Living all my life in the southern United States, I grew up eating my mother’s fried chicken, which is so often considered a staple of southern cooking. My mother’s chicken was great – juicy, tender, well-done, and tasty. I didn’t quite inherit my mother’s skills, and I was never able to produce fried chicken as good as hers. I often ended up burning the breading because I was worried the chicken would be undercooked. I always felt that cooking the chicken first would result in a better frying result, but I wasn’t sure how to “pre-cook” it for best results. Instead of finding some new-age type of cooking method, I found an old method that’s just what I needed. Aicok offered The Gadgeteer the perfect tool for my dilemma – their Sous Vide Cooker.
What is it?
What is sous vide? It sounds fancy and difficult. In French, sous vide means “under vacuum”. Sous vide cooking, at least in a home kitchen, doesn’t actually involve a vacuum. It does require food to be in a sealed bag, which floats in a heated water bath. The heated water cooks the food to a specified degree of doneness at a set temperature point. Because the water is heated directly, it’s easier to reach and maintain a steady temperature than it is in an oven or on a cooktop, where the temperature can experience wide swings as it tries to heat the air in the oven or transfer heat inefficiently through a metal pot on the stovetop.
Hardware specs
What’s in the box?
- Sous vide cooker
- Manual with some cooking instructions
- Warranty card
Design and features
The cooker looks a bit like a short, stocky walking stick. The metal post is submerged in the water bath, and the holes you see along the length, plus the holes in the bottom…
… allow the water to flow in for heating and then out to circulate through the bath.
The display has a touchscreen with a power button and a settings selection button. The dial on the front under the display is used for adjusting temperatures, delay time, and cooking time. The machine defaults to displaying temperature in Celsius, but you can switch it easily to Fahrenheit if desired.
The back of the Aicok has a big clip to attach it to the side of the cooking vessel. The clip is lined with silicone to prevent scratching your cookware.
Setup
To cook, you’ll need a pot that’s 7.5″ or deeper and holds between 3 – 20 liters. You can actually purchase special plastic pans designed for sous vide cooking, some with lids custom-designed to accommodate a particular brand of cooker. I just used my Le Creuset stockpot. I clipped the sous vide cooker to the side of the pot using the clip on the back of the Aicok, then I filled the pot with room temperature water, making sure I had it filled up to the max fill line. (You’ll see an image below with an E04 error message I got before I made sure I had the right amount of water in my pot.)
You can set the cooking temperature between 32°F and 203°F and the cooking time from 1 minute to 99 hours. You use the delay-time function to hold the food and water bath at room temperature before the bath starts heating. This delay allows you to have the food just finishing cooking when you get home. I didn’t use this delay function. I will be cooking meat almost exclusively with the Aicok, and I will not leave meat at room temperature very long before cooking it.
The point of sous vide cooking is to hold food at a perfect temperature for long enough to get it cooked thoroughly. Different meats need to reach different temperatures and be held there for differing amounts of time to be cooked thoroughly. The nice thing about sous vide is that your food will be held at that temperature until you are ready to use it, so there are no worries if it is held a few minutes or even an hour at that temperature. The food won’t cook anymore with additional time.
You put the food in a closed plastic bag. Even a standard zipper-type bag will work, though you could vacuum seal it if you have a vacuum food -saver machine. You need the closed bag to hold in the food’s own juices to prevent it from drying out as it cooks, but you need to be sure the bag is securely closed so no water gets in from the bath. Meat boiled in water is far different from meat cooked in its own juice.
I bought a sous vide cookbook for ideas for cooking various foods, but I really most want the cooker for chicken. When it’s cooked too long with traditional methods, chicken can get dry and tough. I want to use the sous vide to get the chicken thoroughly done, so all I need to do is just brown it or bread-and-fry.
You can marinate meat before cooking it, but you should place only the meat in the plastic bag. Squeeze out all the air from the bag that you can, then zip it up.
I set the Aicok to cook the chicken at 144 degrees for four hours. I checked the bath temperature periodically during the cooking time. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anything that could monitor and record temperature continually, so I just checked it with a candy thermometer. Every time I checked, it was within a degree of my set point.
I chunked up whole, boneless chicken breasts (just over a pound in weight) before placing them in a gallon-sized zipper bag. When the Aicok beeped to let me know it had reached temperature, I put the bag in the stockpot and left it. I was a bit concerned that the meat didn’t submerge completely in the water bath. In the above image, you’ll see the chicken has started to cook just a bit. I left it alone for four hours, other than quickly checking the bath temperature periodically. The Aicok beeped again to signal the end of the cooking time, then it turned itself off.
Performance
This is how the chicken looked after four hours in the sous vide bath. The amber liquid cooked out of the chicken. You can see the meat is very pale and a bit unappetizing in appearance, but I plan to fry it up before eating.
I took out a piece and cut it to check the degree of doneness. The chicken was thoroughly cooked and very moist and tender.
I dredged the chicken in some flour and herbs and spices and fried it. It took no time to fry – just long enough to brown the flour coating. The fried chicken was still moist and tender and completely done inside, and it was beautifully browned outside. It was perfect fried chicken!
My entire family agreed it was the best fried chicken we had made at home, and we all agreed we shouldn’t make anything with chicken without first pre-cooking it in the Aicok sous vide. This moist chicken works equally well in a stir-fry, and it’s great quickly sautéed in a pan or quickly browned under the broiler. I haven’t tried it with other meats yet, but pork chops will be my next venture.
I had originally thought that a sous vide cooker would be perfect for preparing steaks for grilling, but it won’t work for my family. I thought I’d be able to put my steak in first to cook for a while, then put my daughter’s in for a while, then finally my husband’s for just a short while before throwing them on the grill. That’s not how sous vide cooking works, though. A rare steak would need one temperature, a medium rare another temperature, and a medium-medium well would need a third temperature. Steaks aren’t meant to be for us, but it will make our other meals much easier and tastier.
What I like
The Aicok SV-8001 sous vide cooks meat perfectly while leaving it tender and juicy, so it’s ready for just a quick searing or quick breading and frying.
What needs to be improved
The Aicok SV-8001 sous vide cooker works great, I can’t think of anything I would change. I do wish the manual had more guidance for cooking foods. The online manual (the only type I ever use) doesn’t even have time/temp information for chicken.
Final thoughts
Sous vide cooking is a great, relatively hands-free method of pre-cooking meats (or vegetables) for use in recipes. It takes a while to actually cook in the sous vide, but it really is set-it-and-forget-it cooking. If you aren’t home to start the cooker a few hours before you’re ready to cook dinner, you can cook the food in the Aicok the night before while you’re reading or watching TV then throw it in the fridge until you’re ready to cook the next day.
Price: $79.88
Where to buy: Amazon.
Source: The sample of this product was provided by Aicok.
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The trick to cooking steaks with a sous-vide system is in the finishing. Like your chicken, they don’t look too good when you remove them from the bag after cooking, so you need sear them quickly before serving. So, if you’re cooking several steaks, set the water to the temperature of the least cooked one you need. Once they reach temperature, remove from the bag, dry, season and sear. The longer you sear it for, the more done it will be, so you can easily accommodate everyone’s tastes.
I find this useful if I have a lot of people coming round, or am doing a lot of other things in the kitchen. I can set the steaks into the water and forget about them until I need them, and I much reduce, if not eliminate completely the chances of over-cooking them.
The system is also very good for veggies.
I have a sous-vide machine very similar to yours. I use a big cooler (25 l, 5 gallon) instead of a pot. The advantage of course is that the insulation keeps the temperature more even and saves power, since the thermostat doesn’t have to heat the water as much. I love it and cook lots of different meat in it.
I own this exact cooker – well, the European 220v version. You do not want your food to float, you should either weight it or put something over it to keep it submerged. The idea behind sous vide is even heat over the entire surface of the food, so it needs to all be under water. Also, if you do a vacuum or water displacement, you will find most food does sink – the air will hold it out of the water otherwise. And food parts (especially chicken) held out of the water are breeding grounds for bacteria and salmonella.
The only thing about the Aicok cooker I don’t particularly like is the clamp. I wish it were removable, as there are some places where it just doesn’t quite fit properly. A removable clamp like the Annova is a better design.
Hi Matt,
My name is Ryan, and I actually own two of these Aicok sous vide cookers. I agree with you about the clamp. I’ve never had a need to remove it, but it is the one major flaw of this brand. It’s now the day after Christmas in 2023, and I don’t think Aicok is even in business anymore. However, as I was saying, the one major flaw is that the clamp actually ends up breaking in the center pivot point where the spring is located. Over time, the repeated heating and cooling, heating and cooling eventually makes plastics more brittle, and since there’s a decent amount of force exerted by the spring on the clamp’s pivot point, once that plastic starts to become brittle, it inevitably breaks at this point. While technically you could still use the cooker, I don’t see how you’d keep it anchored in place without the clamp. As I said, I have two of these, and both of them have a broken clamp, so while the cooker technically still works, meaning I can plug them in, turn them on, and set them to start heating the water, I can’t really see how I could use them because I have no way to clamp them to the side of the cooking vessel without a working clamp. The thing just wants to bob around in the water, making it impossible to keep the water ports submerged, thus rendering it useless for cooking. Anyway, that’s my two cents. Hope you had a Merry Christmas.
I just bought this product and the cook time is not working. Also, the beep is not loud at all. The instruction manual is not very good, as well.
Kind of disappointed.
I can’t even get mine to turn on. Very disappointed!
The manual is useless and although it is set it did not start heating the water. Ugh! Very disappointed.
Don’t waste your money on a Aicok Sous Vide unit. I’ve had three of them. The first two failed within the first thirty days, so at least I was able to return them to Amazon for replacement. The third one failed at four months, so I’m unable to return it. One might think the good news is that it has a two year warranty, right? NOPE! The warranty is useless. There is absolutely no way whatsoever to even file a warranty claim, and NO phone number on the Aicok company web site unless you want to call China. There’s no information on their web site as to what the warranty even covers; just a claim that it has one. The only thing is an email address, which states “Please get in touch about any issues you’re having, and we’ll TRY OUR BEST to respond with 24 hours.” So, my third one now won’t hold a temperature anywhere near the temperature I set it it. I can set it at 129 degrees F, and within 20 minutes the water temperature climbs to over 200 degrees F, bounces around between that and 211 degrees F for several minutes, and then eventually throws up the oh so frequent E02 error message before failing. I sent Aicok an email explaining this, and they requested that I send them a video of the unit doing it. WHAT?!!! Well I made a video, and since I couldn’t attach a video in the email because the file size is too big, I posted it on youtube, and provided them with the link. 24 hours later they responded saying they’d be willing to refund a PORTION of my purchase price? WHAT?!!! This is the third unit that’s failed on me, I’ve only had it for four months, it’s supposed to have a two year warranty, and they’re only offering to give me SOME of my money back? Absolutely ridiculous! I responded by saying I’d like them to replace the unit, (which I don’t know why since there’s been a 100% failure rate) or refund the entire amount, but after going back and forth for a week now, I’ve yet to hear back from them. This company sells several different kitchen appliances, and if I were you, I’d steer clear of every one of them. It’s cheap useless junk that’s doomed to fail, with absolutely NO REAL warranty to speak of, and the worst customer service I’ve ever dealt with. The Aicok company is a scam.
Thank you for that warning. I have a few Aicok products and none have failed, however after hearing how bad the customet service was with you, I will not buy another of their products.
Surely Amazon have a duty to deal with this as the seller? I would sue Amazon if i were you.
Hi, I have a couple of questions. 1. How wide does the clip open? Can you use it on a cooler? 2. What is the diameter of the shaft that goes in water? Wondering what container it will work with. 3. Do you have to set a time to cook, or can you just set a temp and it will run? I would hate to have to use the timer, esp. the weird delay timer, every time I cook.
Thanks!
As the article says -you can set the timer from 1 minute to 99 hours so, for example, if you want to it ready for 8 pm, with 4 hours cooking, you can set it at 8 a.m. for 12 hours or 4 p.m. for 4 hours (as long as whatever is cooking needs less than 4 hours). The extra cooking time doesn’t overcook the item.
It will work with any container, as long as it is deep enough to hold enough water without the bottom of the circulator touching the base of the container.
A metal container will pass heat out to the kitchen more readily, so a ceramic or plastic container would be better. You can also cover the container to keep heat in (but don’t cover the device) – some people use a layer of ping-pong balls floating on the water to both insulate and reduce evaporation, there are other methods just check out ebay/Amazon for more expensive ‘sousvide balls’.
My sous vide Model SV800-1 just packed up after 2 years and its not that I use it that often. I kept getting the error message E01, kept trying over and over but no luck. Its made in China so there is no sense in trying to get in touch….which I have tried. There is no troubleshooting instructions on the internet or if there is, I can’t find them plus the manual it comes with is useless