AUAG Immersion Sous Vide Cooker Review

AUAG Immersion Sous Vide Cooker Review

Buy it at Amazon: AUAG Immersion Sous Vide Cooker [Affiliate Link]

Takeaway: Precise temperatures, easy operation and cleaning, built-in safety shutoff; delicious results.

You'll receive the sous vide cooker, GFCI power cable, and an instruction manual. The sous vide cooker is made mostly of plastic and measures 14" long and 3" in diameter, not including the clamp. The clamp extends out about an inch and a half. The clamp is wide enough to accommodate containers with walls as thick as 1" though it opens as wide as 3" for ease of installation. It even has a silicone pad at the tip to help grip your container and protect your cookware from scratches. The bottom black portion of the sous vide cooker can be removed for cleaning by twisting clockwise towards the unlock symbol then, squeezing the clamp and pulling straight down. Inside you have the heating coil, pump impeller, and temperature and water level sensors. To re-assemble, line up the horizontal min and max water level markings on the cover with the lock symbol and twist counter-clockwise to lock. This unit has a status LED indicator on the front, a touchscreen LCD screen on top, a settings scroll ring, and power input on the back.

The power cable is 5 ft long and has a built-in GFCI safety module that will trip the circuit to cut off power if a ground fault occurs, that is, if the electrical circuit accidentally comes into contact with water, the unit will stop the flow of electricity to protect you from electrocution. The unit simply clamps onto the side of a pot or heat proof container filled with water. Anything that can be used on the stovetop and can hold over 3" water works well, like a large soup pot, though I found that with very tall containers, taller than the length of the clamp, the cooker tends to tilt precariously towards the water.

The unit is pretty simple to operate, although the instructions were a bit tedious to read through. The LED status light will show different colors for standby, preheat, target temp reached, and keep warm (white, orange, green, blue). The touchscreen on top of the unit works well and is responsive, but could be a tad brighter. It's also only viewable from certain angles so you can't read it from the side or back. The settings scroll wheel makes it easy to make quick adjustments of time, temperature, and pre-set mode selection. The temperature increments are fairly exact allowing for 0.1° changes per scroll click in both Fahrenheit and Celsius. The max cooking time is 99 hours and 59 minutes. You can also lock the touchscreen to prevent accident changes or cancellation during cooking. While there are many pre-set modes for different kinds of foods, you can also make adjustment to those settings after selecting it to customize and cook your food how you like it; just note that your customizations will not be saved to the pre-set and you'll have to make the same adjustments each time.

When testing the accuracy of the sous vide's thermometer, the reading seemed to run a little high when compared to both a calibrated instant read thermometer and analog meat thermometer. Fortunately you can manually adjust the offset for temperature reading but only when the display is shown in Celsius (tap and hold clock and thermometer icons), however, the setting will convert over to the Fahrenheit measurement as well.

I've tried a number of sous vide recipes with this machine and so far its yielded amazing and delicious results. With sous vide cooking, as long as the temperature can be held steady and is accurate and your food is properly sealed before putting in the water bath, it's hard to go wrong. One thing to note is that after the cooking timer runs out, the unit goes into at about 104°F or 40°C for up to 2 hours. After that it automatically shuts off. Also, since it cannot connect to your phone or WiFi, you can't get remote notifications when the food is done cooking so you do have to be around to monitor the device.

Overall, I was completely satisfied with the results achievable with this sous vide cooker. It's easy to adjust and set, simple to use, and with a few tweaks accurately warms your food within fractions of degrees of your target temperature. With a little bit of pre-prep, it'll take some of the work and guesswork out of cooking delicious restaurant-quality food.

Buy it at Amazon: AUAG Immersion Sous Vide Cooker [Affiliate Link]