If you like to experiment in the kitchen, you might have fun with a sous vide cooker, a device that cooks 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, which is sure to please sous vide fans of all experience levels.
Our pick
This no-frills sous vide cooker is affordable, accurate, and easy to use. If you don’t absolutely need app control (and most folks don’t), this wand will get the job done.
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 cooker is reliable, accurate, and simple to use, so it’s 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—this model lacks any sort of wireless connection, so you have to set the temperature and timer on the device itself. But our testing has showed that sous vide apps are disappointing more often than not, so this model’s simplicity may in fact be a plus.
Upgrade pick
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 people.
The Breville Joule Turbo 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’ve tested, and it can cook with less water in a pot, thanks to its magnetic base and unusual pump system.
It’s also the first home sous vide cooker to use algorithms to enable delta-T cooking, which essentially means overheating the sous vide water to reach the desired core temperature of your ingredient sooner. If the Breville+ app offers a Turbo recipe for what you want to cook, it can potentially be done hours faster than it would with a competing cooker, though at the moment the app gives you relatively few Turbo recipes to choose from.
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 Turbo, and we encountered only occasional delays as it reconnected to the machine, which had no effect on our cooking experience.
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