SousVide Dash App Reviews

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.

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.

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.

No time allowances or temps for long term meats such as Brisket and short ribs what gives?

This is not a tool to teach someone how to cook sous vide. It works great if you know how to use it. It is a method to help you know when a protein is done from several perspectives (reaching temp, pasteurize surface or core). It is flexible enough to allow you to change starting and cooking temp but the defaults are excellent and I find myself using them more often than not. As far as "tenderizing" tough proteins, there is no simple exact science for that (collagen breakdown, age and breed of animal, its diet...) and what one might view as a tender short rib of beef another might view as chewy or mush. SVD should not be faulted for not including these types of cuts and cooking methods in its repertoire. All in all this is a fantastic tool that I use several times a week.

Great app for commercial or home kitchen. Helps with planning and making sure that food temperatures are spot on and consistent. Well worth the price - GREAT value and really great info! You can create and save custom settings and even send the results up to the web. Its even kind of fun to use - did you know you can actually cook and pasteurize a 1.5" thick chicken thigh/leg at 133.0 f by cooking for almost 5 hours! ? Just saying. I have never gone below 140f but hey this app will figure out the time needed to cook and even to chill.

Easy to use. No more estimating between charts that dont quite fit the task at hand. Love it still.

This hasnt been updated to accommodate the longer screen size for iPhone 5. It also crashes sometimes after you setup properly and when you leave the setup menu it will force quit and crash out. Needs a update for that.

wish it had a more complete selection. but assuming the info is accurate, a pretty neat app.

LOVE this app. We travel for work and eat paleo low-carb. SousVide Dash and my SousVide Supreme make it easy to stay on program. I freeze meat for 14 days (USDA says it is then safe to eat raw) then cook to pasturized core at our preferred temp as directed by app. Quick chill and refreeze before chucking enough meat in the cooler for a few days trip. Because its pasturized it can stand a little bit of temperature abuse in the cooler and remain safe. Weve been doing this for over a year now without any ill effects. We often eat meat without reheating. If Im concerned there has been a bit too much temp abuse we can reheat in a microwave if I have access or put pkg in a hotel room sink and cover with water heated in coffee maker.

Regarding my previous post and the inability to select the correct thickness and the temperature, the problems are these: The app attempts to predict the thickness of the food based on what you tell it the food is. Selecting a salmon filet limits the maximum thickness to 1-3/16in. Thats nuts. In the Pacific Northwest we have BIG salmon. Why limit the thickness to what the author of the app thinks it might be? Its as though the author is trying to argue with reality. Thats the road to madness! :) Also, my mistake, the final temperature can be overridden if you select final core temperature and then "Allow full temperature range." I retract my previous comment and apologize to the developer. User error. PEBKAC. But I still remain puzzled. The Modernist Cuisine at Home has a recipe that suggests that salmon should be cooked at 115F for perhaps 30 minutes. This app predicts that the to cook this piece of salmon should be....wait for it.... 1 hour 55 minutes (and 31 seconds). Huh? I used a Vernier thermocouple sensor with a type K hypodermic probe, recording the data with a Labquest 2, and carefully placed at the thermocouple tip at the core of the salmon. The core temperature equalled the water temperature after 30 minutes as predicted by Modernist Cuisine. The salmon was superb just cooked as Modernist Cuisine at Homes recipe suggested, incidentally. No trace of being undercooked. No trace of being overcooked. Sous vide is the way to go. But Im therefore puzzled as to the disparity in the cooking times? 30 minutes versus two hours? Somethings not right. This time, I dont think its me.

First, the user interface for this app is basic, at best. It just has two modes, setup and run. Im not really sure the run mode is useful, as I can think of better uses for an iPad then hours as a cooking timer. Next, there is a problem with this program. If your food is frozen at the start you are out of luck. The lowest starting temp allowed is 32F. Duh.. Maybe I want to start with frozen fish. I guess not. Anyway, this program is rough and not all the thought out. Its helpful, but doesnt a whole lot more than a basic cooking chart found in every Sous Vide book.

From a scientific point of view this app seems to be one of the better ones out there. No surprise that PolyScience uses a copy of this instead of writing their own. This one version is better as I have a Nomiku. One suggestion though: Rather than having to set everything up from scratch each time you use the app it would be far more friendly for you to be able to save basic combinations so that you can quickly recall them or edit then after youve cooked them and want to tweak. Obviously not every setting can be saved as thickness may change each time you cook. But the majority of settings can be saved and recalled. This should be done in iCloud and synced between devices. Other than the above, this app is one of the better ones out there so highly recommended for all levels of sous vide chef.

I NEVER review apps. Realizing that this app doesnt have enough reviews, I wanted to show some love. As a scientist, I really enjoy every component of this app! Using the usual time and temperature chart was simply too conservative and frankly, not comprehensive. Few tweaks: having the option to save particular setup & ability to input freezer temperature would be ideal. Other than that, Im in love with this!

Please change the starting temperature spread to extend down to freezer temperatures. Without that, what otherwise could be a supreme app, is just ok. Update a few months later: no fix for temperature setting to include freezer temperatures. You dont listen to your customers, do you?

I am a novice at home sous vide cooking. The app is pretty much self explanatory and gives useful information. Im a bit perplexed as to why frozen food cannot be the starting point in calculating cooking times as that would be very useful. Seems the physics would be pretty much the same so just knowing freezer temp is all that is missing. Easy enough to measure that but the app will only accept temps as low as 0C/32F so cannot get calculation for frozen food. Too bad.