TL,DR: This is a cool new oven that (1) automates cooking to (2) give you perfect results. It's expensive, but 100% worth it if you want to save money by cooking at home & eat delicious food all the time without really trying. This is an Easy Bake Oven for Adults lol. This is basically Sous Vide 2.0, but on steroids.
As the official Kitchen Overlord of ATOT, it's my sworn duty to introduce all of you to all of the latest & greatest cool techno-cooking gadgets on the market. As most of you know, I'm a huge fan of the Instant Pot, which is a magic cooking vessel for making delicious food with minimal effort. However, there's a new Sheriff in town, and the Instant Pot is now the Deputy. Behold the Anova Precision Oven:
Like all good main characters, this one requires some backstory. This is what's called a Combi Oven, also known as a Steam Oven (which doesn't sound too exciting, but we'll get to why that's awesome later!), which is a type of oven that combines two things:
1. Heat
2. Humidity
Typically, a regular oven has a top & a bottom heating element, and you can turn off the bottom one to broil stuff using the top element. Spiffier ovens have a fan to blow air around, which makes it a convection oven. Newer ovens have a high-speed version of that fan, which allows you do to "air frying" or "turbo convection". A Combi Oven takes the turbo convection mode & combines it steam. Now, steam doesn't sound terrible exciting, except that when you can control the humidity level, you can do a lot of neat things, such as:
1. Steam food
2. Do steam-injected baking, like a real baker's oven
3. Do sous-vide (no bath required, and no bag required - just stick the food in!)
The problem is that Combi ovens are typically very large (between the size of a mini fridge or a full-sized fridge) and typically cost between $10k to $25k. The really high-end ones feature things like probes for temperature monitoring, low-temp support (for proofing bread, dehydrating, acting as a warming drawer, etc.), computer control via a touchscreen interface for doing things like multiple stages, etc. So a good one can run $17,000 easily. Thanks to modern technology & some really smart, talented people, Anova was able to create a Mini Combi for home use...for $600. Yes, it's horrifically expensive for the average end-user at home, but if you want a home Combi & don't have the budget for it, just set up what I call a Turtle Saver account (step 1, setup an online savings account, like Capital One or Affirm, step 2, setup auto-withdrawl for $10 a week, step 3, wait about a year, because the next year will pass whether you save up for it or not, and $10 a week is a pretty low-budget way to save up for kitchen gadgets like this!).
One of the reasons I get so excited about good kitchen gear is that when you start to look at the big picture, you can see why finding efficiencies in your workflow really adds up. Not to get morbid, you're going to be alive until you die. Assuming you eat 3 meals a day, that's 21 meals a week, or over 1,000 meals per year. That's an awful lot of work to manage in order to feed your body, each year, every year, for the rest of your life! Assuming you want high energy, and tasty food, and fit your budget, it pays to invest in nice gear to help you do the job required.
Anyway, so in contrast with a restaurant-size Combi & what having one in your life can do for you, the price is not so bad. Government statistics say that the average family of 4 spends over $7,000 per year on food, over $3,000 of which is fast-food, and of which over $1,500 goes to waste. So having a tool that makes cooking easier & gets you really amazing results for EVERY meal is, in my book, definitely worth investing in! I love to cook, but the work of cooking is also one of my biggest barriers, so even though I can just make an amazing burger at home for basically free, I'll still stop at Burger King and get a Whopper on my way home simply because I don't want to deal with the mental chore of having to cook.
So name-wise, the product is called the Anova Precision Oven, which I'll call the APO for short. Initially, I wrote this off as just another fancy oven, like the June smart oven or the Brava hi-speed oven. However, as I dug into it & learned what a Combi oven was & what it could do, I really started to realize what this had the potential to do. It's kind of like the difference between a smartphone & a computer...a smartphone is really good at running apps, but with a computer, you can do anything...do gaming, have an optical disk reader, a backup drive, a giant screen, etc. So you get a zillion possibilities thanks to the power of the machine. Likewise, the APO functions in a similar way - there are just tons & tons & tons of possibilities that become instantly accessibly AND easy! So you have 4 primary control options:
1. Precision turbo convection heat: 77F to 482F with an accuracy of +/- 6F. Preheat time is typically under 5 minutes, very quick. There are 3 heating elements: bottom, top, and rear. It has a fan that can be off, low, medium, or high.
2. Precision steam control: This allows you to control the humidity from 0% to 100% in 1-degree increments. You can do steam control up to 482F, and you can also do precision steam control with an accuracy of +/- 0.5F between 77 to 212F, known as Sous Vide mode. This acts like a wet sauna, where your sweat doesn't evaporate because the room is fully humidified. What this means is that you can do sous vide without needing a preheated water bath & without needing to vacuum-seal the food, because the food isn't underwater! This is SUPER convenient, and also opens up the door to doing both large items, like a pork shoulder, and weird-shaped items, like a whole pie. No more bags, no more weights, no more sealed jars!
3. Plug-in probe: This is a heat-proof probe that plugs into the oven on the inside, then into your meat or other food item. This enables you to accurately hit a temperature or maintain a temperature. As pasteurization & food safety is a function of heat over time, access to accurate data allows you to do a lot more neat stuff. One of the neat tricks is that you can use the Sous Video Express model, which is basically turbo sous vide, which means you can enable sous-vide mode in the oven, stick the probe in the meat, say chicken, set the probe to 140F for internal meat temperature, but then set the oven temperature 20F higher, which enables your food to cook faster, but then alert you that your meat has hit 140F.. So you can do a sous-vide steak or chicken breast in about 30 minutes!
4. Wifi app control: The oven can be controlled by the front touchscreen controls manually, or via Wifi using the app, which is available both in your home network & away from home. The key feature with the app is something called Stage, which is where you can program in multiple cooking stages. So you can sous-vide chicken for 30 minutes, then take it out, pat it dry, roll it in beaten eggs, panko, and parm, and put it back in to bake as Parmesan-crusted chicken! Super super super convenient. Word on the street is that an upcoming app update will let you save your recipes & also share them online as a community type of thing. Currently, Anova has over 150 recipes, which include good explanations about the processes, and also let you launch the settings to your oven simply by clicking on them, which is SUPER convenient.
So those are the 4 basic controls, which doesn't sound like much, but if you rewind to high school, you'll remember that permutations lets you mix & combine numbers to create a huge flowchart or mindmap of options. Likewise, this is a single oven that can do so, so many things! And it's not like an "as seen on TV" multi-function device - it's a legitimate, hardcore cooking tool for people who want convenience but also who want perfect results, and also want an automated babysitter to cook for them. So some features include:
1. Baking
2. Roasting
3. Convection baking
4. Steam-injected baking for flour products (ex. no-knead bread)
5. Sous Vide (bagless, bathless)
6. Sous Vide Express (turbo mode)
7. Dehydrating
8. Air-frying
9. Plus a bunch of other stuff I can't think of off the top of my head
It's an odd assortment of being super convenient while also being super powerful, so it's an oven both for people who don't like to & don't want to cook, but want to save money by cooking at home while also getting restaurant-quality results & doing so in an automated, mostly hands-off fashion, and also an oven for people who really like to cook & get creative in the kitchen. In my opinion, this is the future of cooking. Steam cooking is already huge in Asia the same way bidets are - Americans are slowly adopting them. This is the first fully-featured Mini Combi for home use I've ever seen. There have been other countertop steam ovens, but nothing with the precision controls or features that the APO has. Most in-wall units that are available start at $4,000 & some require plumbing for the water line, so they're not super accessible for most people.
I call this an 80/20 oven, because while it doesn't do everything, it does do a LOT of things, and it does them VERY well, with precision, so that you get perfect results & repeatable results! That means that once you lock in your chicken breast procedure, it will come out exactly the same every single time! You will still need a searing setup, whether it's a grill, a cast-iron pan, a weed torch, or something else. You can smoke food in a smoker (I use an inexpensive plug-in Oster smoker with pellets) in conjunction with sous vide, so that you get tender meat plus smokey flavor. You can pan-fry. You can deep-fry (sous-vide chicken then a quick fry is AMAZING for doing chicken sandwiches, nuggets, wings, etc.). I've been using it in conjunction with my Instant Pot to make some really great meals! This oven is so good that I plan on getting a second one (come on already, second stimulus check!) so that I can cook in parallel (ex. SV chicken & bake bread) & also to do long projects (ex. 18-hour SV pulled pork, 24-hour dehydrator jobs, 24-hour yogurt, etc.).
Size-wize, this is a VERY large countertop oven. It's roughly the size of a 2.2cf microwave. You can do up to 5 racks in it.. They include two wire racks plus a baking tray. You can use the two included racks at various heights, depending on what you're cooking. You can fit a pretty large piece of meat in there (I want to say it maxes out at a 14-pound bird; I've done an 8-pound pork shoulder successfully already!). I ended up picking up a dedicated microwave cart, because my kitchen is kinda small & I ran out of room for my other toys lol. Here's a link to the one I got:
I'll share a few pictures of projects I've done over the last week (just got my APO in this month!) in the posts below.
Pork tenderloin:
Cooked sous-vide for 3 hours, then pan-seared in brown butter, oil, and spices. It was so good that I didn't even bother making a sauce! Supposedly with SVE (Sous-Vide Express mode aka Turbo SV), it can be ready in just 70 minutes, so I'll try that on my next tenderloin!
Sliced finished project:
To prep it, I bought some pork tenderloin, unwrapped the plastic from it, put it on a tray, stuck it in the oven, pushed the probe into the center, and pushed the button on the app. No pre-heated Sous-Vide bath required. No vac-seal bag required. Just stick it right in!
I did a really simple mix of oil & butter with various spices in a cast-iron pan. Used the browned butter as the sauce. Really good!
As the official Kitchen Overlord of ATOT, it's my sworn duty to introduce all of you to all of the latest & greatest cool techno-cooking gadgets on the market. As most of you know, I'm a huge fan of the Instant Pot, which is a magic cooking vessel for making delicious food with minimal effort. However, there's a new Sheriff in town, and the Instant Pot is now the Deputy. Behold the Anova Precision Oven:
Anova Precision™ Oven 2.0
The updated Anova Precision™ Oven 2.0 is our smartest appliance yet — totally remade from the inside out to help you cook like a pro. With new features like integrated cooking guides and food recognition, what you put into this oven will come out perfect, every single time.
anovaculinary.com
Like all good main characters, this one requires some backstory. This is what's called a Combi Oven, also known as a Steam Oven (which doesn't sound too exciting, but we'll get to why that's awesome later!), which is a type of oven that combines two things:
1. Heat
2. Humidity
Typically, a regular oven has a top & a bottom heating element, and you can turn off the bottom one to broil stuff using the top element. Spiffier ovens have a fan to blow air around, which makes it a convection oven. Newer ovens have a high-speed version of that fan, which allows you do to "air frying" or "turbo convection". A Combi Oven takes the turbo convection mode & combines it steam. Now, steam doesn't sound terrible exciting, except that when you can control the humidity level, you can do a lot of neat things, such as:
1. Steam food
2. Do steam-injected baking, like a real baker's oven
3. Do sous-vide (no bath required, and no bag required - just stick the food in!)
The problem is that Combi ovens are typically very large (between the size of a mini fridge or a full-sized fridge) and typically cost between $10k to $25k. The really high-end ones feature things like probes for temperature monitoring, low-temp support (for proofing bread, dehydrating, acting as a warming drawer, etc.), computer control via a touchscreen interface for doing things like multiple stages, etc. So a good one can run $17,000 easily. Thanks to modern technology & some really smart, talented people, Anova was able to create a Mini Combi for home use...for $600. Yes, it's horrifically expensive for the average end-user at home, but if you want a home Combi & don't have the budget for it, just set up what I call a Turtle Saver account (step 1, setup an online savings account, like Capital One or Affirm, step 2, setup auto-withdrawl for $10 a week, step 3, wait about a year, because the next year will pass whether you save up for it or not, and $10 a week is a pretty low-budget way to save up for kitchen gadgets like this!).
One of the reasons I get so excited about good kitchen gear is that when you start to look at the big picture, you can see why finding efficiencies in your workflow really adds up. Not to get morbid, you're going to be alive until you die. Assuming you eat 3 meals a day, that's 21 meals a week, or over 1,000 meals per year. That's an awful lot of work to manage in order to feed your body, each year, every year, for the rest of your life! Assuming you want high energy, and tasty food, and fit your budget, it pays to invest in nice gear to help you do the job required.
Anyway, so in contrast with a restaurant-size Combi & what having one in your life can do for you, the price is not so bad. Government statistics say that the average family of 4 spends over $7,000 per year on food, over $3,000 of which is fast-food, and of which over $1,500 goes to waste. So having a tool that makes cooking easier & gets you really amazing results for EVERY meal is, in my book, definitely worth investing in! I love to cook, but the work of cooking is also one of my biggest barriers, so even though I can just make an amazing burger at home for basically free, I'll still stop at Burger King and get a Whopper on my way home simply because I don't want to deal with the mental chore of having to cook.
So name-wise, the product is called the Anova Precision Oven, which I'll call the APO for short. Initially, I wrote this off as just another fancy oven, like the June smart oven or the Brava hi-speed oven. However, as I dug into it & learned what a Combi oven was & what it could do, I really started to realize what this had the potential to do. It's kind of like the difference between a smartphone & a computer...a smartphone is really good at running apps, but with a computer, you can do anything...do gaming, have an optical disk reader, a backup drive, a giant screen, etc. So you get a zillion possibilities thanks to the power of the machine. Likewise, the APO functions in a similar way - there are just tons & tons & tons of possibilities that become instantly accessibly AND easy! So you have 4 primary control options:
1. Precision turbo convection heat: 77F to 482F with an accuracy of +/- 6F. Preheat time is typically under 5 minutes, very quick. There are 3 heating elements: bottom, top, and rear. It has a fan that can be off, low, medium, or high.
2. Precision steam control: This allows you to control the humidity from 0% to 100% in 1-degree increments. You can do steam control up to 482F, and you can also do precision steam control with an accuracy of +/- 0.5F between 77 to 212F, known as Sous Vide mode. This acts like a wet sauna, where your sweat doesn't evaporate because the room is fully humidified. What this means is that you can do sous vide without needing a preheated water bath & without needing to vacuum-seal the food, because the food isn't underwater! This is SUPER convenient, and also opens up the door to doing both large items, like a pork shoulder, and weird-shaped items, like a whole pie. No more bags, no more weights, no more sealed jars!
3. Plug-in probe: This is a heat-proof probe that plugs into the oven on the inside, then into your meat or other food item. This enables you to accurately hit a temperature or maintain a temperature. As pasteurization & food safety is a function of heat over time, access to accurate data allows you to do a lot more neat stuff. One of the neat tricks is that you can use the Sous Video Express model, which is basically turbo sous vide, which means you can enable sous-vide mode in the oven, stick the probe in the meat, say chicken, set the probe to 140F for internal meat temperature, but then set the oven temperature 20F higher, which enables your food to cook faster, but then alert you that your meat has hit 140F.. So you can do a sous-vide steak or chicken breast in about 30 minutes!
4. Wifi app control: The oven can be controlled by the front touchscreen controls manually, or via Wifi using the app, which is available both in your home network & away from home. The key feature with the app is something called Stage, which is where you can program in multiple cooking stages. So you can sous-vide chicken for 30 minutes, then take it out, pat it dry, roll it in beaten eggs, panko, and parm, and put it back in to bake as Parmesan-crusted chicken! Super super super convenient. Word on the street is that an upcoming app update will let you save your recipes & also share them online as a community type of thing. Currently, Anova has over 150 recipes, which include good explanations about the processes, and also let you launch the settings to your oven simply by clicking on them, which is SUPER convenient.
So those are the 4 basic controls, which doesn't sound like much, but if you rewind to high school, you'll remember that permutations lets you mix & combine numbers to create a huge flowchart or mindmap of options. Likewise, this is a single oven that can do so, so many things! And it's not like an "as seen on TV" multi-function device - it's a legitimate, hardcore cooking tool for people who want convenience but also who want perfect results, and also want an automated babysitter to cook for them. So some features include:
1. Baking
2. Roasting
3. Convection baking
4. Steam-injected baking for flour products (ex. no-knead bread)
5. Sous Vide (bagless, bathless)
6. Sous Vide Express (turbo mode)
7. Dehydrating
8. Air-frying
9. Plus a bunch of other stuff I can't think of off the top of my head
It's an odd assortment of being super convenient while also being super powerful, so it's an oven both for people who don't like to & don't want to cook, but want to save money by cooking at home while also getting restaurant-quality results & doing so in an automated, mostly hands-off fashion, and also an oven for people who really like to cook & get creative in the kitchen. In my opinion, this is the future of cooking. Steam cooking is already huge in Asia the same way bidets are - Americans are slowly adopting them. This is the first fully-featured Mini Combi for home use I've ever seen. There have been other countertop steam ovens, but nothing with the precision controls or features that the APO has. Most in-wall units that are available start at $4,000 & some require plumbing for the water line, so they're not super accessible for most people.
I call this an 80/20 oven, because while it doesn't do everything, it does do a LOT of things, and it does them VERY well, with precision, so that you get perfect results & repeatable results! That means that once you lock in your chicken breast procedure, it will come out exactly the same every single time! You will still need a searing setup, whether it's a grill, a cast-iron pan, a weed torch, or something else. You can smoke food in a smoker (I use an inexpensive plug-in Oster smoker with pellets) in conjunction with sous vide, so that you get tender meat plus smokey flavor. You can pan-fry. You can deep-fry (sous-vide chicken then a quick fry is AMAZING for doing chicken sandwiches, nuggets, wings, etc.). I've been using it in conjunction with my Instant Pot to make some really great meals! This oven is so good that I plan on getting a second one (come on already, second stimulus check!) so that I can cook in parallel (ex. SV chicken & bake bread) & also to do long projects (ex. 18-hour SV pulled pork, 24-hour dehydrator jobs, 24-hour yogurt, etc.).
Size-wize, this is a VERY large countertop oven. It's roughly the size of a 2.2cf microwave. You can do up to 5 racks in it.. They include two wire racks plus a baking tray. You can use the two included racks at various heights, depending on what you're cooking. You can fit a pretty large piece of meat in there (I want to say it maxes out at a 14-pound bird; I've done an 8-pound pork shoulder successfully already!). I ended up picking up a dedicated microwave cart, because my kitchen is kinda small & I ran out of room for my other toys lol. Here's a link to the one I got:
I'll share a few pictures of projects I've done over the last week (just got my APO in this month!) in the posts below.
Pork tenderloin:
Cooked sous-vide for 3 hours, then pan-seared in brown butter, oil, and spices. It was so good that I didn't even bother making a sauce! Supposedly with SVE (Sous-Vide Express mode aka Turbo SV), it can be ready in just 70 minutes, so I'll try that on my next tenderloin!
Sliced finished project:
To prep it, I bought some pork tenderloin, unwrapped the plastic from it, put it on a tray, stuck it in the oven, pushed the probe into the center, and pushed the button on the app. No pre-heated Sous-Vide bath required. No vac-seal bag required. Just stick it right in!
I did a really simple mix of oil & butter with various spices in a cast-iron pan. Used the browned butter as the sauce. Really good!