What it's like to use the Anova Nano, a $75 sous vide machine that's designed to cook restaurant-quality meals at home

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You don't have to tell anyone that you didn't, in fact, graduate culinary school if you can keep your dinner guests impressed with all the sous vide cooking you're doing.
The Anova Nano, the long-awaited sub-$100 sous vide machine, will help you create meals that taste like they ought to cost $100 (per serving).
It's smaller and actually sleeker than the previous Anova precision cooker offerings, making this one of the most appealing sous vide devices on the market today.
Right now, the Anova Nano is $25 off as a Black Friday deal on Amazon.

If you don't spill the beans, we won't either. You didn't slave over dinner for hours on end, carefully overseeing each component of the meal to ensure that it didn't go over or wasn't underdone, nor did you poke and prod your proteins with a thermometer (at the risk of losing all those precious juices) to ensure the proper finish. No, you sly dog — you discovered sous vide cooking, and if you're the slyest of them all, you probably discovered the Anova Nano.

While equipping your kitchen with the tools to make a five-star meal may have once been outside your budget, that's no longer the case thanks to the Anova and its newest product, the Anova Nano.

This highly anticipated device was first announced last June, when it was made available for pre-order for home chefs looking to add a bit of French technique into their repertoire. But now, the Anova has been made widely available, and for less than $100, widely accessible, too. In all seriousness, that's probably less than half the amount you'd need to pay for a meal at a restaurant utilizing sous vide techniques.

As its name suggests, the Nano is smaller than its siblings, weighing in at a diminutive 1.6 pounds.

That's still not quite as light as the ChefSteps Joule sous vide stick, but still, it's nearly a pound lighter than the Anova Precision Cooker 4.0. Plus, it's just over a foot tall, which is again, much more manageable than the nearly 15-inch original Anova. This new size not only makes it a bit easier to handle once it's in the pot, but also makes for easier storage. After all, if you're at the point in your cooking career that you're adding not just spatulas and whisks but sous vide machines, you probably already have drawers full of culinary tools and appliances.

Unlike the other Anova units, the Nano is entirely made of plastic, which frankly, doesn't really bother me. It allows for a more streamlined aesthetic (a la the Joule), and of course, cuts down on the weight. Moreover, the Nano features a built-in clamp, which makes it a bit easier to attach to pots and water containers.

The Nano doesn't have the same Wi-Fi capabilities as the most expensive option in the Anova lineup, but honestly, you won't miss it.

You still have access to the Anova app, which includes the same, ever-growing database of recipes and cooking tips, as well as the ability to control your Nano from afar. It's also a very quiet machine — of course, it's not as though other sous vide sticks sound like blenders, but it is worth noting that with the decrease in size, it seems that Anova has also managed to make the Nano even more whisper quiet than before.

If you'd rather cook without your smartphone (rather than risk dropping it into a precisely controlled pot of water), you can control everything on the Nano with its slightly shrunken display. The LED indicators are still just as useful, and you can still increase times and temperatures from the device itself, but because it's gotten a bit smaller, you may find yourself wishing you had slightly more delicate fingers. Or, maybe it's just a good way to get the kids involved in the actual dinner preparation process, rather than just inviting them in for the finished product.

Otherwise, you can use the new and improved Anova Culinary App, which will come with MultiStep and MultiCook features in a future software update. The former allows you to tell the Nano to raise or lower the cooking time and temperature for different parts of your meal, whereas the latter allows you to keep tabs on multiple Anova Precision Cookers at the same time.

In short, if you're looking to introduce some sous vide into your supper, the Anova Nano is certainly a good place to start.