Part I: The SousVide Supreme
The people handling marketing for SousVide Supreme were exceptional in accommodating us for this review. When the first unit arrived, Deb and I planned out our first meal in it — a skirt steak — and invited company over to test it out with us. The morning of the dinner (yes, we had to start the meat that early — more later), I prepped the meat and attempted to start the SousVide Supreme unit … and it wouldn’t work. The LCD screen reported “E1″ and simply would not power on.
Once I got hold of the people who sent the unit to me, I was told that this was a common error in the demo units, in that they apparently can’t take the shipping process very well when sent out to site after site. They were very nice about sending us a new unit the following week, but that meal was a bust. Still, I wanted to mention this error here because it’s possible it occurs more often than I was told.
The SVS unit comes with a pretty basic manual, since the controls couldn’t be more basic: there’s a power button, a temperature button, and a timer button. The timer is almost never necessary since, as I said, you can’t really overcook anything. The manual’s true value comes in the handy guide for temperatures and cooking times for various foods, along with a few sample recipes. I found three huge problems with the manual:
1. The chart for temperatures and times was cut off at the bottom, where apparently the items marked with asterisks were explained.
2. The temperatures and times for certain items were very different from the chart to the sample recipes. For example, the flank steak said to cook 24 hours MINIMUM, if you followed the chart. The included recipe, however, said to cook a minimum of eight hours. That’s quite a confusing difference, and there was no explanation to why.
3. No explanation at all as to the “E1″ error. If anyone else were to get this, there was nowhere to go but frantically try to contact someone at the SVS company (I tried this and got nowhere, so contacting the person who sent me the unit worked much better).
The SVS itself looks pretty nondescript. The inside has two removable racks where you can safely and easily place your food without scalding your hands (OK, at 130-degrees, it’s just mildly ouchy). The one problem I found was that, even though I vacuumed out every little bit of air that I could possibly get out of the bags, even placing the meat on the bottom rack sometimes had the meat sticking a little out of the water (it has to ALL be underwater). The way I got around this was to place the meat on the bottom of the bath and place the rack on top of it, but this just didn’t seem right.
Once the SVS beeps to tell you that the water is at the set temperature, that’s when you place your food inside and … wait. This is where I get back to the part about being patient, because depending on what you’re cooking, it could be a long, long time.
Next time in Part II we’ll cover how the first meal went: leg of lamb!
Clacked by Keith McDuffee 
on Mar 03, 2010 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
