The 2 Best Sous Vide Machines of 2023

Breville has released a new sous vide cooker that we plan to test soon. You can find more details in What to look forward to.

If you like to experiment in the kitchen, you might have fun with a sous vide cooker, a device that lets you cook foods slowly and precisely to the perfect temperature—think custardy eggs, effortless medium-rare steak, and falling-apart pork shoulder. After testing dozens of models since 2013, we’ve concluded that the Monoprice Strata Home Sous Vide Immersion Cooker 800W is the best sous vide immersion circulator for home cooks. Though this circulator lacks the app integration of more expensive wireless-enabled cookers, it nails the basics, with easy-to-use controls and precise temperature settings. It's also remarkably affordable, a trait that is sure to please sous vide fans of all experience levels.

Most sous vide cookers we’ve tested cook food equally well, so we focus on their controls, clamping systems, size, and speed.

Holding a precise temperature is extremely important, so we test each cooker's temperature accuracy and variance.

Sous vide cookers produce a range of noises, from quiet rustling to high-pitched whining. Generally, quieter is better.

Features such as in-app recipe libraries, low-water alarms, and smartphone notifications are nice to have but not essential.

This no-frills sous vide cooker is affordable, accurate, and easy to use. If you don't absolutely need app control, look no further.

May be out of stock

Monoprice's Strata Home Sous Vide Immersion Cooker 800W is the least expensive model we’ve tested, but don't confuse inexpensive with cheaply made. The Strata Home 800W is reliable, accurate, and simple to use, which makes it a great option for everyone from sous vide beginners to seasoned cooks. Unlike some of the most popular circulators available—including those from Anova and Breville—it lacks any sort of wireless connection, so you’ll have to set the temperature and timer on the device itself. But our testing showed that sous vide apps are disappointing more often than not, so this model's simplicity may in fact be a plus.

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This cooker is the smallest and most powerful we tested, and it works with less water than most other options. But it lacks physical controls, which may be a dealbreaker for some.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $248.

This cooker functions the same as the Breville Joule White Polycarbonate, but it has a stainless steel cap and foot. It's a good backup if the polycarbonate option is out of stock.

The Breville Joule relies exclusively on a smartphone for all temperature and timer adjustments since it doesn't have physical controls. If you’re okay with that—and the high price—this cooker is in many ways the best you can buy. It's extremely small, it holds temperature accurately, it heats water the fastest of all the wands we tested, and it can cook with less water in a pot, thanks to its magnetic base and unique pump system. For the most part, we loved the app; it works over either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, depending on how far you are from the Joule, and we encountered only occasional delays as it reconnected to the machine, which had no effect on our cooking experience.

This no-frills sous vide cooker is affordable, accurate, and easy to use. If you don't absolutely need app control, look no further.

May be out of stock

This cooker is the smallest and most powerful we tested, and it works with less water than most other options. But it lacks physical controls, which may be a dealbreaker for some.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $248.

This cooker functions the same as the Breville Joule White Polycarbonate, but it has a stainless steel cap and foot. It's a good backup if the polycarbonate option is out of stock.

We’ve been reviewing and recommending sous vide devices for home cooks since 2013. Our long-term testing has given us a look at how the technology has changed over this period—and it has also helped us figure out what's important and what isn't.

Ben Keough has written for Wirecutter since 2015, covering everything from printers to coffee to cast-iron bakeware. He is an avid home cook, a sourdough specialist, and an aspiring pitmaster. He has been cooking with sous vide, starting with the original Anova Precision Cooker, for almost a decade. During that time, he has used sous vide for everything from cooking steaks and lamb chops to controlling the temperature of his mash when homebrewing.

A home sous vide cooker is often seen as a luxury: something for food enthusiasts and experimental cooks. And while it's true that sous vide is ideal for people who love cooking and playing around with new recipes and techniques—and are willing to wait for hours for a dish to finish cooking—sous vide cookers have plenty of other applications that could appeal to a wider range of people (more on that shortly).

Over the past decade, the technique has blossomed into the public consciousness thanks to its prevalence in the kitchens of high-end restaurants and a glut of demystifying literature, perhaps most visibly in the work of J. Kenji López-Alt. As a result, demand for home-use sous vide circulators has soared, options have proliferated, and prices have dropped.

The results can be glorious: steak that's a perfect medium rare, chicken so tender that you don't even need a knife, and eggs the consistency of custard.

Put simply, a sous vide circulator is a device that uses an electric heating element to heat water to a set temperature and keep it there. In addition, it circulates the water, using an impeller or pump, to ensure that the water is evenly heated. To cook food in this water bath, you seal it in a bag—ideally using a vacuum sealer—and immerse it in the hot water for anywhere from 45 minutes to 72 hours or so.

The goal is to cook your food evenly from edge to edge, at the ideal temperature. And the results can be glorious: steak that's a perfect medium rare throughout (no cold, raw centers or overcooked outsides), chicken so tender that you don't even need a knife, and eggs with the consistency of custard. And it won't heat up your house while cooking, either, which can be a blessing for those without air conditioning during the hot summer months.

But while sous vide is most famous for cooking mouthwatering steaks and chops, it can do much more. Like a slow cooker, a sous vide cooker can break down tough cuts of meat and make them fork-tender. It works great on veggies, too, producing perfectly creamy potatoes and turnips, or vibrant corn and carrots with a toothsome texture (the method is known to preserve the colors of vegetables beautifully). It can also serve to make yogurt, acidify sour beer, prepare cheese, proof bread dough, render fat into tallow, and even infuse edibles with marijuana or flavor alcohol. It has plenty of non-culinary uses, too—foot baths, bottle warming, and film development are just a few. For the most part, making all of that happen is as easy as pressing a few buttons.

You can find a few different types of sous vide cookers, but for most home cooks, an immersion circulator is the way to go. This type of machine clamps to the side of a vessel—be it a pot, a plastic tub, or even a cooler—and not only heats the water but also uses an impeller or pump to circulate the water around the container, ensuring that the entire water bath stays at a constant temperature. Immersion circulators are typically smaller than some of the alternatives (like all-in-one baths, which marry the circulator with a permanently affixed container), usually more affordable, and generally simple to use.

Although all the sous vide immersion circulators we’ve tested do what they say on the box, a few traits separate the best from the rest:

With all of the above characteristics in mind, we surveyed the available sous vide circulators and came up with an initial list of 21 contenders for our latest round of testing. From there, we pared down the list by eliminating models with too few features, an unusually high stated temperature variance, consistently poor owner reviews, or an impractical design. In the end, we decided to test eight circulators for the 2022 update of this guide:

We’ve been testing sous vide cookers since 2013, and in that time we’ve found that since most tested sous vide machines accomplish their most important task—heating water to a set temperature and keeping it there—usability is what separates an average circulator from a great one. So, as we begin each round of testing, we try to answer a series of questions: How does the cooker attach? How precise does the water level have to be? How big is the machine? How big of a container does it need? How loud is it? Is it easy to use? Does it have audible alarms to indicate when it's at temperature and when it's done cooking?

Still, sous vide cooking is undeniably technical. Fine differences in temperature can have outsized results—a few degrees can make the difference between a silky or solid egg yolk and a medium-rare or medium steak. Because sous vide cook times are so long to start with, it's also important that a machine heat water quickly to the desired cooking temperature and keep it there. So in addition to usability, we test for speed, accuracy, and consistency.

In our latest round of testing, with each sous vide cooker, we first checked to see if the reported temperature in a bath of cold tap water matched the reading from a calibrated instant-read thermometer. If it didn't, we adjusted the calibration (where adjustment was available). Next, we heated 4 quarts of water—enough to mostly fill a medium-size Cambro container—from ground water temperature (around 54 °F) to the temperature necessary to cook steak to medium (135 °F), confirming the temperature at both points with the same calibrated thermometer.

Since your starting water temperature is likely different from ours, the time each machine took to get the water bath to 135 °F in our testing doesn't tell the whole story. So we determined each machine's speed in degrees per minute, as well. (A higher number here is better.) Then we let the wands run for two hours, checking the displayed temperature every 10 to 15 minutes to confirm that they were able to maintain a steady temperature over the course of a typical cooking session.

After this initial round of water-only testing, we dismissed several contenders that were awkward to use, too noisy, or otherwise notably flawed, and then we used our finalists to cook real food.

We started by following a recipe for soft-cooked Japanese-style onsen tamago, setting the circulators to cook the eggs for 13 minutes at 167 °F. We then judged the results on how closely they conformed to onsen tamago's ideal of silky whites and set but creamy yolks. Next, since sous vide is popular with vegetarians as well as with carnivores, we cooked carrots for an hour at 183 °F to get the classic texture of glazed carrots—cooked through and fork-tender, but not mushy. Finally, we cooked thick ribeye steaks. For the app-connected cookers, we used their preprogrammed thick-cut steak recipes, and for the circulators with physical controls only, we used J. Kenji López-Alt's preferred medium-rare specs, cooking for two hours at 129 °F.

The last test involved searing. In previous rounds of testing, we tried searing only with a torch and a cast-iron pan. This time around, we included two more methods: In addition to using a Bernzomatic TS8000 butane torch and a screaming-hot cast-iron pan on an induction cooktop, we also seared our steaks over a grate-topped charcoal chimney and a lump-charcoal fire built in a kamado-style ceramic grill. With each method, we attempted to get a similar-looking sear, with an evenly browned exterior and just a little char. We judged each method on the time it took to achieve the desired sear, the amount of smoke produced, the thickness of the gray ring in the finished meat, and the overall texture and flavor.

This no-frills sous vide cooker is affordable, accurate, and easy to use. If you don't absolutely need app control, look no further.

May be out of stock

The Monoprice Strata Home Sous Vide Immersion Cooker 800W isn't the most technologically advanced, the smallest, or the sleekest sous vide circulator, but it's absolutely the best option for most home cooks. Why? Because it nails the fundamentals at a surprisingly low price—about $50 at the time of our testing. We found that this simple-to-use model heated water quickly enough, kept the water at a reliably even temperature, and did so quietly. Our steaks came out tender and edge-to-edge pink, our carrots were bright orange with just enough bite, and our onsen tamago turned out silky soft. The Strata Home 800W lacks the app integration of more expensive models (like our upgrade pick, the Breville Joule), but the truth is that most sous vide apps are frustrating to use—and even when they work well, they tend to be of limited utility. Unless you have a compelling reason to choose an app-connected circulator, this cooker's tactile controls will do the job just fine.

Visually, the Monoprice cooker is a throwback to some of the earliest home-grade sous vide cookers we’ve tested, like the original Anova cooker. It features a removable clamp, a capacitive touchscreen with buttons for power and for selecting the temperature or timer setting, and a tactile scroll wheel to choose the cook temperature and time. We measured the device at about 15 inches long and 2.375 inches in diameter, which makes it larger than some other cookers we tested—including the Breville Joule, which we measured at a mere 11 inches long and 1.85 inches in diameter—but it will fit into the average kitchen cupboard or large drawer with ease. The materials feel robust, with a rubberized plastic coating on the upper portion of the wand and a stainless steel shroud around the heating element where it sits in the water.

The Strata Home 800W's plastic clamp slides over the metal casing, but unlike the clamp on the Anova Precision Cooker, it lacks a set-screw that helps it stay in place if you want to position it somewhere other than all the way up the shaft. Even so, this model has more than 3.5 inches of range between the stamped minimum and maximum water-level markings on the body, so you can use it in plenty of different container shapes and sizes.

The instruction booklet states that the cooker requires a 4.25-inch-deep container with a minimum capacity of 2.64 gallons or 10 liters—guidelines that Monoprice told us via email are suggested for "optimal performance"—but we found that although the minimum depth is important, you really need just enough water to cover what you’re cooking. In our testing, we successfully ran the Strata Home 800W in a 6-quart plastic Cambro container filled with just 4 quarts (1 gallon, or a little under 4 liters), which put the water level at about 4.75 inches deep.

This cooker lacks any sort of wireless connection, so you control everything on the unit itself. That may sound like a negative to some people, but in our tests we found the controls responsive and easy to use. You can set the temperature in 0.5-degree increments and the timer in one-minute intervals by pressing the appropriate button and rotating the scroll wheel, which provides ample precision for just about any dish. Then, you simply press the start button to set the cooking in motion. The unit beeps loudly enough to be heard from several rooms away when it's nearing the set temperature, so you can get to the kitchen and add your ingredients to the water bath, and it beeps again when the timer expires.

In our tests, the Strata Home 800W heated water at a rate of 4.55 degrees Fahrenheit per minute—faster than our previous pick, the Anova Precision Cooker Nano (4.05 degrees), and equal to the Inkbird ISV-200W but predictably slower than the more powerful Breville Joule (5.79 degrees). Out of the box, our unit read 1 degree higher than the actual temperature as measured by our reference thermometer, but we were able to correct it easily using the built-in calibration feature. Once the cooker was at the set temperature, it held our water bath within ±0.1 degree for a full two hours. If you buy a sous vide cooker—of any brand—we recommend checking its reported temperature against an accurate quick-read digital thermometer, just to be sure your 129 °F water bath, say, is really cooking your steak at 129 °F. (If you’re not sure whether your thermometer is accurate, here are some easy instructions for how to check.)

This cooker was louder than some others we tested, but its constant low hum was a much more pleasant background noise over a two-hour run time than the high-pitched whine of the Anova circulators. At about 6 inches from the wand, we recorded a noise level of 48 dB, a result that was noticeably quieter than the Breville Joule's 58 dB or the Anova cookers’ 60 dB.

The Strata Home 800W is backed by Monoprice's one-year warranty, which is standard on all Monoprice products; it also comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The Strata Home 800W is inexpensive for a quality home sous vide circulator, but it predictably sacrifices a few premium features in exchange for that low price. First, you can't control the device via your phone or tablet. If you want that kind of connectivity, we recommend looking into the Inkbird ISV-200W (which offers both physical and mobile controls) or our upgrade pick, the Breville Joule (which you can control only via mobile devices).

But this model has a few other shortcomings and rough edges, as well. For one thing, this cooker is one of the largest we tested, both in length and girth. It also lacks a few software niceties, such as a low-water-level alarm, that other cookers (including the Inkbird ISV-200W and Breville Joule) offer. And although it's nice that we were able to correct our unit's temperature reading using the calibration settings, the fact that the cooker read 1 degree high out of the box is annoying—especially since not all home cooks will think to confirm their brand-new cooker's accuracy.

This cooker is the smallest and most powerful we tested, and it works with less water than most other options. But it lacks physical controls, which may be a dealbreaker for some.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $248.

This cooker functions the same as the Breville Joule White Polycarbonate, but it has a stainless steel cap and foot. It's a good backup if the polycarbonate option is out of stock.

The Breville Joule outperforms the Monoprice Strata Home 800W in a lot of ways. It heats water faster, it has a much smaller body, and it works with an app that's easy to pair, simple to use, and loaded with great recipes. But Breville's circulator is roughly four times as expensive as our top pick and devoid of physical controls, so it won't work unless you tether it to a phone or tablet via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. For all of the great things the Joule has going for it, the lack of buttons is a big enough omission that we can't recommend it as our top pick. But for people who can overlook that shortcoming, want the best overall performance from a home sous vide circulator, and are willing to pay for it, the Joule is the obvious choice.

First, let's talk about that mobile-only interface: The Joule's app is by far the best sous vide app we’ve tested, though it's not perfect. The best news is that the Bluetooth functionality makes pairing simple; in our tests, the app recognized our device right away, immediately downloaded and installed a firmware update, and then launched us right into cooking. It's also full of vetted recipes that include step-by-step instructions to adjust cooking temperatures and times to account for the specific cut of meat you’re using (specifically, its thickness and whether it's thawed or frozen) and your preferences in doneness and texture. The recipes guide you through the cooking process, though you can also set these parameters manually.

The Joule uses both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and switches between the two based on your proximity to the cooker. Occasionally during our testing, the app would get stuck switching, and we’d have to close and reopen it to reconnect it, but that was the only serious trouble we encountered (and the issue didn't have any effect on the quality of our food). Compared with our struggle getting connected to the Anova Precision Cooker, this experience was a walk in the park. If you want to share your Joule with a family member or friend, they can easily control it via Bluetooth using the Joule app. However, only the device's owner can use a Joule over Wi-Fi, so if your friend needs to control their cooking from long distance, you’ll need to disconnect your account in order to allow them to connect theirs.

But our biggest concern regarding the Joule's app-only nature has nothing to do with the quality of the app: Rather, it's the question of what happens to your Joule if Breville stops selling and supporting this cooker with software updates or simply goes out of business. There are no easy answers to that question. Joule's warranty covers it for one year, and despite Breville representatives telling us via email that the app has "a 30-year certification to operate in the cloud" (we’re honestly not sure what that means for actual users), the company doesn't make any explicit promises of future software support.

App aside, we noticed two clear differences between the Joule and the competition. The first is the Joule's raw power, which translates into impressive speed. Its 1,100-watt heating element heated 4 quarts of water four minutes faster in our tests than the 800-watt element in the Strata Home 800W, achieving a rate of about 5.79 degrees per minute to the Strata Home 800W's 4.55 degrees per minute. Despite that advantage in raw power, in previous rounds of testing the Joule actually used fewer kilowatt-hours over time: In an earlier round of testing, the Joule drew only 0.65 kWh over 12 hours of continuous operation, compared with the Strata Home 800W's 1.12 kWh. That's not a huge difference in terms of actual money—about 10¢ to the Strata's 18¢, per the US Energy Information Administration's February 2023 national average of the price of electricity—but as costs continue to rise across the US economy, it's something that more people may be keeping an eye on.

The second major difference is the Joule's diminutive size. At about 11 inches long and 1.85 inches in diameter by our measurements, this Breville model is nearly 4 inches shorter and half an inch thinner than the Monoprice wand. As a result, it could easily fit in pretty much any utensil drawer, whereas the Strata Home 800W (with its larger head, housing the display and controls) could fit only in our cabinets or deeper drawers.

Another way the Joule preserves resources is by requiring less water. The Strata Home 800W needs at least 4.25 inches of water in which to operate, while the Joule needs only 1.5 inches. The Joule pulls in water through an opening just above the base, heats it, and then spits it out through an oval opening that doesn't have to be submerged. The device also has a magnetic foot that lets it stick to the bottom of some pots and other vessels. We were able to use a Dutch oven for sous vide cooking with the Joule, a task that would have been difficult with the Strata Home 800W because of the shape of the pot's curves and its relatively short walls. The Joule just stuck right to the bottom, and we were ready to go.

This Breville model is louder than the Monoprice cooker, but unlike the whiny, high-pitched Anova models we tested, its sound signature offered the relatively pleasing white noise of rushing water. When the water pump outlet isn't underwater, it gurgles like a fountain backed by a faint whine and registers about 70 dB; when it's fully submerged, the sound is smoother, and the noise level dips to around 58 dB.

Breville offers two versions of the Joule: the original with a stainless steel cap and foot, and a more available model that uses polycarbonate on those components, as on the rest of the body. We’ve tested both, and they’re functionally identical, so we recommend going with whichever version you can find, or is cheaper. Both models cooked our steak and other food just as well as the competition.

The Joule comes with a one-year warranty, which is a more or less standard coverage length in the industry and matches that of our top pick from Monoprice. Brands like Anova and Vesta Precision offer longer, two-year warranties.

Cooking your food sous vide gets you only halfway to a delicious meal. That's because the water bath brings ingredients up to the proper temperature but leaves the outside the same color as the inside, without any of the tasty and texturally pleasing exterior you get from other cooking methods. (This is as true of veggies as it is of meat, but the way you sear veggies differs drastically based on the particular vegetable and dish in question. So here we’ll talk mainly about big ol’ chunks of protein, which tend to be finished in roughly the same way.)

You’ll find a lot of debate over the best way to sear steaks and other meat, and even over when to sear it. (For example, some recipes—including the "Ultimate Steak" recipe in the Joule app—ask you to sear steaks both before and after the sous vide cooking.) So, in an effort to identify the best searing methods, we took thick-cut ribeye steaks that we cooked with our sous vide finalists and tried four options:

Yes, there are lots of other methods we could have tried, including using a garden-variety propane grill, deep-frying the finished steaks, cooking them caveman-style directly on hot coals, or using lava (seriously, check out this video). But we chose the above four methods because they seemed to strike the best balance of accessibility and flavor potential—and because we didn't have a propane grill or lava handy.

To cook the steaks, we used each of our three sous vide finalists: the Monoprice Strata Home 800W, the Breville Joule, and the Inkbird ISV-200W. With the app-connected Breville and Inkbird, we followed the best steak recipes available in their respective apps; with the Monoprice, we followed J. Kenji López-Alt's recipe for medium rare and cooked for two hours at 129 °F. (If you’re wondering, yes, we had three cooker finalists and four searing methods, and we resolved that by cooking two steaks at the same time with the Monoprice.) Then, we got down to searing.

Ultimately, we found that all four methods produced tasty steak with slightly different characteristics when it came to the look of the sear, the time it took to get there, the edge-to-edge doneness after searing, and the final flavor. (Every steak fan has their own preferences when it comes to how their steak is cooked, but I was shooting for an even mahogany crust with light charring, an edge-to-edge pink interior, and a soft and juicy—but not mushy—texture.) So, rather than recommending a single method, we’re opting to recommend several different methods for different situations.

If you live in a small apartment (or just don't want to deal with smoke): We strongly recommend the Bernzomatic TS8000 torch paired with a small propane tank. That's mostly because the TS8000 is easy to store in a small kitchen and produces the least smoke of any searing method. The torch took about five minutes to thoroughly sear a thick-cut ribeye (including the edges), on the slow side next to the other methods we tried. The steak was extremely tender, with a minimal gray ring around the pink center, and the propane didn't add any flavor—all we got was beefy goodness. Compared with other torches, the TS8000 strikes a great balance between power and price, and we found its flame-control adjuster to be helpful when searing more sensitive foods like cheese or crème brûlée.

If you want the crispiest sear (and don't mind smelling like smoke all day): We suggest searing your steak in a very hot cast-iron skillet with just a little neutral oil. We used a Lodge skillet on a portable induction cooktop, which got the cooking surface up to about 650 °F. Using the induction burner allowed us to cook outdoors and avoid smoking up the house. You can still use this method on a kitchen stove, but if you do so, you need to have a powerful vent hood, fans blowing out through open windows, and/or some air purifiers to avoid setting off every smoke detector in your home. In our tests, after spending just three minutes (flipping every 30 to 45 seconds), we had a beautiful, extra-crispy crust on our ribeye, and the pan contained a thin layer of rendered beef fat that made a great gravy.

This steak had the thickest gray ring of the four, likely due to its direct contact with the cooking surface, but the ring was still less prominent than what you get from most conventional cooking methods. Like the Bernzomatic torch, a cast-iron pan doesn't contribute any flavor of its own, but it allows you to finish your steak with butter, herbs, or garlic if you like, which you can't do with a torch.

If you love smoky-tasting meat (and have the patience to build a fire): Finish your steak on a charcoal grill—preferably with hardwood lump charcoal. We seared ours over mesquite lump, which burns clean, produces a lovely aroma, and allowed the grill grates to hit a 700 °F surface temperature. At that temp, the steak acquired a beautiful crust (complete with pronounced grill marks) in just three minutes, including a full minute we spent searing the fatty edges. The flavor was wonderfully smoky, and this method also produced the skinniest gray ring of all thanks to its especially brief contact time. The big downside here, of course, is that you have to plan ahead to build a fire before searing, which can take up to an hour. But, hey, if your steak is going to cook for a couple of hours, that's plenty of time for you to get the coals going. It can also feel wasteful to build a whole fire just to sear a few steaks—not to mention make you question whether you should’ve just cooked them on the fire to start with—but in my opinion, it's a great excuse to grill more stuff. Take it from me: If you’re not grilling some asparagus, onions, peppers, or cabbage (yes, cabbage) to go with your steak, you’re doing it wrong. You can, of course, use a propane grill, if that's what you own or prefer; in that case, you won't have to spend time building a fire, but you won't get the same smoky finish.

We didn't love the results we got searing a steak on a grate directly over a roaring charcoal chimney. Although we were able to get a thorough sear in around four minutes, the overall crust wasn't as pretty as what we got from the pan, and the smoke flavor was more acrid than the results from the full charcoal grill.

In a previous round of testing, we tried what is perhaps the best-known searing device: Booker and Dax's Searzall. This cone-shaped attachment for the TS8000 torch features two layers of wire mesh at the end that help spread out the flame, so you can cook more surface at once. But it also slows down searing: In our tests, browning time doubled with the Searzall. We liked the results but not enough to justify the attachment's extra cost. Because it's an add-on to the TS8000, we suggest starting with the torch by itself and upgrading only if you’re looking to take your searing to the next level.

In order to cook sous vide, you need to put your food in a bag and eliminate all of the air around it. Vacuum sealers work great for foods that can stand up to pressure without getting smooshed, like steaks and carrots. However, vacuum-sealing delicate foods like hamburger patties requires some finesse.

You can use your sealer's pulse function to avoid overly compressing the meat, though this technique may leave a bit of air in the bag; as a result, you may need to use a metal utensil to weigh it down in the water bath for a proper cook. You can also freeze your food before sealing it, which allows it to hold up better under vacuum and ensures that you get all the air out of the bag.

After rigorously testing 12 vacuum sealers, we recommend the Anova Precision Vacuum Sealer Pro.

Another option is to put delicate food in a zip-top bag and use the water-displacement method to force the air out of the bag before sealing it. Here's how it works: Put the food in the bag and seal it almost completely, with just a small section of the zipper left open. Immerse the bag in a container of water, leaving the opening just above the water line. Allow the air to escape, slowly pushing the entire thing under, and then seal it just before the opening gets submerged. You can see more discussion of this technique on this forum and in this blog post.

The downside to the water-displacement method is that your food might take on a little water while cooking, depending on the quality of the seal you’re able to get with your zip-top bag. In a previous round of testing, we "cooked" a couple of small containers filled with rocks in a Hefty freezer bag over the course of 12 hours. The bag took on 38 milliliters of water—not a huge amount, and if it's something you’re worried about, you can double-bag. In most cases, if your bags seem to take on a lot of liquid while cooking, it's most likely coming from inside the food. If you’re worried about leakage or about cooking your food in a plastic bag (though for what it's worth, Ziploc bags are BPA-free), you can instead use a silicone Stasher bag, our pick for the best reusable zip-top bag. It's a little more difficult to get all the air out of Stasher bags using the immersion technique, but they’re sturdy, as well as heatproof up to 425 °F, and they were leakproof in our tests.

Because sous vide cooking in the home has been so heavily driven by innovative people putting things together piecemeal and experimenting in their kitchens, you can find a lot of fantastic recipes online. But if you want a superb technical breakdown of sous vide cooking that's available at no cost online, Douglas Baldwin's excellent "A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking" is likely your best bet. It's a fantastic look at the science of sous vide, offering details about proper handling, cooking times, and various other techniques.

If you’re interested in diving deeper into the science of cooking and other advanced techniques, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking and Modernist Cuisine at Home are two bibles. They’re expensive but immaculately researched (and gorgeously photographed).

It's also worthwhile to check out Serious Eats's sous vide recipes and how-tos, J. Kenji López-Alt's excellent book The Food Lab (which features many sous vide recipes), and the recipes from the people behind SousVide Supreme appliances (which are just as applicable to other machines). Alternatively, for anyone who is carb-avoidant, Nom Nom Paleo has some delicious options.

Most of the machines we’ve tested come with a one-year warranty (the Anova and Vesta Precision circulators notably have two years of coverage). However, if cared for properly, sous vide machines should function for quite a bit longer. After all, they’re relatively simple devices, made from durable materials.

When we polled manufacturers regarding their cookers’ longevity, we got answers ranging from "three to four years" when using the machine three to four times a month (from Monoprice) to 5,000 hours (from Inkbird). If you’re doing the math, that's at least 2,500 steaks, assuming two hours for each cooking session. (Note: We don't recommend that anyone eat 2,500 steaks, for the sake of their own health and the planet's.) And if you’re using your cooker less frequently, there's a good chance it could last a decade or more.

Unfortunately, none of the manufacturers we spoke to have a trade-in program or offer recycling incentives, and none of these machines are designed to be user-repairable. If you decide to upgrade your cooker or simply find that you’re not using it enough to justify keeping it around, the best way to dispose of it is to resell it via Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, or another similar service, or to give it to a friend.

A more pressing sustainability issue when it comes to sous vide may be the use of plastic bags—either disposable zip-top or vacuum sealer—for cooking. Depending on how often you’re cooking, you could burn through a roll or box of bags before you know it, and these plastics are not easily recyclable (especially once exposed to food). In order to cut down on plastic waste, you can wash and reuse bags that contained veggies and other non-meat foods. Another alternative is to use reusable silicone bags such as the Stasher bags we recommend, though in our testing we were unable to get all the air out of them and had to resort to using a metal utensil to keep them from floating in the water bath. Some sous vide appliance companies, such as Anova, vow to make their bags "plastic neutral," meaning for every box of bags they sell, they’ll prevent an equivalent amount of plastic from entering the ocean (through a partnership with Plastic Bank).

Water is another concern, but there's no easy solution in this regard. Some machines, such as the Breville Joule, can operate with significantly less water than others, but that ability goes only so far since you always need enough water to cover the food you’re cooking. The best you can do is use as small a water bath as possible for the items you’re cooking and then reuse the water once you’re done. During our testing, we watered our garden and houseplants with the gallons of water we used to cook steak, carrots, and eggs.

Although you can find plenty of sous vide circulators that operate entirely manually, including our top pick, most of the latest machines are app-connected, allowing you to control them by remote. As with other app-connected appliances, this connection means they may be vulnerable to hacking.

You might be wondering: Why would hackers want to mess with my steak? Well, they probably don't. But while there's not a whole heck of a lot of sensitive data that a sous vide machine could possibly collect, we still expect to see some basic protections in the connected apps.

In 2022, we sent a privacy and security questionnaire to Inkbird and Breville. Inkbird told us that it does not share data with or sell data to third parties for advertising purposes, and that it encrypts data in transit and at rest. However, Inkbird does not offer a way to upgrade the firmware on its sous vide machines, which means if a vulnerability is found in the future, that flaw may not be fixable. The Inkbird app also requests a surprising number of permissions, including your location. This permission is necessary for the initial setup of your circulator, but we suggest turning it off completely after that (the app will still work fine). Unlike Breville's Joule, which requires its app to operate, for the Inkbird cookers, the app is optional; if you have concerns about your privacy, you can simply choose not to use the app and instead make all temperature and timer adjustments on the device itself.

Breville says that it collects data from Joule devices—specifically regarding performance and recipe preferences—in order to improve future circulators and refine the user experience, but that it doesn't share any customer data for advertising purposes. Its app also requests fewer permissions than Inkbird's app does. When firmware updates are available, the Joule app will alert you, and in our experience updates installed quickly and painlessly.

Both Inkbird and Breville require you to create an account to use their respective apps, so be sure to use a unique password. You should also ensure that your home network's security is up to snuff. And if you ever sell or give away your sous vide machine, be sure to factory-reset it.

If you want a more affordable app-connected sous vide circulator: Give the Inkbird ISV-200W a look. In our tests, this 1,000-watt circulator heated a water bath at a rate of 4.55 degrees per minute—matching the rate of the Monoprice Strata Home 800W—and kept the set temperature within ±0.2 degree throughout a two-hour cooking session. It offers temperature calibration in the app, as well. Along with the very similar ISV-100W, this model was the quietest circulator in our test group at a mere 39 dB. Though the Inkbird app isn't as polished as Breville's app for the Joule—it was very obviously created by non-English speakers, and the translation isn't perfect—it pairs smoothly with the circulator and provides reliable push notifications and easy control of temperature and timer settings. The app also contains plenty of recipes for a wide variety of proteins, though it doesn't guide you step-by-step like the Joule's app does. The ISV-200W is substantially larger than the Joule and even a bit bigger than the Strata Home 800W, so you need to keep it in a cabinet or large drawer. And although Inkbird is gradually building a reputation for quality devices, we still have concerns about the app's privacy and security practices due to the company's unclear privacy policy and a lack of public-facing security documentation.

Breville has released the Joule Turbo Sous Vide, an updated version of the Breville Joule, which Breville claims can cook food in half the time of traditional sous vide cookers. We plan to test it soon to see if this claim holds up.

The Anova Precision Cooker Nano was our previous top pick, and at the time we praised it for its small size, quiet operation, Bluetooth connectivity, great app, and moderate price. Unfortunately, in our latest round of testing using a new sample unit of the Nano, we were surprised to find that it was the loudest and highest-pitched circulator we tested—loud enough to be annoying from across the house. The app, redesigned since our last update of this guide in 2019, was also more frustrating to use than its predecessor. The pairing process was a struggle, requiring us to close and reopen the app several times to get a connection, and we were never able to get push notifications working on either Android or iOS. Perusing recent customer reviews, we learned that we were not alone in our dislike for the cooker's sound or app experience. Similar to most of the other circulators we’ve tested, it cooks food just fine—we just don't think the subpar user experience is worth dealing with.

The Wi-Fi version of the Anova Precision Cooker offers moderate improvements over the Precision Cooker Nano, with a more powerful heating element (1,000 watts to the Nano's 750 watts), a more adjustable clamp, and a stainless casing around the heating element and impeller. It's exactly the same size as the Nano, it has the same touchscreen controls, and in our tests, it heated a water bath five minutes faster than the Nano did. (Its 15-minute heating time was second fastest in our test group, beaten only by the Breville Joule's time.) However, it produced the same nails-on-chalkboard sound as the Nano, and its entirely Wi-Fi–based app pairing was even more frustrating than the Nano's Bluetooth-assisted process. Like many other sous vide machines, the Wi-Fi version of the Precision Cooker works only on 2.4 GHz access points, but bizarrely it won't work at all if your network name contains a space, as in "illapants 2.4" (my actual SSID, named for my dog, Illa—yep, I had to rename my Wi-Fi network to test this cooker). To us, that's unacceptable for a web-connected device in 2022.

Anova's Precision Cooker Pro is the company's high-end sous vide machine, designed for professional chefs. This 1,200-watt circulator can keep up to 100 liters of water at a set temperature and can cook for up to 10,000 hours (416 days!), and it's advertised as being accurate to within 0.09 degree. But for day-to-day home use, it doesn't offer any notable advantages. In our tests, it took the same amount of time as the Breville Joule to get a water bath to cooking temperature, it didn't use any less power than our favorite cookers, and it wasn't any quieter. For specific, advanced cooking, it may be worth its high price, but for most people's needs, it isn't.

The Inkbird ISV-100W is nearly identical to the ISV-200W. The main differences are that the ISV-100W's display is tinted blue rather than orange, and it has a smaller temperature range. This cooker has two potential advantages over its sibling. The first is that it's able to heat water to 99 °C (210 °F), compared with the ISV-200W's limit of 90 °C (194 °F). However, most sous vide recipes max out around 170 °F to avoid overcooking, so that added range is unlikely to be useful for most people. The ISV-200W, for its part, has a much wider temperature range on the low end, going down to 32 °F, in contrast to the ISV-100W's 77 °F minimum. That could actually be useful for defrosting meat safely. The second difference is that the ISV-100W lets you access preset cooking routines from the cooker's built-in display, rather than only via the Inkbird app. But since you can't update the machine's firmware, these routines are frozen in time—and they’re much easier to select via the app, anyway.

The Instant Accu Slim Sous Vide Immersion Circulator is reasonably priced and quite compact, but a combination of a poor interface and inaccurate temperature control doomed it in our testing. The most annoying aspect of this cooker is that it resets to its factory-default time and temperature settings (four hours at 133 °F) after every cooking session. Our test unit also read 0.6 degree high out of the box, and the device offers no option to calibrate the reading.

PolyScience's Sous Vide Professional Creative Series is built like a tank and extremely accurate. However, it isn't intuitive to use—it's huge and heavy. It can't calibrate the temperature, and it doesn't really offer anything that you can't get from a model that's half its price.

The VacMaster SV1 Immersion Circulator is both the bulkiest circulator we’ve tested and the most expensive. Although it reached the set temperature quickly (after only 15 minutes, thanks to a 1,200 W heating element that could potentially trip circuits), it had a few serious drawbacks, including inconsistent temperature, difficult-to-use buttons, and an annoyingly shrill alarm.

In our tests, the Vesta Precision Imersa Elite heated water nearly as quickly as the Wi-Fi version of the Anova Precision Cooker and the Breville Joule, and its app—though not polished—worked better than those of all competitors except the Joule's. We liked its large display and the laminated ring of cooking temperatures and times that came in the box, too. However, its short, stubby, flat design (a bit like a really chunky Moto Razr) is less flexible than the cylindrical shape most other cookers have, so it doesn't fit well in common stockpots and other round containers. The 1.75-inch range between the minimum and maximum water levels was also the smallest we saw. In our tests, the Imersa Elite read 1 degree lower than the actual temperature, and we weren't able to correct it since the unit doesn't offer calibration. During our extended cooking tests, it also had the widest temperature fluctuations at ±0.4 degree.

This article was edited by Gabriella Gershenson and Marguerite Preston.

Yes, Ziploc freezer bags in particular are BPA-free and generally leakproof. You just need to get all the air out. There's a trick to this: Once you’ve put the food in, seal the bag most of the way but leave a small section open. Then immerse the bag in a large container of water, leaving the opening just above the water line. As you lower the bag, all of the air will be pushed out, and you can then seal the opening.

A sous vide machine can't "overcook" a piece of meat the way a pan is liable to—since the water bath never exceeds a set temperature, your steak can remain medium-rare for hours. But it's still a bad idea to leave your food in for longer than the recipe recommends. Over the course of hours, your meat will become mushier and more unappealing.

A sous vide machine allows you to cook food slowly to a precise, uniform temperature. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of preparing a perfectly medium-rare steak, a juicy chicken breast, or a just-runny-enough egg. That kind of control also gives you more room to experiment and try new things in the kitchen.

Ben Keough

Ben Keough is the supervising editor for Wirecutter's working from home, powering, cameras, and hobbies and games coverage. He previously spent more than a decade writing about cameras, printers, and other office equipment for Wirecutter, Reviewed, USA Today, and Digital Camera HQ. After four years testing printers, he definitively confirmed that they all suck, but some suck less than others.

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