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 the two biggest players left in the home sous vide appliance world, both focus 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 half a 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. 12 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.