The award-winning SousVide Supreme is the world’s first water oven designed to make the gourmet sous vide cooking technique easy and affordable. Sous vide cooking locks in the juices and flavor and preserves the nutritional quality of the food. The result is incomparable taste and texture: steak perfectly cooked edge-to-edge, vibrant vegetables, juicy tender chicken breasts, and ribs with the meat literally falling off the bone. All at the push of a button.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
176 of 181 people found the following review helpful.
Great cooking results. Design needs some work.
By SecretAsianMan
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.
149 of 156 people found the following review helpful.
Fantastic Small Appliance - Easy Gourmet Cooking for Busy Home Chefs
By Dawn Tarin
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" tall2. Good starter recipe book, but the curious chef will want Douglas Baldwin's book - also available from Amazon3. Simple to use - out of the box only takes about 5 minutes to learn how to set it up and start cooking4. Easy clean-up5. Very accurate temperature maintenance - doesn't vary by more than 0.5 degrees, even without a re-circulating pump6. 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 one2. 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.
114 of 121 people found the following review helpful.
Good execution for a great technique
By Ric Crabbe
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.
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Really Nice Machine So Far
Arrived broken and with someone's writing on box