If you weren’t already convinced that sous vide cooking was the next big thing for home chefs, check out Anova’s freshly-launched Kickstarter project. In it’s first 24 hours, it’s already attracted more than 3,000 backers and raised more than $400,000 in pledges. At time of writing, it’s still on a bit of a tear – gathering an additional 2K every five minutes or so.
It’s not just by chance either — there’s a reason people are going so crazy over the company’s new product. The Anova Precision Cooker, as they’re calling it, is essentially a smarter, cheaper, better version of it’s original immersion circulator — a product that was already one of the best sous-vide cookers on the market.
This new version comes with a number of big improvements over the original, but the most obvious is definitely the product’s physical design. The Precision Cooker has a slimmer, sleeker look to it, and has been redesigned to ease the cleaning process. Whereas the old model featured a solid unibody construction, the new one is built with detachable parts that give you easy access to the heating element. You probably won’t have to clean it more than once or twice a year, but even so, the ability to clean the heating element will likely help extend the life of the product.
Anova also did away with the original product’s touchscreen controls, and instead opted for a simpler LED number display that you control with a roller wheel. We’re not entirely sure, but we have a hunch that doing away with the touchscreen likely helped drive down the price of the device.
The most significant improvement, however, is definitely the addition of Bluetooth. This allows the Precision Cooker to wirelessly connect to your mobile device, and (with the help of Anova’s accompanying application) drastically simplify the cooking process.
With older cookers, you generally had to memorize the correct temperature and cook times for different foods — steak is 57 celsius for two hours, chicken breast is 60 Celsius for about an hour and 40 minutes, and so on. If you didn’t know these things off the top of your head, or were cooking something new, you typically had to hop online to find the proper time/temp settings. The precision cooker fixes this problem, and allows you to enter the ideal settings at the touch of a button. Just specify what food you’re cooking, place it in the water bath, and Anova will do the rest.
Whats amazing is that, despite the fact that it’s considerably more advanced than most other immersion circulators currently on the market, Anova’s Precision Cooker is also a bit cheaper. If you back the project now you can lock one down for around 135-160 bucks. But we highly recommend you move quickly — the early bird backer rewards are disappearing fast!
Find out more here.
