Anova Culinary Bluetooth Sous Vide Precision Cooker Review

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Anova Culinary Sous Vide Cooker Rated
  • Smart Capabilities
  • App Quality
  • Ease of Use
  • Reliability
  • Construction Quality
  • Value for Money
4.5

SHJ Verdict

There’s no other smart kitchen device out there right now that can improve the quality and efficiency of your cooking like the Anova Culinary Bluetooth Sous Vide Precision Cooker.

Supremely easy to use — so long as you have a good internet connection — and effective, you’ll be cooking like a top chef in no time.

>>> Check current price on Amazon

Cooking well can be a challenge. But with the Anova Culinary Bluetooth Sous Vide Precision Cooker, it’s got a whole lot easier.

Whether you’re an amateur chef or a feverish connoisseur of the kitchen, cooking can easily become a huge source of stress. We typically see quality cooking as a factor of skill, time, and luck, and if you’re short on any one of those on a given day, you could end up spitting out all your hard work.

That’s part of why some of us might dread the kitchen, but new technologies are making it easier than ever to make great-tasting meals that cut the labor intensity down by half. The era of the smart kitchen is here, and it’s amazing.

anova culinary sous vide review

One new product from Anova Culinary has brought the gourmet process of sous vide cooking right into the home.

Sous vide means “under vacuum” in French, and it involves sealing food in a plastic bag and cooking it in a pot of heated water. This method helps control temperatures so that your items are cooked evenly without drying out.

Sous vide works using lower temperatures, which means it takes hours to thoroughly cook a meal, much like dumping food in a Crock-Pot, while leaving your food tender and moist.

But Anova’s Bluetooth Sous Vide Precision Cooker makes the process completely automated, and you don’t have to spend the whole time hovering in the kitchen because the cooker is synced to the Bluetooth in your home.

It’s all app-controlled, which makes getting great sous vide-style food easy and affordable.

Let’s take a closer look at what this sous vide device can really do…

Anova Culinary Sous Vide Precision Cooker: the Details

Specs

  • Dimensions: 14.8 x 2.8 x 2.8 inches
  • Weight: 2.5 lbs.
  • Product Type: Sous vide precision cooker
  • Temperature Range: 77 to 210 degrees Fahrenheit (25 to 99 degrees Celsius)
  • Tank Capacity: 4 to 5 gallons
  • Wattage: 800 watts
  • Bluetooth: Yes
  • Wi-Fi: Only in the Bluetooth/Wi-Fi version, which is priced approximately $50 more than Bluetooth-only
  • Compatible with Amazon Alexa: Yes, through the Anova Culinary skill download (Wi-Fi version only)

How Does It Work?

Step one: pick a pot and fill it with water. Ah, so simple.

Step two: Fasten the Anova Precision Cooker to the side of the pot. The cooker clips onto the side of any pot, small or large. It comes with an adjustable clamp to ensure that it’s on tight and properly aligned to stir and heat the water. One of the beauties of this is that you don’t even need to be near a kitchen or an electric socket for it to work, so it’s a great device to use when you don’t have much space (stow it in a drawer at college or get it out to cook a tasty meal in an RV).

Step 3: The best way to get precise cooking times is to refer to the Anova app, which compiles tons of recipes for specific types of food, but you can also find plenty of references on the web. Once you know what to cook, you can input the times and temperatures manually into the cooker, or use the Anova app to select quick start recipes.

Step 4: Next, you’ll need a resealable bag to vacuum-seal your food. Any Ziploc bag will do; all you need to do is find large enough sizes for hefty meals. Place your food in the bag and slowly start emerging it in water, zipping it up a little bit at a time to get out most of the air pockets. Without getting any water in the bag, submerge it and clip the top of the bag to the side of the pot.

Step 5: Once your meal is done, you can, of course, grill it in a skillet, add spices, or otherwise bring it to a crisp finish. But the sous vide process takes away the guesswork and makes it ready to eat right out of the pot.

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Anova: The Brand

Anova has quietly become a leader in the smart kitchen market, with a wide array of products that integrate intuitive tech with complicated cooking techniques, which adds up to quick, energy-saving features for you.

Anova Culinary has a dedicated app service to bring you tips, tutorials, and recipes at the push of a button, and their customer service is responsive and ready to troubleshoot or replace machines if needed.

Their sous vide cooker is the top-selling product of its kind on Amazon, and part of that no doubt lies in Anova’s support network. Our Anova review found plenty of features designed for maximum convenience, and that goes a long way.

Anova Culinary Bluetooth Sous Vide Precision Cooker: Review

The Positives

Consistent Cooking

The great thing about the Anova precision cooker is that it takes all the guesswork away from cooking, especially when it comes to any kind of meat.

The process is so consistent and thorough that it actually gets rid of more bacteria, on average, than a grill or oven, and the intuitiveness of Anova’s design means you can pick it up right away without a steep learning curve.

You’ll get great results every time, and you can use it the way you want, making use of the Bluetooth/Wi-Fi options or doing it all by hand.

If you’re a home cook with loftier aspirations, you’ll find this smart kitchen device takes your food to the next level, immediately. For all the products we’ve tried, the Anova precision cooker is the one that’s made the most tangible difference in the quality of our cooking, as well as the efficiency.

Here’s a look at in action with some New York strip steaks:

Extensive Recipe Database

The app features connect you instantly to hundreds of recipes from all around the world. The app includes custom settings to go with any recipe at the touch of a button, a robust addition that adds to the overall simplicity of the Anova cooker.

Many of the settings are fine-tuned for different textures of meats — tough beef or flaky fish — to get you the perfectly right balance of juicy flavor out of each meal.

Manual Control Options

For anyone with spotty internet connectivity, the Anova also has manual controls that allow you to turn it off and on and set the cooker to the correct temperature, without going through either a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection.

It’s always rewarding to see that smart kitchen appliances have taken these fail-safes into consideration, so that you needn’t be too reliant on a perfectly functioning Bluetooth connection to cook.

Another benefit is that, if you’ve installed it correctly, the cooker will not turn itself off in the event of a lost connection. A power outage unfortunately will prevent you from being able to control the device when you aren’t at home, which when it works is a great benefit of the Wi-Fi app, but the precision cooker can go right on with its job anyway, even in the event of a power outage.

Dishwasher Safe

The cooker’s detachable parts are dishwasher safe, and cleaning the cooker itself can be done with just a soft, damp cloth.

There’s no fuss here, and the parts come off easily.

The Negatives

Unreliable Connectivity (Not Necessarily the Machine’s Fault!)

As with any ‘smart’ device, internet connection issues are one of the biggest problems you can encounter, and while we’ve said there are ways of manually operating the cooker, being able to sync it with a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection guarantees optimal performance. And, after all, that’s probably what you’ve bought it for.

But connections can be easily lost if your Bluetooth device is slightly out-of-range, so you will likely have to do plenty of troubleshooting when you’re first learning how to use it to understand how the device adjusts to your home connections.

Depending on where you intend to do your cooking, you may want to keep this in mind when you’re deciding what features are worth paying for. Going with a Bluetooth-only option takes a lot of the unknowns out of the equation.

We opted for the WiFi and Bluetooth option and so far haven’t regretted spending a little extra for the benefits of WiFi.

anova culinary bluetooth sous vide precision cooker review

App Usage Depends On Your Location

The app also is a your-mileage-may-vary situation.

You might find plenty of use for it, especially as a reference for recipes, or you might decide to save yourself the headache and make use of the simple interface on the cooker itself.

Syncing can occasionally stall, so if you’re relying on your phone to let you know when your meal is done, you might find that it takes a couple of minutes to tell you when it’s finished — annoying when you’re aiming for perfectly cooked meat. We suggest staying with your meals for the first few tries until you know how exactly reliable the app will be for you.

Cooling Rack Required

The Anova is so lightweight that you might imagine you can use it practically anywhere, but be careful of leaving your pots directly on a countertop or table — it is a cooker after all!

The best thing to do is buy a cooling rack to set your pot on above the counter, which will prevent prolonged heat exposure to your counter top.

best sous vide cooker

Overall Verdict

We’re incredibly impressed with the Anova Culinary Bluetooth Sous Vide Precision Cooker and recommend it to anyone looking to improve the quality and efficiency of their cooking.

If you’re keen on trying a sous vide product, this is an excellent brand to try. Set-up couldn’t be easier, and you’ll immediately save time by letting the machine do its thing and having next to no cleanup after preparing a full meal.

The interface options are so simple and intuitive, and if there’s anything to hold it back, it’s the potential fickleness of internet connections and some unreliability baked into how the app syncs with your device.

With realistic expectations, though, you’ll be able to quickly figure out what works best for you, and the rest of the work is just snapping it on a pot. Give it a try, and share some of your culinary creations with the rest of us!

anova sous vide review

Where To Buy the Anova Culinary Precision Cooker

This is one of the most popular smart kitchen devices on the market right now, and it’s readily available to buy online.

Check out these online stores for starters:

And, of course, it’s available on Amazon.

anova culinary sous vide precision cooker review


Have you tried the Anova Culinary Bluetooth Sous Vide Precision Cooker yet?

Staff Writer

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