PolyScience Sous Vide Professional Chef Series Black Immersion Calculator with 30 Piece Heat Seal Vacuum Bag Set

I started with home grade immersion circulators (Nomiku) and quickly became a fan of the sous vide cooking technique. I noticed, however, that the Nomiku circulators often had trouble getting to higher (80 degree Centigrade plus). They would often get to a degree short of target and struggle to reach it. There is NO such problem with this unit. It heats up quickly and circulates powerfully. It maintains temperature to within one tenth of a degree. While I have not tried it yet, I have no doubt that it will be able to control temperatures and circulation in 10-20 gallon containers. It does not have the bells and whistles of the newest Nomiku (WiFi monitoring and downloads of cooking times) but once the temperature is entered this operates flawlessly.

(Updated 3/8/2016)If you are trying to decide between one of these units or one of the far cheaper units (Anova, Sansaire, Nomiku), here's what I think it boils down to :REASONS TO GO WITH THE ANOVAS, SANSAIRES, NOMIKUS:- You are usually cooking for four or less- You occasionally use your sous vide- You like having wifi or bluetooth connectivity (in the case of some Anova and Sansaire models) to set timers, give you alerts on your food and cooking guides- You prefer something more compactThe $100-$200 (when on sale) units work perfectly fine most of the time, and is so much cheaper than the Polyscience that it's a better starter sous vide unit. And actually, looking at the specs now the cheaper units have almost the same power as the Polyscience, with the exception of the Anova. The Anova is a 800W unit and everyone else seems to offer a 1100W which is the same power as the Polyscience Chef series. Between the Sansaire and the Nomiku, the Sansaire seems to be the more powerful unit.REASONS TO GO WITH A POLYSCIENCE- You cook for a lot of people- You will use this frequently- You want this to heat up and regain temperature losses from more water quickly- You want something that is more industrial- You want something made in the USA- You want a longer cord (Polyscience power cord is almost 2x as long as the Anova)- You want to be able to adjust your flow rate (Polyscience jet is really powerful which makes it noisy in a small pot but very necessary in a large container. Being able to control the output of the flow by toggling two tabs on the bottom is handy)The Polyscience is a more industrial unit. It's heavy and very sturdy feeling. This unit heats up much faster than the Anova that I have and has a far more powerful jet that circulates large pots of water more efficiently. It also has a lower water level for circulating than some of the other units (see photos) I've had this unit for about 4 years now and it's still holding up great with regular use. The capacity for the Polyscience Chef unit is 8 gallons (30L) while Anova is 4-5 gallons (15-19L). It also has the highest flow rate at 12 L (3.2 gallons) per minute with the Sansaire a close second at 11L / minute (3 gallons).--------------------Original review--------------------I had the most delicious incredibly moist 72 hour short rib at Ad Hoc roughly one year ago. At that very moment, I knew I was going to need to own a sous vide machine. Since this was the only consumer sous vide brand available (at the time), I promptly ordered one.My impressions so far:SIZE:The unit arrived much larger than I expected. It's roughly the size of a 1.5L coke bottle. While this might have been really obvious to everyone it was a surprise to me. :) The unit still fits comfortably within a stockpot for small items, but the sous vide unit will take up ¼ of the available space of the pot. I ended up primarily using the 12x20 plastic tub I got with my unit as the main cooking container.NOISE:Provided you have enough water it's a quiet steady hum (much like a small fish tank) that you can quickly tune out. If the water level is too low it can be a bit noisy.ELECTRICITY USE:Given that low and slow was my plan (meaning days of cooking), I was curious to know how much electricity the unit consumed. According the PolyScience web site, the cost of using the sous vide at 59oC (138oF) comes to about $0.03/hour. In comparison from a study, using a gas or electric oven ranges from $0.07 - $0.10 per hour. Good to know using it a lot doesn't break the bank :)WATER EVAPORATIONAfter an unfortunate granite-cracking incident (details below), I wasn't allowed to use the machine in the kitchen anymore, so the only possible place to use the machine was in the garage. I was worried about water evaporation since I didn't have insulation for the container, however if you are to fill your container to the max fill line before you sleep, you can safely leave the unit overnight. That's using a 12x20 plastic tub with no insulation and no lid.FOOD SAFETYThe most delicious medium-rare short rib is cooked at 133oF for 72 hours. The texture you get at the end is just not replicable by any other cooking technique and these ribs alone are worth getting the machine. However, at that temperature, my friends (aka food test subjects) were naturally curious about food safety. The sous vide manual actually has a whole section on this. The #1 thing to keep in mind is just to minimize the amount of time that food is kept between 5oC (41oF) and 50oC 122oF ("the danger zone".) The total time that food stays in this range must not exceed 4 hours. In general most sous vide dishes are cooked above 130oF, and above 122oF most pathogens will die off. Just make sure your food is well chilled and goes straight from the fridge to the sous vide. After cooking, if you aren't serving food just chill the food in an ice bath and get it in the fridge or freezer ASAP. Also if you use the freshest ingredients possible and sear to finish off food you should be pretty well covered.THE FOOD EXPERIMENTS:1) 24 hour pork shoulder @ 149oF. Seasoned with pepper and wrapped in 2 strips of bacon. By then, the bacon had almost entirely disintegrated leaving behind one chunk of delicious moist meat that promptly disappeared within moments of being served. My faux ziploc bags leaked and got waterlogged so I'm looking forward to a repeat for 48 hours and with proper vacuum sealed bags.2) 1 hour poached eggs @ 145oF. I'd never made poached eggs in my life, but all the pictures of eggs in the quick reference guide convinced me to give it a shot. I poached them in their shells for 1 hour, and then cracked them straight onto salad for absolute deliciousness. The only thing I'd say is you want to serve them pretty quickly because the eggs already felt a bit cold between the time we cracked the eggs and when we all sat down to eat.3) 72 hour short rib @ 133oF , 3 styles. Here's where you absolutely need a proper vacuum sealer. My cheapo generic brand zip bags broke within 2 hours resulting in a boiled watery mess. Ziploc brand bags lasted the full 3 days but one of them still got waterlogged. And after waiting 3 days for meat you don't want any hiccups! It's painful, trust me!! The results when everything works are where it's AT. It's also where you can mess things up. I did one batch plain, one with a Korean Galbi marinade and one with a red wine marinade. Given that the sous vide is doing the tenderizing for you, you do NOT want to use marinades that tenderize. It changes the flavor of the meat to mush and gives weird not exactly tasty results. Likewise don't salt too much as you end up curing the meat. If you use a marinade, try to avoid acid or alcohol (or boil it off) and make sure you allow time for your marinade to penetrate before cooking because your food will actually cook before the flavor of the marinade has time to penetrate the meat.4) 30 minute butter poached lobster at 143oF. I got lobster tails, soaked them for 3 minutes in almost boiling water to get the shells off, chilled the lobster tails in the fridge again before combining lobster w/ butter. Pure glutton heaven.FINISHING:Having tried blow torching and pan searing, I think I preferred the taste of pan searing better but will continue to experiment. I used the Iwatani blowtorch.BAGS:I was so excited to use the sous vide that I didn't want to wait to buy a chamber vacuum sealer. After using zip top bags for a week I'd say you definitely want to use a vacuum sealer if you can. I'll be ordering a VacMaster VP112 Portable Chamber Vacuum Sealer but friends have used a FoodSaver without problems. I'll report on using it when I do. I know there have been some problems with the lid cracking, but at the same time upgrading to the next size means a much larger footprint. Word of advice if you do use zip tops: NO GENERIC! They are just too flimsy and break too easily.RANDOM COUNTERTOP INCIDENT:The first night I used the sous vide, I put it on a granite countertop. Within hours, we discovered a crack under the counter. According to the repair professional, granite is rated to withstand heat up to 900oF and I was cooking something at 149oF, so it shouldn't have been an issue, however I learned that granite counters often have imperfections that are filled with epoxy and this sealant CAN wear down at much lower temperatures. While no direct cause-effect could be determined with absolute certainty, I would still say to be safe, don't put your container directly on the counter, and at least lay down a towel. The sous vide was warm enough to actually transfer heat to the whole slab of counter.BOTTOM LINE:Since my purchase, I discovered a slew of Kickstarter sous vide machines that cost far less than this unit. While I'm completely happy with this unit and feel like it was still worth the price I paid, were I to be on the market today I'd seriously consider a Sansaire or Anova for~$199 instead of ~$799. Since I have what I have, I don't regret it, and am looking forward to more sous vide action once my vacuum chamber sealer arrives! This is definitely a must-have tool for the home kitchen!----------Update 9/4/2015 : Well I've had this machine for a few years now and it's been used continuously so I know that this machine can survive the long haul! My foods perform best with just a dry rub or salt and pepper. I haven't been happy with how most of the marinades recipes have turned out as marinades seem to turn my meat to mush. I DID buy a VacMaster VP112S to seal my bags and I much prefer it over zip loc bags. When you buy the 250 pack bags it comes out cheaper than ziploc! The VacMaster is quite clunky but I just keep it in the garage and it hasn't gotten in my way.Update 1/30/2016I bought an Anova as a backup / 2nd sous vide machine. *Despite* the fact that the Anova has a WAY better app interface, this still ends up being my main sous vide machine for the following reasons:- Faster heating - I was cooking some sous vide carrots (185oF) at the same time I was preparing some rib eye steak (125oF). I used the Polyscience for the carrots and I noticed that the Polyscience had my water heated to 125oF well before the Anova.- Better heat circulation / maintenance - for small batches of food an Anova is fine, but I noticed the Polyscience had a better time maintaining high temperatures for large pots of water than the Anova----------Back in 2015, I thought I had a calibration problem and contacted PolyScience. I was surprised to receive a VERY detailed response from a chef at PolyScience Culinary and not just a customer service rep. As he explained, calibration problems are very unlikely because :==========Our SVP unit features a platinum PT1000 probe that has been checked against a traceable thermometer that is calibrated against a government standard. It is possible, but highly unlikely that it's calibration is off, as every sinlge unit is tested for accuracy and stability before being air dried and packaged before leaving our facility in Niles IL.There are many great thermometers available, but they aren't as fast as the PT 1000 in the SVP. Typically, discrepancies are common and we highly DO NOT recommend offsetting the circulator based upon even a thermocouple reading. The way that the probe in the SVP works is quite different.To expand upon this topic:From Philip Preston: "Most thermocouple type thermometers are not as fast and have inherent inaccuracies of ± 0.7 degrees. This and the location of their thermometer compared to the location of the probe on the SVPro can influence discrepancies between the two references.There are several factors at play here. First would be the thermal response time of differentprobes. We use a platinum (PT-1000) sensor and most kitchen thermometers use athermocouple. Thermocouples are fine and they are very fast, but they have an inherent absolute accuracy of plus or minus 2.0C. We need high accuracy and linearity. The sensor location is another factor. Even though there is circulation, our control sensor is in a close relationship to the heating element. When the heater is full on we will see a slight offset as compared to the reservoir as a whole."From Thermoworks: “Our proprietary circuit yields accuracies better than ±0.7°F.” Thermocouples are fast but not suitable for accurate control. Even though it has been calibrated at ice point it is not linear and therefore lacks accuracy at cooking temperatures. I would never calibrate (offset) the Sous Vide Professional using a thermocouple. We test and calibrate using a Hart data logging reference thermometer[...]and the SVP has faster response than the reference.Recovery time is also a complex issue. In a PID control system the integrator "I" term must move slower than the largest anticipated thermal mass of the system being controlled. On our more accurate systems where we achieve plus or minus 0.004C stability the recovery time is very slow. There is plenty of good reading on the internet on velocity based PID control systems.”===========So I guess while there are a bunch of lower cost alternatives out there, this is still likely a more precise and industrial machine.

Purchased 2 units for our restaurant just about a year ago and they are awesome! They are in use 8 -10 hours a day 5-6 days a week and I haven't had a single problem. Quickly reaches and maintains temp. I use them for large batch prep and for cooking and reheating during dinner service. Highly recommend!

I love this device. Yes, it is expensive. But it works. I can cook up to 16 steaks at a time, perfectly. Yes there are less expensive 'sous vide' devices on the market, and many more coming soon. For now this is the gold standard. I look forward to using this thing every time.

This works very well and has produced some fantastic dishes thus far! For long cooks, I place the water bath (camco 12L bin) in an insulated container like a chest cooler to help retain heat, then put it in a back room instead of the kitchen, since the circulation pump does make a fair amount of noise. This is normal for commercial-grade equipment, but is something you should be aware of if you have an open kitchen type floor-plan.It would be great if there was a way to adjust the speed of the circulation pump, since I don't think it needs to be full bore for smaller volume water baths. Flow is adjustable by opening and closing sliding flaps on the unit, but that achieves flow regulation without changing the speed of the circulator.I wouldn't recommend fully enclosing the unit inside a cooler - I did that once by closing the lid, and came back to find the pump off (heating element still on), and the LCD screen was illegible. I would guess the humidity got too high. After letting it relax a bit, normal operation resumed and I haven't had problems since.Overall, highly recommended, although I haven't worked with any other precision-cooking solutions to compare it with.

So user friendly and easy to use! Have used this unit 5 days a week and it's still holding strong! Do yourself a favor and buy this one!

Great

Wanting to better prepare meals at home, we purchased this and it took 3 cooking cycles to get to perfection - but I've never tasted a steak anywhere as tender and flavorful as those done on our 3rd cycle. Seasonings and finishing (Maillard) seem to be the key as the rest of the process is pure push button physics. Anyhow - rarely, if ever, do I say the words . . . . "to die for" but I did last cycle - this could spoil your appetite for average food. Easy to use and fast clean-up. If you can fit this in your budget - you will not likely regret it. Kudos to PolyScience.