Kitchen Gadgetry

Yeah, I’ve never had an issue with mine. Lately I’m vacuum sealing more than I’m using the Anova.

I’ve had the seal fail while under water, kind of fucking everything up.

While the bag just clipped onto the side of the pot can’t really have anything go wrong.

You’d think so, and yet I have. What sealer do you use?

Mine is one of these:

I’m a bag clipper as well. I have a vacuum sealer but that’s like … minutes of extra work.

Ziploc all the way, baby.

I’ve never had a fail during cooking and I’m at least 50+ sessions in. I do double seal both ends and I don’t cheap out on bag length to minimize bag material used.

Agreed that it isn’t prone to catastrophic failure, but the bag clipped to the side definitely doesn’t get the same even exposure as a vacuum sealed bag. At least the top of the food, for example, gets less exposure to the heated water, even if you ignore the inevitable air bubble.

Why would this be the case? It seems to me like it’s getting the same exposure as when I’ve used a vacuum sealed bag. It’s fully submerged, and all the water is exactly the same temperature.

You’re managing to clip your whole bag under water? When I do it, the top part of the bag is out of the water, which invariably means part of the bag leads to the surface, holds a bit of air, and generally isn’t as immersed as the rest. Or are you talking about not clipping and dunking the whole bag, perhaps with a weight or something to hold it down? Even in that case, there’s still some sort of air pocket that means a part of the food is less directly exposed.

It’s admittedly much less pronounced for small, thin items (e.g., pieces of fish) and more of a problem for large steaks. If you go to something like a roast or a brisket, it’s very pronounced.

Generally you put the food in, then push the bag under until the top is at the edge of the pot, then clip it. So all of the food is submerged entirely, with no air around it since the water pushed it all out.

I’ve never had it push it all out as well as a vacuum can. I certainly always have mine float to some degree, particular after a bit of cooking time, which causes the plastic to soften and expand a bit. As mentioned, this is most pronounced when you do something big.

I have a small rack that I sometimes put in that holds chicken breasts separated and under the water, but if it’s only one or two, I use and office binder and a heavier piece of silverware. I clip the silverware piece to the bag and drop it in. They never move once it hits the bottom, but the bags will usually sit vertically in the water, which is perfect. Anova even mentions hacks like this on its site.

I’ve never had any trouble with chicken breasts floating when in a ziploc binder-clipped to the side. I use something (usually a table knife) to push the bag under the water while getting the air out, but that’s it. Bacon floats, so some spoons go inside the ziploc with the bacon. I will use the vacuum sealer for longer than 8 hours, of bigger stuff.

The sealer is mostly for Parmesan cheese (unless we’re using it quickly enough), freezing meat and parceling freshly roasted coffee beans into 2-3-day supplies (that works awesomely).

This is genius.

Did you post about getting two Aergrinds from the lone Made By Knock guy and you weren’t able to return the surplus grinder because he never answered your mails?

My coffee club sense went off when I read about you vacuum sealing your beans, LOL.

Yeah - the extra one is still in its original shipping package. I should get around to trying to sell it one of these days.
I don’t drink very much coffee, so I’m happy to pay for good beans as long as I have a way to keep them fresh until I use them.

A few years ago after cooking some pizza the control module on my oven went bad and proceeded to engage the heating elements on its own without any sort of shutoff temp. I noticed when I smelled something burning and walked in to find it running hotter than the self-clean cycle (the stove and sides of the oven were too hot to touch). So I hit the “off” button, which didn’t work. The only way to disable the runaway oven from hell was to shut the circuit breaker off. I’d say it was probably about five or ten minutes away from burning the house down.

I know any appliance can start a house fire, but I worry a lot more about an oven than a slow cooker.

Thank you for my newest crippling fear!

I agree, that’s scary as hell. I don’t know what’s worse, sitting on my older oven that’s worked well but it pretty aged at this point, or switching to a new one with probably more electronics that could have issues.

I actually read somewhere that a lot of ovens have issues at high heat, and if there is a failure, that’s when it typically happens. Now granted, they may have been referring to some really old ovens, but now I surely can’t get that fact out of my head.

It’s entirely possible since I was using it at 475 for the pizza prior to it going haywire.

The front glass of my apartment’s old oven blew out (well, technically, sucked in) when I tried to bake some bread at 550F for the first time. That was a fun day.