Dear Silicon Valley: A sous-vide is not a crockpot

No, you don’t need a sous-vide. You don’t need one from Mellow or Anova or Nomiku. A sous-vide will not make your life better or easier or more fashionable. This is not a crockpot. This is not an instant pot. Dinner won’t magically appear at 6:30pm. Despite what sous-vide makers tell you, food will not always be the perfect temperature or consistency as long as the word “perfect” is subjective.

You won’t always even be sure you like the food that comes out of your sous-vide.

So what are these various sous-vide contraptions? They’re experiment machines. If you like to play around in the kitchen, if you’re OK with a meal occasionally turning out a little weird or a little raw in exchange for that one magic night when everything tastes out-of-orbit amazing, then perhaps a sous-vide is for you. But disabuse yourself of the notion that you’ll be using this every night to feed your large family of toddler children. This is for the big kids and the people who can chug wine if the fat on your meat never rendered. This is for the stay-cation date night.

I should preface this by saying I cook a lot. It saves money, I like following recipes, I like giving people food. My husband worked back-of-house and front-of-house in restaurants for more than 20 years. We know food pretty well, and we’re both adventurous eaters; neither of us is picky.

By that measure, a sous-vide is right up our alley. Modern sous-vide is a cooking technique developed by a French chef in the 1970s as a means of cooking foie gras without losing the volume of the food. By cooking the fatty duck liver at a low temperature for a long time in a vacuum-sealed bag, the meat keeps its volume—no water is lost and no fat is rendered.

Sometimes this is an issue. A couple of spins with the sous-vide and you find that “cooked” food tastes and smells distinctly different from regularly cooked food. Part of this is due to the lack of a Maillard reaction, in which amino acids and sugars react to create a variety of flavor profiles that humans are generally accustomed to. That’s why many sous-vide recipes recommend searing or broiling food after it comes out of the water bath. Although the meat or vegetable is a uniform texture and temperature throughout, you still may want that nice crispy outer crust.

Water + bags + app + food

Although I’ve eaten plenty of sous-vide food before, the cooking process had been a black box for me.

The $399 Mellow (currently just $299 until December 29) seemed like a good place to start. It’s a bit more expensive than other immersion circulation pumps, but it’s an all-in-one kind of deal. Anova seems to have the bulk of the sous-vide appliance market share, but there are a plethora of options out there to start from. Frankly, I’d reached out to several companies for review units, but there always seemed to be a “newest product” in development, almost ready to send to reviewers, perpetually in a beta phase. Finally, Ars Senior Editor Lee Hutchinson received the Mellow he pre-ordered three years (and change) previously, and he turned around and sent it immediately to me for testing. I omitted the final standard “Will It Blend?” test for this product because it’s going home to Lee after this.

The Mellow has all the basic features any comparable sous-vide has: wireless start/stop, the ability to set your dinner time and walk away, a circulation pump to make sure the water is a uniform temperature, heating as well as cooling mechanisms. That makes it a perfectly fine candidate for a general sous-vide review.

There are obvious differences, though. The Mellow is self-contained—the water bath sits on top of a special platform designed to circulate the water above—whereas many sous-vide makers offer a single baton-shaped pump that you immerse in a self-provided pot. In my opinion, that makes the Mellow way more beautiful. It’s a sleek appliance meant to live on your counter, not a tool that helps you cobble together an ad hoc precision cooker.

Despite having almost no counter space in my kitchen, the Mellow was able to become an installation rather than a distraction. (I reviewed the PicoBrew Pico in May, and, while the size of the appliance was a wonder given how big its pervious iteration was, it was definitely big enough to be a distraction.)

Ultimately, the Mellow’s design is good. It’s the ultimate Silicon Valley appliance—no buttons, no screens, no levers or cranks or skeeboblers or doodaddlers. You plug the Mellow in, sync it with the mobile app using a code transmitted from light pulses, and, from there, the bulk of your interaction with the machine is done through the app.

This Mellow came with two boxes of special “food safe” plastic bags (I assume this means they won’t melt in high temperatures). Most sous-vide food needs to be cooked in a bag (otherwise I guess it would just be “boiled” food) with the exception of eggs. If you’re concerned about minimizing waste, well, a sous-vide is not the ecological choice. After food has been cooked in them, reusing the bags is really not an option.

How it works

The app itself is quite nice, though limited. Tiles showing the kind of food you can cook appear at the forefront. Once you select what you’re going to cook, stylized static cartoons directing you to insert or remove the bag give the process an instructional vibe.

My biggest gripe, though, is that, besides selecting the kind of food you want to cook and the consistency you want it to come out at, there’s really no other guidance about how to cook your food. I spoke to the Mellow creators, and, apparently, that’s going to change in a 2018 update. Mellow rolled out a page on its website just this week with a small collection of real recipes you can use to make food, and those recipes will be pushed to Mellow’s app next year. But for now, all you can do is select a general category of food, the desired consistency when it’s done cooking, and when you want it done.

The most frustrating part of this arrangement was that, at the end of a cook time, Mellow would offer short, two-sentence “finishing suggestions,” but there was no apparent way to see those finishing suggestions beforehand. Sometimes the app would suggest you sear food or even broil vegetables for an extra 5 minutes, but there was no way for me to see what the finishing suggestion would be until the food was “finished.” For the short ribs, it suggested “finishing” the dish with a blowtorch. Maybe if you’re enough of a foodie to have a blowtorch lying around this is no big deal, but it’s something I could have maybe borrowed or bought on Craigslist if I had known that it was a piece of equipment key to a perfect meal.

But the nature of “finishing suggestions” is a big part of why sous-vide is marketed wrong. Every new sous-vide Silicon Valley has barfed out has a dreamy introduction video showing busy young professionals cooking beautiful meals in their expansive, spotless kitchens, throwing down perfectly cooked-through meat and vegetables in front of their happy children and friends.

The world of sous-vide is not at all that simple. Every recipe only cooks the food through. You need to sear or brown or broil it. You need to make a sauce. You need to make side dishes if you want them because you can’t cook two different foods in a sous-vide unless you plan a great deal ahead and feel confident enough to do it manually, without the app’s help.

As I stressed above, this is not a crockpot, where you throw all your ingredients in and get a bowl of chili or a meat-and-potatoes meal out. You’re still going to be spending 20 minutes in the kitchen at the end of the day cutting up vegetables or boiling rice to go with your meat—20 minutes that could be spent simultaneously cooking meat with a quick sear and a pop in a pre-heated oven.

Sous-vide is just a cool way to cook stuff differently, and sous-vide makers should be more honest about that. I mean, why not?! Cooking is chemistry! Lean in to the market of curious amateur chemists out there rather than try to solve the hectic professional’s life. This food is what they serve on other planets! It tastes different, it smells different, and it has an exotic-from-nowhere kind of magic.

What we cooked

In case you’re wondering where my pulled pork recipe is: for admittedly vague ethical/ecological reasons, we try not to eat huge amounts of meat, and sous-vide is for meat. (I mean, there are egg and vegetable settings in the mellow app, but 80 percent of the app is dedicated to flesh-cooking). I avoid pork and lamb and veal and cephalopods (and chicken, mostly). I cook local beef and bison on occasion because I live in Colorado and it’s easy to get that kind of high-quality meat from local farmers. I love fish so much, and I try to eat trout and inland varieties, but I splurged on a Chilean sea bass filet for this review. It was so. Unbelievably. Good.

We ended up doing a lot of beef for this test, because the day I went to buy short ribs there was an insane sale on chuck roast and ground beef. I’m glad that happened because it allowed me to test meats with a range of fat content.

Eggs

The first recipe anyone tries in a sous-vide has to be eggs, because these self-contained protein pouches don’t require a plastic bag and sous-vide eggs are significantly different from any other style of eggs you’ll try in your life.

Low-temperature, long-duration cooking cooks the yolks to this crazy creamy texture you’ll never get from poaching or soft-boiling. But the white of the egg doesn’t so much get cooked. For this reason, sous-vide eggs can be polarizing. Either you love ‘em or you hate ‘em. I move the weird white aside and love a good creamy yolk. My husband can’t overlook the weird yolk and just can’t get into the sous-vide egg camp.

One thing I didn’t try that I wish I had: pre-scrambling the eggs, a technique I found on a cooking blog after the Mellow and I were separated.

Beets

I used to hate beets, but I developed a love for them this year after I found a post-run smoothie recipe that used them. I started roasting and boiling them on Sundays for the week ahead, which led to me throwing them in salads and eating them with dressing as snacks.

But were sous-vide beets all that different from roasted or boiled beets? The texture seemed more consistent, and I definitely got more beet juice collecting at the bottom of the Tupperware I used to store them. But the Mellow recommended I broil them quickly as a “finishing suggestion,” and I honestly couldn’t tell what was better about sous-vide-then-broiled beets as opposed to simply roasting them in the oven at 450 degrees. In fact, I preferred the latter.

Chilean Sea Bass

Oh god this was so good. After two sous-vide meals that produced mixed reviews for our household, this was the one that knocked it out of the park. We got a fancy cut of fish, and the sous-vide technique made sure nothing was lost or overcooked. I took a tip from another sous-vide blog (since the Mellow app was silent on how to prepare sea bass for cooking). I threw in some lemon slices and sage leaves, but, to be honest, the salt and pepper were all the fish needed. Sous-vide-cooked sage is also kind of bitter.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1236297