I have a Sous Vide Supreme[1] and it's pretty much the secret weapon for making cheap beef tasty. Even cheapo chuck can do really well in one of them if you let them go for a while. What's nerdy-cool about it, I think, is that if you're quick, you can seal a steak with no air bubbles whatsoever and the steak will remain bright red while it cooks. Obviously you sear it after, but watching people's eyes bug out a little when they see the bright red slab of perfectly tasty and cooked meat come out of the pot is kind of amazing.

[1] - I also have an Anova, and if you can swing it I much prefer the SVS; with the Anova the temperature gradient can be pretty wide in larger containers, and you don't have to be nearly as careful about how you place stuff in the SVS.

Really? You're getting better performance from an SVS than an Anova? My understanding is that for reasonable water baths, the Anova is pretty close to the performance of the Polyscience, which is the gold standard. When Kenji Alt tested the Anova, he found his unit had been miscalibrated; maybe check yours?

I donated my unopened Sansaire to Butcher & Larder and the first thing they did with it was set it up in a huge water bath to cook a bunch of huge mortadella. It took them forever to get the bath up to temp, so long that I thought something might have been wrong with the unit.

I think the fix was to cover the bath to eliminate evaporative cooling. That is also a problem the SVS doesn't have, being a closed bath. But the circulator should be more flexible and, from what I understand, higher performance.

If you're willing to spring for the SVS, a better rec might be to go for the mid-range Polyscience (the CS).

For my use cases, I find the SVS Demi (sorry, forgot to note that before) to work well. I use it primarily for cooking for one or two people, on a daily basis, so it does have a home on the counter and all. Setup/teardown (or just having an ugly stockpot on the counter) makes the Anova worse for my use cases, so I only break it out for big, 5-6 gallon batches of stuff, at which point there is something of a temperature gradient at the far end of the bath. I don't think it's a calibration thing, because it does work fine on smaller batches, it's just not very useful to me there.

Also, I bought the SVS Demi on sale for under $300. The Polyscience bath is like $500. (I got the Anova for free.)

I purchased a pre-cut Cambro lid to avoid evap. It's a snug fit around the circulator, and works really well.

I've also noticed some folks using double-tub baths for better insulation.

> the secret weapon for making cheap beef tasty

Traditionally, that has been barbecue, no?

http://bbq.tamu.edu/meat-selection/

Or long, slow cooking in general. The "secret weapon" property of low-temp cooking is not so much that it makes cheap cuts taste better, but that it makes them taste like expensive cuts of beef --- not the same thing.

The best-tasting cuts on a cow actually tend to be the cheapest anyways.