SousVide Dash app good for
By far the best of the sous vide apps. Most of the others just have a preset table of times, and wide ranges like 30-60 minutes and little or no correction for different food thicknesses. Size matters in sous vide. This app lets you pick any thickness you want down to the millimeter. Do you prefer rare, medium rare, or something in between? You can pick down to 0.1 degree. The app tells you an exact cooking time and then acts as a timer, with a loud beeping sound when the cooking is done.
Its frustrating; most of the other apps (and information easily found online) have food safety times and/or optimal cook times for tenderness, while SousVide Dash is awesome for having the core-temperature graphs with completely customizable meat types and thicknesses, but doesnt have the safety/tenderness information.
I feel like simply adding this information, with an optional toggle to tack the safety time onto the end of the calculated heat penetration time would make this app truly great, and eliminate the need for other tables/apps/resources.
Oh, and maybe a built-in ruler to measure meat thickness to, but of course thats super minor.
The new SousVide Dash version 2.0 is a significant contribution to the science of sous vide cooking. Now you can calculate the time necessary to reach the desired temperature irrespective of pasteurization, OR the time required to pasteurize the surface (assuming the interior of the meat is still sterile), OR the time required to pasteurize all the way to the core, e.g, for hamburgers, etc.
Curves are plotted showing the surface temperature, core temperature, and the log reduction of various pathogens (E. Coli, Listeria, and Salmonella, depending on the kind of food) vs. time.
Suggested temperatures are provided for various meats, including beef, chicken (white and dark), duck, pork, lamb, eggs (fast and slow), lean and fatty fish, scallops, shrimp, clams, oysters, and mussels. No turkey, and no vegetables (yet). It would be nice if users could add their own favorite foods and default temperatures.
A number of different sous vide water baths are included, so that you dont have to make all of the complicated thermal diffusivity calculations (or guess).
Ive encouraged the author to add another feature (or another app) to calculate chilling times for sous vide cook/chill, both in an ice bath and with a chilled alcohol bath. It will probably need to be a separate app, because of the fact that the ice bath is not generally stirred.
The one thing that is still sorely lacking is the ability to compute the time from a frozen state, but because of the latent heat required to change ice into water, or more exactly, frozen meat into thawed meat, this is MUCH more complex. I may have to discipline myself to thaw a steak or whatever in the refrigerator a day ahead of time, in order to avoid this problem.
If I use this app for nothing else, being able to cook my "perfect" eggs in 19 rather than 60 minutes has made it an indispensable item in my kitchen.
Very easy to use and customize with intuitive interface.
This app will take your sous vide cooking to another level. When I first got into sous vide I was excited to try the "perfect" egg only to be disappointed by the runny whites. This app allows you to cook a perfect egg with a custardy yolk and a set white. These are the eggs I was promised! And thats only one small aspect of what this app can do. Simply amazing!
I gave the previous version the six-star review below. Ill leave it for reference.
Everything I wrote is still true and it keeps getting better. The reviews of the early versions that say it needs pathogens should be updated. Or you should just ignore them. Its the king of the sous vide apps.
-------
Does everything I want in a sous vide app. Computes time and temperature and pasteurization for all kinds of foods of all different shapes and sizes. Change it by a millimeter or a degree and it recalculates in a second or two. It shows you what is going to happen all through the cooking process on a little graph.
Just enter your food. Look at the time and temperature it says, and go. Change the temperature if you want, but the suggestions it makes are usually pretty good. Ive done beef and chicken and salmon and the suggestions were right on. Also, be sure you set it for your machine. You do that once and then forget about it. It gives warnings if you try to do something crazy like six hours in the danger zone without pasteurizing. There is some advanced math and physics greek letter stuff at the bottom that the nerds probably like. Its beyond me but its easy to ignore. It still tells you exactly how to cook sous vide. Im glad it does, because I could never do that math myself!
The sixth star is for listening to users. They are on egullet and when people ask for new features they add them. Usually its done in a week. Things like fahrenheit degrees for the US and pasteurization time. There are three or four more I cant think of right now. Ive never seen another app do that. They usually just ignore the bad reviews and do what they want.
Some bad moments
Im just getting started with sous vide cooking, and was looking for some good sous vide cooking apps to get me started. Since this app was $5 and looked like it had all the necessary cooking times for various meats that Id typically put in the sous vide cooker, I trout that this would be quite the bargain, but boy was I wrong.
Overall, this app is a calculator app to tell you what the minimum time it would take for your meat to achieve the desired internal temperature. However, it doesnt take some things into consideration, like food safety. If you want a medium rare steak at 135 degrees, the minimum safe time that it has to hold at that temperature is around one hour and 45 minutes. If you cook it for less, you have a good chance of having food poisoning. This app tells you that the time to cook that same piece of meat is only about 35 minutes. Which is technically correct, to get the internal temp up, but not correct when it comes to food safety.
Also this app does not take into consideration that part of the magic of sous vide is low and slow cooking. To make a hanger steak taste like filet is the fact that you leave the lower quality steak in for ten hours. This tenderizes the steak and makes it so delicious. Sous vide is not a microwave! This app would be much more valuable if the developers would factor the type of meat and display the recommended time to tenderize that particular type of meat.
No time allowances or temps for long term meats such as Brisket and short ribs what gives?
