours and you are cooking close to the pasteurization temperature of 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

Consider this tentative. I've had it only about a month. On the plus side it was delivered promptly by Amazon and was easy to set up and get going. Thank you for the DVD! On the minus side you need to make sure you have sufficient vacuum-packing capability.

I began modestly by cooking a half dozen pretty thick carrots. Later I tried cooking whole yams. Then whole onions and broccoli. A temperature of 160 degrees F for about two hours did the trick. The veggies were rendered tender and juicy.

Pork ribs likewise turned out great. I vacuum-bagged the ribs in six-to-eight inch sections including a splattering of barbecue sauce. The bags were frozen. Later I thawed a bag and popped it into the water oven. Again, 160 degrees works for a cooking time of about six or eight hours.

The result is the most tender ribs I've ever eaten.

Today I risked it all. I committed a $37 leg of lamb. I smeared the raw lamb with garlic and added fresh rosemary to the bag. I set the temp to 170 degrees F. It stayed in the water oven for 28 hours! I also include a separate bag with a couple of potatoes, each with a diameter of about 2 inches.

The result was near-perfect. The lamb was so tender it could be cut with a fork. No worries about gravy. The bag had about 12 ounces of fluids -- perfect for gravy.

The potatoes were perfect. They were tender (cooked in their own skins).

In future I would probably shorten the cooking time for the lamb. Maybe 24 hours would be better.

I mentioned vacuum-bag capability. I have two (2!) FoodSaver units, a big one and a little one. This is overkill, but it also gives me plenty of headroom.

The main challenge with the SousVide system is the planning. Imagine you're in New York and you're planning a meal for Honolulu. The long lead time makes it tough to have everything ready at once.

On the positive side, you can't burn anything. But here's a warning. If you leave something in the water oven too long, it will literally melt, i.e., become soup.

My strategy is to visit Costco and purchase meat, poultry and fish in large quantities. I have plenty of marinade on hand. Using the FoodSaver, I vacuum-bag mealtime portions and freeze them. Once thawed, they are popped into the water oven.

SousVide meals cannot be spur-of-the-moment. Just heating the water oven to 140 degrees F takes about 20 minutes.

On a whole, it was a worthwhile purchase and opens new possibilities in cooking.

I have had my unit for a few weeks now. It does a stellar job keeping the temperature nearly spot on. It holds a lot and is attractive.

The only issues are, it's very difficult to remove the lid without water going everywhere. The lid gets heavy condensation on it and it seems no matter which way you lift it, water runs all over the place. I have found the easiest way is to slowly lift, drop one corner down into the machine and hold it there for a moment then slowly raise onto the corner.

Another thing to beware of ordering it here. The units on Amazon are sold through outside vendors. Mine developed a leak so I contacted the manufacturer as someone here had posted they handled returns very quickly and did a turn around exchange. When I contacted them, Doug was the person responding to me and he told me that I would have to seek service from who I bought it from. Hmmm, really? Okay, so I contacted Amazon.com. They cannot do an exchange on these because of them being outside vendors so they have to initiate a refund. In this case for me it caused a huge inconvenience because I used nearly 100.00 in amazon.com point credits toward my purchase so I am going to have to wait until they issue my refund, then I can re purchase. So keep this in mind, if you buy it here on Amazon, the manufacturer won't help you with an exchange for a defect. This was the first time I have had a vendor do this to me so I thought it was odd. Given Amazon.com only takes returns up to 30 days, what happens on day 31?

Outside that, the unit is great (as long as it doesn't go haywire) the food is amazing and makes great hard boiled eggs too. I did find the recommended pork temp was too low, the pork chops were pink and had a blood spot (yuck) but I upped the temperature about eight degrees and they were fine then. Trial and error will make this work perfect for you.

Cheers,

John