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Sansaire's new sous vide cooker is smarter and more stylish

Sansaire's new sous vide cooker is smarter and more stylish

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Pledge $299 on Kickstarter for a bonus blowtorch and some steak sauce

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Sous vide cooking as we know it has been around for about 40 years, but consumer devices for it have only been around for about seven years, and affordable consumer devices to do it at home have really only been around since Sansaire first launched its precision cooker on Kickstarter in 2013. Now Sansaire is back on Kickstarter with the updated version of its immersion circulator called the Delta.

Sous vide works by placing food (meat, fish, vegetables, eggs) into a vacuum-sealed bag (Ziploc bags work, too), immersing the sealed bag into water, and leaving it there for a couple hours — although time here doesn’t really matter. The temperature in the water is precisely controlled by a machine like the Sansaire Delta, so it’s literally impossible for your food to get overcooked using sous vide as long as the internal temperature of the food is equal to the temperature of the water surrounding it. Of course, after you take your steak out of the water, you have to cook the outside for a minute in a pan, on a grill, or with the Sansaire Searing Kit blowtorch, which helps you get a nice crust around your food. Sansaire says a steak cooked with its kit can be ready in an hour, with only 15 minutes of actual hands-on time with the food.

The Verge previously played with sous vide at CES with the Anova, a similar device that uses a Bluetooth-enabled app to set the temperatures and timers on the device. More recently ChefSteps launched its own connected sous vide cooker, Joule, with funding from Gabe Newell.

Sansaire faces steep competition from Anova and Joule, but the Delta stacks up pretty nicely against them. The new Sansaire comes with an 1100W heater, matching the Joule’s power and certainly beating out Anova’s 800W unit. The increased power in the Delta means it can heat the water and cook food in larger containers more quickly than other immersion circulators with less powerful heaters.

The Delta’s app comes with a feature that helps you find recipes and lets you select your cooking temperature using images of what the food will look like when it’s done. Sansaire’s Delta app uses Wi-Fi to alert you when your food is ready, making it ideal for people who are brave enough to leave Bluetooth range while their food is being cooked perfectly.

The original Sensaire sous vide cooker from 2013 is a far cry from today’s more advanced and connected machines. The old Sensaire could control the temperature of water with tremendous accuracy and cook food perfectly, but things like timers, recipes, and notifications were all left to the consumer. The Delta fixes these shortcomings with its new app that takes out some of that guesswork. The Delta is smaller and prettier than the previous model, weighs half as much, and sports an improved clip to hold it in place on the side of a pot.

The Delta is available for preorder on Kickstarter now starting at $129 for an April 2017 ship date.