Hello there!

Any recommendations for a sous vide thermoplongeur, like this one? It should be available in Europe, temperature from 30 - 60°C (90 - 140°F) and have a cooking time of up to 36h. Its main purpose will be yogurt making.

  • quixotic120@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    2 days ago

    Anova is all around pretty good and should be available in the EU

    That said these are simple machines. I’ve been using immersion circulators for cooking since around 2011 with a home built setup. They’re just a heater, a thermocouple, a relay, and a PID controller to adjust the temperature as needed based on input from the thermocouple. Don’t submerge it and it should last ages

    Since then I’ve gotten a few proper ones and they all work about the same because they’re pretty simple. My anova works well but I also have a Chinese no name one that was $13 and works about as well. A bit harder to use as the controls are weird, it feels cheap, and it can’t do huge tubs of water like the anova can but that’s not common to utilize.

    Whatever you buy make sure it’s somewhat easy to clean (generally you should still clean and dry it throughly after each use, especially so if you ever have a failure where the bath gets contaminated obviously) and look into how the stick mounts to whatever you plan to use as a vessel for the bath. I generally just use stockpots or whatever for shorter cooks but I also have the plastic tubs as well and some options don’t clip on to everything well, apparently

      • quixotic120@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        Sad to hear. I have the og version and it runs like a tank, the one with the big wheel. I never use the connectivity options

        I can’t in good faith recommend a company that is hostile to their consumers, so fuck anova

    • Hugin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I’d stay far far away from Anova. Their build quality has massively dropped.

      In the last two years I’ve seen plastic cracking, touch screens failing, and panels falling off because the glue couldn’t handle the upper temp limit of the machine.

      If you are willing to spend big for buy it for life get a PolyScience MX-CA11B. It’s what restaurants that run them non stop for years use. If you are not willing to spend that much get one of the other PolyScience machines.

      • quixotic120@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        31 minutes ago

        Sad to hear, my og one still runs fine but it’s old at this point from like 2014 or so

        The polyscience is definitely a workhorse but it’s wild overkill for 99% of users. I will again point to I have a chinese no name one I’ve had for like 8 years now that has held up fine and was $13 from AliExpress because I wanted a backup. I have used it quite a bit for whenever I host a large meal and need to cook 2-3 baths at once

        And honestly for what the polyscience costs you don’t get the value, imo. I have read people who have had them fail on the Chefsteps forums, it does happen. I don’t hold this against polyscience of course, failure is inevitable, but frankly for $1200 you should get a significant warranty period. You don’t get that, it’s like 12 or 24 months. If and when it breaks you’re hosed and on the hook for (very expensive, given brevilles track record) repairs

        What you’re buying with polyscience is very strong power and a high degree of precision. The first point is why restaurants use them; if you’re preparing 30+ portions at once you need a circulator that can heat a significant amount of water. And to this point a lot of commercial kitchens doing this now use external heaters on the bath like this so that the circulator doesn’t need to be as powerful. The other thing polyscience does (or at least did) is higher precision on the thermocouple but this is unnecessary for culinary applications. It was necessary for laboratory circulators that they were making before this was popularized but with culinary applications you really just need accuracy within .1 degree C, which is not all that precise