I received the Anova model for Christmas this year. Gave it a quick try that night on some leftover carrots from a veggie tray, but I'm excited to try all kinds of proteins.

Thoughts on how to best get started, as I'm learning how to best use it? I was thinking I'd try some simple chicken breasts next...starting with cheaper cuts of meat rather than an expensive steak in case I mess up. But what's a simple, yet delicious recipe I can try to impress my wife so she doesn't feel it's a silly gift? :)

I made chicken (thighs) with my Anova once and thought they came out terrible—like mush. I find that fish and tough cuts of meat like rump roast really shine in the sous-vide—fish takes an hour, roasts take 24+ hours in the way I cook them. Both take a sear at the end to make them taste really good.

We really only use them for cheaper beef and pork cuts. Great for sub $3 a pound chuck roasts!

I bought an Instant Pot stick a few months back. Tougher cuts of steak and pork chops were disappointing. Haven't tried fish though I live next to the ocean. What works particularly well are duck legs and chicken thighs (check your temperature). I think beef short cut ribs (a.k.a. kalbi) will work well but I was SVing mine in marinade. Big mistake.

For efficiency, I got a small cooler chest from a Big Brothers Big Sisters yard sale and made a lid out of some insulating foam (didn't want to put a hole in the original lid). Heat loss is minimal.

Sounds like everyone has had different experiences, but maybe tougher cuts of beef would work best.
I'm going to try chicken breasts tonight, just because I have some thawed. But I guess I'll be shopping the beef section soon!

Honestly, it's tough to mess up a steak with one. Seal and cook for an hour to an hour and a half at 54C (medium rare) finished with a quick sear in a very hot pan (up to a minute and a half per side depending on thickness of the steak), maybe finish with some butter, salt, and pepper. Maybe don't start out with a really nice dry aged steak or wagyu or anything, though, just to be safe. ;)

Where you could go wrong is cooking the steak too long sous vide--it will turn to mush if you use roast-esque times of hours and hours on end. I would never give a steak more than 3 hours even at rare temperatures (say, 50-52C), as the proteins just denature too much even at that low of heat. For a frozen steak into the sous vide, I usually go 1.5-2 hours to account for the extra time it takes to thaw in the bath.

You can find so many uses for a sous vide cooker... honestly, my only limiting factor is my vacuum sealer (which you don't even strictly have to have--you can use ziplocs and water displacement to push most of the air out, though a cheap vacuum sealer is a no-brainer IMHO). I just have a Food Saver that uses the special bags; for some things, it would help to have a commercial-grade chamber sealer, as you can seal with marinades, broths, etc., without the dang thing sucking them out of the bag.

I use mine for potatoes a good bit, if I'm aiming to make a puree or mash: Cook at 70C for 35 minutes, then cool in an ice bath and refrigerate for at least an hour (this gelatinizes the starches), then boil for 30 minutes or so until fork-tender, rice, add 40% by-weight butter, and if you really want them smooth, put them through a fine mesh screen (a pain but it does pay dividends). A bit of salt and pepper and voila!

Onsen eggs (IIRC, 13 minutes at 75C, though I'd have to double-check the temp) which have nicely-set, creamy whites and rich, unctuous yolks...

Shrimp and scallops are wonders in the sous vide. I can't recall the temps off the top of my head, but a 10 minute cook for the shrimp followed by a quick pan sear or deep fry after dusting in cornmeal makes for an awesome ingredient in so many of the southeast Asian dishes we cook. Scallops are more like 30 minutes in the sous vide followed by a pan sear, but they are perfectly cooked.

Fish is a bit tougher as each type of fish will have different perfect temperatures, and most fishes have two sweet spots for temperature, and you won't want to cook at anything in between or you'll get rubber or mush. Salmon is a favorite, as are thick cuts of sea bass or halibut. But you need to finish with a roast in the oven vs. a pan sear--cooking the fish sous vide will often yield something that falls apart if you try pan searing to finish.

I once made turducken sous vide... used transglutamase to "meat glue" together a duck breast, a chicken breast, and a turkey breast, then cooked it sous vide. It looked a bit like Neapolitan ice cream with three distinctly-colored bands of meat when done, and cut like a single piece thanks to the meat glue. Too much work for the gimmicky effect, honestly, but it was fun anyway to have the dark red duck, the near-white chicken, and the tan turkey breast meat layered together and served like that.

The trick with Instant Pot is some things cook really long and other short - for tougher meats, sometimes the longer the better - but in all cases, always natural release tougher meats because when you flip the valve open to do a rapid release, the pressure drop can pull the moisture out of the meat leaving it dry and tough with all of your juices now sitting in the bottom of the pot. I tried chuck roast a couple times in the IP following online recipes that were too short and left me with a pile of shoe leather, but just letting it go long with natural release resulted in fork tender, moist meat.

No, not an Instant Pot (IP) pressure cooker but an IP sous vide stick. IP has also at least added thermal blender/cookers and air fryer(!) attachments for IP pressure cookers to the product line.

I double checked a few of the temps. Shrimp are 70C for 10 minutes (if you have them single-layered in the bag--otherwise, a bit longer IME). Scallops are 45C for 35 minutes.

I was looking at the onsen egg recipes, and the one I use most often is indeed 75C for 13 minutes (I go with the one in ). But I came across another yesterday that was 70C for 22 minutes; I haven't tried it out yet but trust the cookbook I saw it in ( ) as the other recipes there are fantastic and work well. I've made the mistake before of going 70C for 13 minutes, and though the yolks are good, the whites are just not set enough and you lose half of the white... but perhaps the extra 9 minutes handles the proteins in the whites without nuking the yolks. Eggs are weird given there are several different proteins (yeah, albumin dominates) and they all coagulate at slightly different temperatures.

A few years in, I continue to believe leaner cuts (sirloin, strip, etc.) tend to come out better than fattier cuts like ribeyes.

While it is hard to screw up and overcook something with SV, and people prone to or scared of overcooking might find comfort in that, I’ve found myself doing less and less SV for steaks and far more reverse sear. With a good instant-read thermometer like a Thermapen Mk4, the risk of overcooking is still extremely low. I’ve found I like the texture and crust better as the outside of the steak dries in the oven and promotes a better Maillard reaction when it hits the cast iron skillet, while the inside remains juicy and a perfect temp edge-to-edge - one of SV’s biggest selling points. For a while I also liked SV when having guests over because the steaks could hold indefinitely. But it actually became much more of a pain when guests prefer different temps. With reverse sear I can put steaks in the oven at different times to have them all finish around the same time and at everyone’s preferred temp, while the resting period still provides some flexibility in serving times.

For chicken, even though you can cook to a much lower internal temp when using SV due to the duration of the bath, my wife was weirded out by the texture and we kept upping the temperature until we ended back up in the low-to-mid 150’s.

This was a recent realization for me, as my wife and I were talking about trying steaks in the SV. She prefers medium and I, medium rare. So I think those are out for us. We tried a pork loin earlier this week and it turned out perfectly (although a little salty, my fault :)). My guess is, because of temperature preferences, most cuts of beef won't work for us.

There are multiple YouTube videos demonstrating how to use 1 circulator for 2 different doneness of steaks. Several cooking websites discuss the 2 different doneness of steaks.

Unless I’m missing some alternatives, the techniques involve either extra hours of bath time so you can start with the highest temperature steaks and then lower it, holding them while you add the next batch... or they involve extra time on the sear which develops the bullseye instead of an even cook edge-to-edge. I’m willing to do neither, when with the reverse sear technique I can just add 10 minutes for each temp level and time putting the steaks into the oven accordingly.