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.
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
I have an Anova, and I like it, but I wouldn’t consider it BIFL. After a few years, the manual controls are getting dodgy and it’s getting difficult to use without the app, which they’ve started charging for:
But I think you’re spot on with your other general recommendations.
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.
I don’t know how much room you have in your kitchen or cupboards but a sous vide machine does only one task. If you don’t have one already or you have any use for a pressure cooker, there are ones that have a sous vide mode. So you can have one machine that multiple uses instead of a single use appliance.
On the other side of the coin, large electric pressure cookers get kind of enormous. If you use your immersion circulator to do large batches, like 30 individual cheesecakes for a party or large cuts of meat, you’ll run out of room very quickly, which means batches which would take forever. Whereas an immersion circulator can be stuck in a cooler or even the bathtub and cook a lot of food at once. A small pressure cooker and an immersion circulator is a lot less space than a large pressure cooker. If you only ever cook for a few people a combo unit would be fine, but I find myself pulling out the immersion circulator much more often for events.
I say this as someone who bought a large pressure cooker because it was a really good deal and now struggles to store it, lol.
I just have a 6 quart countertop one. I can make a pretty big stew in it. It has yogurt making function and sous vide mode as well. Way more functions than I will ever need. I just want it to last as long as my last electric pressure cooker, it lasted 20+ years before it melted down.
Yeah, I think the ones my friends have are about that size. I wound up with the next size up and it’s just obnoxiously large so I try to warn people, lol.
