Give the Gift of Sous Vide

By Sara Johnson

For people who appreciate high-quality food, cooking sous vide at home can be a game-changer, improving consistency for novices and allowing for unique infusions for masters. This holiday season, give the home chef in your life an immersion circulator paired with a sous vide cookbook to advance their vacuum-sealed cooking skills.

Beginner 
For someone completely new to sous vide cooking, the Joule (created by ChefSteps, which was recently acquired by Breville) is a great starter device. Billed as “the smallest sous vide tool on the market,” the circulator hooks up with iPhone or Android for a user-friendly experience. Pair the device with chef Hugh Acheson’s new cookbook, Sous Vide: Better Home Cooking (Clarkson Potter, 2019). “I think if you work with sous vide for a number of months, even in your home kitchen once or twice a week, you’ll begin to learn just a lot more about food,” Acheson told Sous-Vide in a recent interview.

To learn more about getting started with sous vide, check out our guide: How to Cook Sous Vide: Beginner.

Intermediate
If your gift-recipient has some experience with sous vide, box up the newly released Anova Precision Cooker, which is both lighter and smaller than the company’s earlier model. It also can connect to WiFi. Wrap the circulator with the year’s celebrated baking cookbook, The New Pie: Modern Techniques for the Classic American Dessert (Clarkson Potter, 2019) by Chris Taylor and Paul Arguin, which offers up tips for using sous vide with fruit pies. “We use sous vide for pie fillings, because fruits can be cooked to the point where they no longer taste raw but still maintain their structure,” the authors write in the book.

To refine your existing sous vide skills, check out our guide: How to Cook Sous Vide: Intermediate.

Advanced
For the person who has advanced beyond sous vide steak and eggs, order PolyScience’s Sous Vide Professional Chef Series Immersion Circulator, which heats a water bath within 0.1°F. Include the food industry’s go-to book for sous vide cooking, Under Pressure by Thomas Keller (Artisan, 2008), which outlines how the French Laundry chef came to use sous vide.

Once you’ve mastered the sous vide technique, check out our guide: How to Cook Sous Vide: Advanced.