The Best Sous Vide Machines (Immersion Circulators)

This immersion circulator has all the features we loved in previous incarnations. It is durable and easy to attach to a wide range of vessels. Its powerful motor heats water quickly and to exactly the temperature we selected every time. And, while it’s an inch taller than its predecessor, it’s still lightweight and easy to store. With no controls on the unit itself, you must rely on its app to program time and temperature. Fortunately, its app is one of the best we’ve used, with a clear, user-friendly interface and lots of built-in recipes. The jury’s still out on the machine’s new “turbo” function, however. While this function did allow us to cook steak and pork chops to our desired doneness in a fraction of the time we’d need for conventional sous vide recipes, it currently works only with a relatively small selection of preset recipes by Breville—mostly different types of steak. Moreover, we’ve never found speed to be a priority when cooking sous vide conventionally; if anything, the texture and flavor of most foods improves over the longer, slower cook.

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We loved (almost) everything about this model: its dead-on accuracy; its solid construction; its speed; its powerful water circulation (it beat the rest of the lineup by several seconds in our food-coloring test); its silence; and, most of all, its great cooking results. But one design flaw annoyed us from the start: The control panel display of this 14.5-inch-tall device points straight up, making it nearly impossible for a shorter tester to see, set, and check without standing on a step stool (and there’s no app to use instead). It comes with reusable bags and a hand-operated vacuum pump plus four metal clips to attach bagged food to the vessel. We tried the bags and pump to cook spice-rubbed indoor pulled pork for 20 hours, and while the bags became slightly stained and retained a faint scent, they remained in usable condition. However, the pump is small, flimsy, and plastic, so we wouldn’t expect great durability, but it’s a nice starter kit.

We liked many things about this sous vide machine. It’s sturdy, relatively compact, and well-made, and it attached to different vessels easily. It heated water quickly and usually quite accurately—on a few occasions, the temperature was off by about a degree. And we appreciated that we could set the time and temperature either manually, on the machine itself, or using an app. The app is functional; we didn’t have the connectivity issues that plagued an earlier iteration. But it still has room for improvement, as it automatically starts a cook the moment water has reached its temperature and doesn’t alert you when food is done or water levels are low. (The machine itself beeps when these things happen, but if you’re not in the same room, you won’t necessarily hear it.)

While we appreciated the accuracy of this model’s cooking and the unique control wheel that let us zip up and down rapidly to set time and temperature instead of repeatedly pressing and holding buttons, the device itself felt slightly flimsy, particularly when turning that plastic wheel. It’s also slightly clunky and top-heavy. The display could be improved: It flashes between the target temperature and the timer in a single small portion of the readout, so we had to linger to read elapsed time (and when the numbers were similar, such as 16 hours to go at 160 degrees, it was momentarily confusing). The upshot: If you can deal with the slightly awkward operation, this device works fine at a relatively inexpensive price.

We loved this device’s very large, easy-to-read face with controls that were simple to set. While food came out acceptably, the display was dependably off by a full degree during cooking, reading higher than it actually was. If you buy this machine, you may want to check it against another, more reliable thermometer and adjust temperature settings accordingly. The display has a “chill” button for wine, which means that it circulates the water without heating it; to use it, add ice to a cold-water bath and insert the bottle. An adjustable clamp helps it attach to most vessels (though it could only slide so far and the device sat at a slight angle in our Dutch oven). It comes with a small, plastic hand-operated vacuum pump and 10 reusable plastic bags in two sizes, a nice touch—but even the large size was too small (at 9.5 inches by 9.5 inches) to fit our asparagus or pulled pork.

We loved the ease of setting this extra-quiet, slim, and compact device. But its temperature display was consistently off by 1 full degree, reading as higher than it really was. This didn’t affect longer-cooking recipes such as pulled pork and steak, but asparagus came out just slightly too crunchy (though our soft-cooked eggs were within the range of acceptable). If you buy this model, you might want to check the water temperature against a trustworthy thermometer and adjust the temperature setting accordingly. We disliked that its clamp was fixed in place (not adjustable) on the device, so we could not attach it to shorter vessels such as our 4-quart saucepan or 7.25-quart Dutch oven.

This large, durable, reasonably priced sous vide machine was easy to attach to different vessels, thanks to its simple clip. And while its no-frills WiFi-enabled app wasn’t the most well-designed, it was relatively simple to connect to and intuitive to use—much more so than the machine’s manual controls, which were a pain to cycle through. Our gripes? Right out of the box, the machine generated temperatures that were off by 2 degrees, though it has a feature that lets you calibrate the machine to compensate for this difference. (Once we calibrated, it made very good asparagus, steak, and slow-cooked pork.) It took a very long time to heat water.

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We appreciated the compact size of this new model from Anova and that we could control it by using either the manual display or an app. The app was great—when it worked. Unfortunately, it often lost Wi-Fi connection and froze. Also unfortunate: We couldn’t manually set cooking times on the display in increments of less than 5 minutes, so when we wanted to poach eggs for 12 minutes, we were out of luck (we could set custom temperatures on the app when it was working). Worse, the device was sometimes slightly inaccurate, displaying its temperature as higher than the actual temperature by up to 1 degree; one of our soft-cooked eggs came out a bit too runny, but longer-cooked foods such as steak and pulled pork were fine. We liked that its adjustable clamp was easy to affix to every size vessel.

This solidly made sous vide machine had a clip that made it a breeze to attach to vessels of different sizes and shapes. And we liked its simple, bright display, which was easy to read. It was fairly easy to set cooking times and temperatures manually too. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get its app to recognize the machine or to connect to our WiFi, rendering this service useless. And the machine took longer to heat up water than any other model we tested—over 40 minutes to raise the water temperature by 100 degrees. It wasn’t very accurate, generating temperatures that were off by 1 to 2 degrees, but not consistently, so we had to continuously monitor the true temperature during cooking to make sure that food didn’t overcook or undercook.

This simple, small, sleek model aced every test: It was the most powerful of the lineup at 1,100 watts, making it the fastest to heat water, and it held whatever temperature we set with perfect accuracy, whether we were cooking for 12 minutes or 20 hours. Easy and quick to set and monitor via an extremely user-friendly app (that’s compatible with iOS and Android), it’s also simple to clip onto any size vessel for cooking (if desired, a strong magnet in the base lets you stand it in metal pots without clipping it). Because it has no display, it isn’t harmed when it’s dropped in the water, unlike other models. Its small, lightweight, and slim profile makes it a snap to store when you’re done cooking. (Note: The only difference between this model and the stainless-steel version—which costs about $50 more—is the trim on the outside of the device, so we recommend this less-expensive polycarbonate model.)