Sous Vide Cooker VPCOK Sous Vide Precision Cooker Immersion Circulator Sous Vide Machine, Accurate Temperature and Time Control Sous Vide Cookbook Included

We bought this to try sous vide cooking. Liked the results. Given an Anova for Christmas so not used this of late but I can say the results are pretty much the same.

The item works as expected, cheaper than Anova yet still cooks great steak. It is very simple to use. Water is heated quickly.Tips:- The clamp is a bit loose, you need a deep tank to hold the device steady.- Error code "E03" means there is not enough water. It took me a while to find it out since there is no reference in the manual.- 57 C x 90 mins for medium rare steak

Friend of mine bought such an appliance and i found it quite useful to have it in your kitchen. At the beginning i couldn’t really understand how to set it up cause usually i don’t read instructions but in this case i said that i really need to read it and i advice you as well cause there are some important safety advices that every user should be cautious of them.After you follow instructions steps is quite easy to use it. Looks very expensive and made of a good quality. Also, you get a little book with different recipes which i find it very interesting.

Works very well. I bought this to keep a water bath at a constant temperature for colour film developing. It works well for this keeping the temperature correct to within 0.1 c

As just under £60 this circulation cooker is significantly cheaper than the Anova or Joule models but seemed to have better Amazon reviews.Out of the box the VPCOK looks robust and well made. It came with a manual and a slim recipe book.My background is in food testing. I have run contract food testing laboratories for the last 25 years so my first look will be to assess the VPCOK’s performance. I attached the unit to a 5L aluminium pan filled with 4L of cold water. I set the unit to 25C, the lowest temperature the unit will set. I then checked the temperate display against my ISO17025 calibrated meat thermometer. Not the perfect experiment but the best I could do. Display Temp Thermometer Temp 25.0 24.8 50.0 49.4 70.0 69.0The unit proved to be stable with no observed variation in temperature once the unit had reached equilibrium.The unit took 11 minutes to increase from 25C to 50C and a further 10 minutes to heat to 70C. This was achieved with no form of insulation around the aluminium pot.Conclusion.The unit is powerful and stable. There is a temperature discrepancy that increases with increasing temperature but this is not an issue as long as you take the difference into account when calculating pasteurisation times and temperatures. I award 4 stars because of the temperature discrepancy. See part 2 for the first cooking attempt.Review Part 2 - First SteakToday I purchased 2 large 1 inch thick Longhorn rump steaks from Tori & Ben’s. After adding salt and pepper I placed each steak in a bag and vac sealed them. I set the VPCOK to 56.5C and cooked the steaks for 3 hours.The steak was perfectly medium rare and quite tender. The thicker part of the steak was not quite as tender and the thinner so I think next time I will add another hour to the cooking time.Conclusion.For a first try the result was excellent. It was easy to cook and tasted perfect. Defiantly 5 star.

Delivered a day early. Lucky I was at home. Solid packaging and complete.The product looks reasonably robust (Some reported it broke early, so let's see).The "cookbook" that comes with it is useless. Temperature tables are mentioned, but not in it. The last two pages are empty; perhaps they forgot to add them? It's easy to find better advice on the internet.Ideally you need a pretty deep pot. The Min and Max markers are at about 6.5cm and 14.3 cm, but you have to count in another 1.5cm at the top (for water not to spill over) and at least a few cm on the bottom to allow for circulation; the device should not touch the bottom of your pot. This asks for a pot as high as 14.3+1.5+a few cm; at least 19-20cm I'd suggest. The one I thought I could use was too shallow. I used some of the packaging material to lift the device up by some 6cm. That was still reasonably stable, but not really recommended on the long term.The larger your pot, ie the more water it contains, the more energy the cooking will consume. Especially steal pots dissipate heat easily. Consider insulating them somehow (eg with kitchen towels or even a blanky); there are some sort of over-priced sous-vide plastic balls around which should help a bit for heat and steam getting out at the top. One of those plastic containers one can buy for too much money, may be more efficient; still, I would insulate it further, especially for long cooking times.Setting temperature works fine. Adjusting the time is more tricky, as fast-forwarding (by holding the button for 2 seconds) is way to fast. I also had some problems readjusting time/temperature during operation. Not sure yet, If it was just me being left-handed.Some pages suggest that one can use standard zip-lock bags for cooking times under 6-8 ours. Tried with 3 bags and in all cases they developed holes. That didn't entirely spoil the foods as only relatively little water leaked in, but you don't want it. Perhaps I used the wrong standard bags? Try your own ones with some cheap veggies? Special purpose bags work fine.Beside that I tried eggs, fish and steak and the results are very good if you get yourself a proper temperature table. For veggies, well-done fish/meats or hard-boiled eggs, the machine is not of much use. Those are easier cooked in conventional ways.