So early last week I received a seemingly random message here on Reddit from someone saying they’ve seen me posting on r/sousvide. They said they were from Typhur, which is a company I had never heard of before that moment, and they were wondering if I would be willing to review the Typhur Sous Vide Station in exchange for them sending me one for free. They wanted me to make three posts outlining how I used the machine, and they had to be at least 300 words. I was assuming this was not real, but the only personal information this person requested was my name and home address, so I figured “what the heck?”
Sure enough, the next day I was sent a FedEx tracking number and verified there was definitely a package coming to my house. At that point, I decided to look into the equipment I was told was coming my way – I was absolutely blown away! I have a circulator that doesn’t even have a brand listed on it that I think my sister got for $40 about 10 years ago that I’ve been using. It has worked just fine, but what I was seeing online had me drooling. I couldn’t wait to get it! I had visions of all the things I wanted to try making in it – specifically a brisket.
So last Friday the FedEx truck pulls up and delivers a HUGE box that I am very excited to open. I was like a little kid on Christmas opening all these things, and my initial thought when I got it out of the box – “Wow, this tank is REALLY SMALL!” There would be no brisket going in. There would be no large cooks at all with this. The tank I have already is not very big, but is probably 1.5 times the size of this… But with my current circulator I can and have just attached it to a medium-sized cooler for larger cooks. I’ve done a 20+ pound turkey all at once. I’ve done 7 racks of ribs all at once. I’ve done two dozen 16+ ounce New York Strip steaks all at once. None of that can be done with this system, which I found very disheartening. For the price of this system (regularly $1200, currently on sale for $600), I would expect that I could vacuum seal an entire pig and drop it into the tank. And unlike my current circulator, I can’t just move this to a cooler and start using that as the tank – the connection between the tank and the circulator on the Typhur system is proprietary and one doesn’t work without the other. Even if they sold larger tanks as an add-on, it would go a long way to fix this issue. While I find that disheartening, admittedly most of my cooks are small, so I’m still very interested in this unit.
I got the machine put together and powered it on. I really liked the touchscreen. It connected easily to my Wi-Fi, it prompted me to download the app on my phone, and then I was able to start searching through recipes. The first thing I made was eggnog based on the recipe on the touchscreen. I mentioned it in the write-up I made for it, but the recipe was messed up when it came to the step-by-step directions. It was correct initially, and correct on the phone app, but when I went step-by-step through the app, the measurements for the ingredients were all one line off, so the measurement for each ingredient was actually the measurement for the ingredient one below. As a result, I ended up making my eggnog with twice as much vanilla as the recipe called for (I doubled the recipe, so I initially put in four times the vanilla). I did two other recipes and only saw this once. I’m still not sure if the system glitched or if the recipe is just marked wrong in the step-by-step instructions. In the end, I liked the touch screen, and I liked the step-by-step instructions. I said in my initial write-up that it was dumbed down enough that my 10 year-old son could jump in, with no instruction from me, and make a really great meal just by following the prompts.
The second and third things I made were chicken breast and asparagus. For both of these I utilized the bagging system. The bagging system is very convenient! Just grab a bag, stuff the food in, grab the vacuum sealer that is attached via magnet to the circulator, and seal the bag. I have a full vacuum sealing system in my basement, and any time I need to vacuum seal something, I have to drag the entire thing up from the basement to use it for 2 minutes, and then bring it back down – so this is much more convenient. That said, the bags are expensive. According to the Typhur website, you can buy a box of bags for $54. Assuming it’s the same box that comes in the initial package, that’s 40 bags. So $1.35 per bag. For this food I used four bags, or $5.40. I wanted to see if I could clean the bags out and reuse them – this would be a selling point for me! I initially just tried washing them when I handwashed the dishes. They still smelled of chicken, asparagus and (more importantly) garlic. I then tried soaking them in Dawn dish soap for a few hours. No change. I then tried soaking them in vinegar for an hour – now they smell like chicken, asparagus, garlic and vinegar. This was something else I found very disheartening. I like the convenience factor, but if the cost greatly outweighs the convenience, going downstairs to get my vacuum sealer doesn’t really seem like that much of an inconvenience by comparison. I can pretty much guarantee that I will never buy the bags at the current price, and once they run out, they’re gone.
With the asparagus I also got to use the weights to hold the food down. This is a great concept, but I think it needs work. When I attached the first clip, it just fell right off. I reattached it and it stayed on, and the second clip also stayed on with the first attempt. When I picked both bags up to put them into the circulator, the clips bumped together and both fell off again. I then attached one at a time, and dropped them into the water one at a time. They both stayed on for the duration in the water. When I lifted the bags out of the water, one of the clips came off again and ended up at the bottom of the water. This is another feature that I really want to like, but it just doesn’t seem to work. For the price someone is paying for this system, these clips should only come off when they are manually removed from the bag. That said, if these clips were sold separately, even with the hassle I had with them, I might still consider buying them. While they were a bit of a hassle, they did work in the moment that I needed them to work, and these aren’t something that would only need to be used with this particular system.
In the end, I really want to like this system – but I don’t. The price on this is 15 times what my existing system cost. For that price, it should offer me something drastically better, drastically different or drastically more convenient. This does not meet any of those expectations. From the perspective of doing a large cook, it’s actually worse, not better, and it’s less convenient than my $40 unit. Following the recipes on the touch screen is convenient, but the price to convenience ratio is trumped dramatically by the fact that I can pull the phone out of my pocket and follow recipes there. It does heat up much faster than mine, but for 15 times the price, I can wait five more minutes each time I cook something. If you are someone who lives alone, has a lot of disposable income, and only plans to ever cook for 1-2 people, I might see the allure of buying this system. But if I’ve got $600 to focus on sous vide, I’m spending $200 on Anova equipment and buying $400 worth of meat.
by 2PhatCC
5 Comments
$600 – $1,200 for a non-commercial sous vide is absurd.
I own 2 ANOVA setups and still spent less than $600.
Typhur = one letter off from typhus (a group of infectious diseases caused by bacteria that are spread to humans by fleas, lice, and chiggers). While I’m sure this is an inadvertent thing, I would not be able to avoid thinking about it.
A commercial waring system is literally almost half the cost of this unit on sale. They are insane if they are demanding this much.
Seems like you gave it a fair assessment. Most of the things it seems to attempt to solve are already solved easier and cheaper, just maybe not packaged as cleanly? I could see someone who wants an all-in-one solution paying $600 for something like this, maybe with a bigger tank. I’m not sure about the $1,200 price tag their website also shows, but $600 is not unreasonable.
Not for me, but people spend more on things with less utility. My espresso machine was $500, but other people spend $3,000 because theirs looks cooler… in the end we’re both drinking the same coffee each morning…
Fair play from them trying this marketing/feedback scheme out and well done for the honest review. It looks pretty nice in your photo, but why clear plastic? Would be much better being well insulated and in a case that won’t look grotty in no time. A water bath like in science class would be cool, if it were more like that (though perhaps a bit ugly on the counter top).