The Basics of Sous Vide Mode
Traditional sous vide cooking uses a precise temperature-controlled water bath to cook foods with edge-to-edge even doneness. Devices like the Anova Precision® Cooker 3.0 maintain the precise target cooking temperature you set. You seal your food in a bag before putting it into the temperature-controlled water bath so it doesn't get waterlogged.
Because of the way we've designed the temperature sensors and humidity control in the Anova Precision™ Oven, you can use it to cook sous vide — without needing to heat up a pot of water or vacuum seal food into bags. The oven will precisely maintain the cooking temperature you set. And because you're no longer cooking in a water bath, you've got some new options for your sous vide strategy.
Why Use Sous Vide Mode?
Sure, you can keep using a traditional sous vide set-up for your steaks and chicken breasts, and they will still be delicious and perfectly cooked, but the Precision™ Oven makes it even quicker to get started.
Bagless (and Bathless) Sous Vide Cooking
Because the oven pumps in continuous steam at 100% humidity, you can achieve the same results as your favorite sous vide cooks without needing to heat up a water bath or bag your food in plastic. Set the oven to your desired doneness temp and let it run. You can use the same cooking times as traditional sous vide, or you can follow along with your food's doneness using the probe. This leads us to…
Continuous Monitoring
It is tricky to use a temperature probe for traditional sous vide cooking. Either you need a very good Bluetooth probe or a probe with a very skinny wire that can be sealed in the plastic bag. But because you don't need a bag for Sous Vide Mode, you can use a probe with ease. Keep an eye on your steak and pull it when the core reaches doneness for quicker cooking. Or let it cook based on a timer and use the probe to stare at the temperature for four hours. Whatever floats your boat.
Large Roasts and Big Batch Cooking
It can be challenging if not impossible to wrangle a large prime rib or whole turkey into a sous vide bag. But it's easy to pop large hunks of meat into the Precision™ Oven. It's also much simpler to cook big batches of smaller cuts, like chicken breasts and steaks. You can fit up to eight of each on an Anova sheet pan, and can fit two of those pans in the oven on the provided racks.
Get Started with Sous Vide Mode
In the Anova Oven App, you can select the Steam Quick Start or add steam using Manual Control.
With a Precision™ Oven 1.0, you can turn Sous Vide Mode on and off on the oven handle by pressing the thermometer icon next to the oven temperature.
With a Precision™ Oven 2.0, you can select either the Sous Vide or Dry Sous Vide Cooking Modes on the home screen. You can also turn Sous Vide Mode on or off in the Manual Cooking Mode.
When Sous Vide Mode is on, the maximum temperature you may set is 208.4°F (98°C). When Sous Vide Mode is off, you can set a temperature up to 482°F (250°C).
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What Is a Wet-Bulb Sensor?
The secret to sous vide mode lies in the oven's innovative wet-bulb sensor. It's located in the corner of the oven and is a very small water reservoir with a temperature sensor suspended within it. As the oven heats up, water evaporates from that reservoir just as it evaporates from the surface of your food. The corresponding temperature that the sensor measures is the exact same temperature your food experiences. This temperature is always going to be a little bit cooler than the ambient temperature. (Think of it similarly to the way in which your body cools down as it sweats on a hot day. As moisture leaves your skin, it cools off.) When you turn on sous vide mode in the Anova Precision™ Oven, you activate the wet-bulb sensor.
Contrast this with the dry-bulb temperature, which is the temperature of the air circulating in the oven cavity. The Anova Precision™ Oven is able to measure both dry-bulb and wet-bulb temperatures, and to calibrate the target oven temperature based on these readings.
Having direct control of the wet-bulb temperature means you are setting the oven to the exact temperature your food experiences, ensuring it won't overcook.
What does this have to do with sous vide? Knowing the temperature your food is experiencing and keeping the oven temperature in line with this experience is critical for replicating water bath cooking. Even better, you can easily monitor the food's temperature using the oven's food probe.
In addition, the Anova Precision™ Oven is capable of maintaining consistent, low temperatures. This is a trademark of sous vide cooking, and not something traditional ovens are good at (or even able to do).
Replicating traditional sous vide cooking in the Anova Precision™ Oven is done using sous vide mode and 100% humidity since sous vide cooking always takes place at 100% relative humidity. In the sealed environment of a bag, the water from your food begins to evaporate as it starts heating. Before long, the tiny amount of air in the bag is saturated with moisture so it reaches 100% relative humidity.
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Non-Traditional Sous Vide Techniques
Dry Sous Vide Mode
For plenty of food, cooking in a wet sous vide environment is best. Meats and vegetables turn out perfectly and evenly cooked, and if you want to sear them after cooking, you can pat them dry before finishing over high heat. But for foods with skin, like whole chickens, the wet sous vide environment is not ideal. Once waterlogged, it's a challenge to get the skin crispy. In the Anova Precision™ Oven, you can cook sous vide without adding humidity. The food will still experience the correct cooking temperature, but the oven won't generate any steam. This means that the surface of your food will stay dry during the cooking process, allowing for better crisping.
Because Dry Sous Vide Mode is all about driving down relative humidity, it does need to set the dry-bulb temperature a bit higher than the wet-bulb temperature. This difference increases as you increase the set temperature. In order to preserve the precision of sous vide in this mode, we've placed a limit on Dry Sous Vide Mode at 197.6°F (92°C). Cooks at or below this temperature will behave as you'd expect, with edge-to-edge perfect doneness and dry skin.
We do not recommend using Dry Sous Vide for foods that have been sealed in a bag or container.
Sous vide express
Sous vide produces great results, but sometimes you want to trade absolute perfection for an increase in cooking speed. This is where the food probe gives you options. In traditional sous vide cooking, you can't usually use a probe to monitor your food's temperature; instead you have to rely on long cooks following time and temperature tables. But in the Anova Precision™ Oven, you can monitor your food's internal doneness with the food probe. This means you're free to adjust the oven temperature slightly higher than the target probe temperature to speed up cooking by up to 50% without adding guesswork to the equation.
As you might imagine, there's a bit of a tradeoff. The closer the oven temperature is to the probe temperature, the more gently the food cooks and the more uniform the doneness will be from edge to edge. The higher the oven temperature, the less uniform the doneness will be. A good rule of thumb is adding 5°F (2.5°C) to the oven temperature for every pound (450g) of food. For foods weighing less than 1 pound (450g), stick with 5°F (2.5°C).