This Sous Vide Cooker Doesn’t Skimp on Its Features or Its Size

Of all the kitchen appliances out there, sous vide cookers fit most seamlessly into the ever expanding smart home. Preparing food sous vide is much slower than using an oven or the stovetop, but you don’t need to stand over your food while it’s cooking—really, you don’t even need to be in the house while it’s cooking, because the likelihood of overcooking your food is so low. These days, Breville and Anova are the two biggest players left in the home sous vide appliance world, both focusing on smart versions of their cookers.

Now there’s a new entry in the sous vide game. San Jose–based Typhur is a tech-focused kitchen brand that was founded in 2019, but flew under the radar until it showed up at CES, an annual tech and electronics trade show, in 2023. There’s an unmistakable Silicon Valley vibe to each of the company’s initial offerings: a giant air fryer called the Dome, a pair of very accurate thermometers, and certainly its massive, smart sous vide station. Typhur markets the sous vide station as a one-stop shop for sous vide cooking, integrating a circulator, water container, specialized bags, and a vacuum sealer in one package. I spent several months testing it—here’s what I found.

How the Typhur Sous Vide Station works

Typhur’s sous vide station has two large components: a 12-liter, double-walled water container and a water circulator/temperature controller designed to snap into a column on the back. Like smaller sous vide circulators, the Typhur cooks by keeping water at the desired cooking temperature and moving it around food that’s vacuum sealed. You can use whatever sous vide bags you like, but the sous vide station does come with its own zip-top bags and a handheld vacuum, which attaches to the side of the circulator with a magnet.

The controller has a small touchscreen tablet built into the top. The interface is quite intuitive, and gives you the option to set a specific temperature and time or use one of the dozens of preset recipes. In addition to the tablet, Typhur has an app that uses the same interface as the controller itself, making it a seamless experience to switch from using one to the other.

What’s good about the Typhur Sous Vide Station

First, the sous vide station does exactly what a sous vide cooker should: It circulates water and holds it at temperature very accurately. I checked in a half dozen times over the course of a 24-hour cook and the temperature was never off by more than half a degree.

The water container comes with several useful, well-thought out design features. Its tight-fitting lid helps in two important ways: It allows water to heat much faster than it would in an open pot, and it also prevents evaporation. Twelve liters of water went from 58℉ to 147℉ (the temperature I use to cook eggs) in 26 minutes, compared with 39 minutes with the Joule Turbo, the stick-style immersion circulator I tested alongside the Typhur. (If you’re not testing the machine’s speed, you can use hot tap water to get cooking even faster.) I’ve done overnight sous vide cooking before in open-top containers, and evaporation has always been a problem. When I cooked ribs for 24 hours in the Typhur, I never had to add any additional water. The double-walled construction is also a plus; it protects your countertop from the extended exposure to heat. Without that extra insulation, counters and cutting boards used under sous vide setups can discolor and even crack.

Because of its massive 12.7-inch touchscreen, the Typhur also has the most comprehensive and easy-to-use controls of any circulator I’ve tried in my career. Because the screen is so big, it has space to offer step-by-step video instructions for the pre-loaded recipes that includes video of all the non–sous vide parts of the process. It’s a nice way to show the desired thickness of a reduced sauce, and it walks you through all the steps of popular savory applications like juicy chicken thighs and poached eggs, sweet ones like crème brûlée—and weird ones like cold-brew coffee.

Finally, the Typhur’s scheduling feature is very convenient if you’re trying to plan ahead for dinner. I prepped chicken before leaving the house at 8:30 one morning and it was ready for me when I got home at 5 p.m. Typhur is actually the first brand I’ve come across that built in a way to deal with the food safety issues that can come with leaving food out all day: Each time you schedule a cook it includes a recommended amount of ice to add to the water bath to keep food at a safe temperature before cooking begins. And if the temperature of the bath goes above 40℉, you get an alert on your phone.

What I didn’t like about the Typhur Sous Vide Station

The Typhur’s size is a double-edged sword. On one hand, a big vessel for the water is entirely necessary for some sous vide cooking. (Don’t believe me? Go ahead and try stuffing a rack of ribs in a six-quart pot.) On the other hand, a 12-quart container that’s 10 inches high and 18 inches wide may be tricky for some people to store when it’s not in use, and it’s almost certainly too big to keep on the countertop at all times. And while features like the double-walled insulation and built-in hooks to hold bags in place are nice, the Typhur’s container is specially designed to work only with its circulator, which makes it a hulking unitasker. Stick sous vide circulators, by comparison, are more convenient and versatile. You can cook with more all purpose containers like this one, which easily pulls double duty as a storage container.

I also didn’t love the proprietary bags, not because they didn’t work, but because I couldn’t effectively reuse them. Typhur’s bags are heavy and expensive at $54 for 40 bags. And they look and feel like they’re multiuse. They have valves built into them for removing air and plastic hooks attached to the side to hold them in place while you’re cooking. The problem was that, when I cooked meat in them, juices stuck to the bags in ways that couldn’t be washed out, even after multiple runs through the dishwasher. None of that is a deal-breaker—you can use whatever bags you want—but I was happier using a standard roll of FoodSaver bags.

Finally, there’s the matter of price. At the time of writing, the Typhur sous vide station is on sale for $1,000, and regularly retails for $1,200. The Joule Turbo, which I tested alongside the Typhur, is just $250, maintains temperature just as well, stores more easily, and comes with a user-friendly app.

Should you get the Typhur Sous Vide Station?

The answer to this comes down to how often you want to cook sous vide. If you love the precision it brings to a protein’s texture and it’s your go-to every time you want to cook salmon, chicken, and especially larger cuts of meat, like shoulder or ribs, the Typhur really is a wonderful machine. Its scheduling feature makes prepping dinner—even if you’re in the office—easy, its interface is downright fun to use, and its well-designed water container heats quickly and controls evaporation.

But if you think of sous vide cooking as more of a fun novelty or as a technique that occasionally makes a perfectly cooked protein easier to pull off, the sous vide station may be too much machine for you. You’d be better served with a less expensive, less bulky stick circulator.