It's been a couple of weeks since I got my Anova. Since then I've cooked ribeye steak, salmon, chicken thigh, carrots, asparagus, tilapia, and cod. I have a few jumbled thoughts about the whole experience so far.
1) The Anova app hasn't been working well for me so far. The bluetooth seems to randomly disconnect from my phone, and it would sometimes declare my food to be done even when it was just preheating - that's surely a bug (happened twice when I was cooking carrots). The interface is also kind of messy - the guide by Serious Eats is good, but it doesn't have a lot of recipes. You can search for more recipes under the recipes tab, but it's not well organized at all. Many a times I just wanted to find out what the optimum temperature and cooking time I needed for, say, cod. Searching for cod recipes bring out a bunch of different cod dishes, ingredient lists, food photos and navigating that requires a few more unnecessary taps than I'd like. I downloaded the Sou Vide Celsius app which seems to fix a lot of my issues. It's unfortunately a paid app, but for some reason, the bluetooth connection seems to be more reliable from that app, and when you go to the app, it present a no-nonsense list of categories, from which I can usually find what I need in two taps. It feels much better to use and I wish that was the official Anova app.
2) I've been using my 6 quart stockpot to cook my food so far but I'm starting to feel it's too small. Since I don't have the time to sous vide during the week day, I usually sous vide a batch of food on Sunday, transfer them into an ice bath, and refrigerate the sealed packs, and complete the cooking on the day I need to eat them. I'm thinking of getting
a polycarbonate container now to make larger batches of food.
3) I think the food item I've seen the greatest improvement from sous vide so far is steak. Unfortunately, I messed up the first time by not heating up my skillet hot enough to sear it quickly without cooking the middle. My steak ended up medium well.
4) I decided to get a sous vide recipe book for motivation/inspiration. I looked at a few books and finally decided on
this one. It seems to be at the right level between the books aimed at true beginners and that fancy Thomas Keller cookbook aimed at chefs and have impossible-to-find ingredients.
So far, I'm quite pleased with my Anova. It's definitely given me renewed motivation to cook more often instead of eating out (which saves me money!). It also takes out a lot of the guesswork of cooking, which is great for me.
