For my first foray, I bought a top sirloin steak from the store before I realized that the Joule app didn’t have a sirloin recipe. Oh well, I figured I’d just fudge it and use the fillet mignon settings. This was a mistake. Sirloin is a much leaner cut, and it takes time for the connective tissue to break down and melt, so it turned out okay, but it was a bit chewy. That was my fault, though.
The next week I bought a proper 1.5-inch filet mignon tenderloin (on sale at Costco, no less) and used the Turbo mode for medium rare (131F / 55C). A cut like that could easily take two hours, but with Turbo, it was ready to be seared in just 50 minutes. I slapped it on a blazing hot cast iron pan for 30 seconds on each side and… it was absolute perfection. Better than nearly every fancy steakhouse steak I’ve ever had. Honestly, I can’t stop thinking about it.
When I made a pair of 1.5-inch-thick chicken breasts using the Turbo mode, I set it to 161 degrees. At one point, the water bath got as high as 175 degrees before dropping down again just in time. It took just 55 minutes, and they turned out tender and juicy, with just a bit of variation in the texture throughout. Without Turbo mode, that cook would have normally taken around 100 minutes.
Now, there are some Turbo caveats. For starters, Turbo mode only works with certain cuts of meat, and these are pretty exclusively tender cuts. They do turn out great, but if you’re wanting to experience the magic of making a cheap cut taste like an expensive one, you’re still going to want to use the slower, non-turbo method. The Breville team has expanded the Turbo recipes in just the last few weeks, but at the time of writing, there are no fish settings, much to my surprise. I asked the team at Breville about this, and they said that fish is surprisingly tricky. For example, farmed salmon in the US cooks differently than farmed salmon in Australia, and wild salmon cooks differently than either of those. There are no Turbo veggie recipes yet, either.
Lastly, Turbo mode currently only works with fresh cuts, not frozen. This is because the temperature differential is just too great, so by the time the core gets up to the target temp, the outside would be overdone. You can sous vide from frozen, but the problem is Breville seems to have removed the non-Turbo recipes where there might have been both, so you’ll be winging it. When I wanted to cook a fillet from frozen, I had to search around until I found the Basic Steak recipe and follow that. Hopefully, Breville adds those recipes back or at least makes Turbo something you can toggle on and off.
That being said, you don’t have to use any of Breville’s recipes at all if you don’t want. You can always follow a recipe you find online and manually set the time and temperature within the app. You can also use Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant to set the water temp with your voice, but frankly, that’s probably more trouble than it’s worth.
Aside from the lack of physical controls, really my only other gripe is the app could be better about helping you find analogs for things. For example, when I searched for mahi mahi in the app, it turned up no results. I had to ask Google for fish that were similar. It suggested halibut, which also wasn’t in the app. Eventually, I got to cod, which there was a Joule recipe for, and which did indeed work extremely well, but it took too much work to find it. There are a few points where instructions could be a bit clearer, too. With regular sous vide cooking, you preheat the bath and then add the food. With the Turbo, you add the food while the water is still cool and let it all heat up together. I did eventually figure that out, but more explicit directions would be helpful.
It’s worth noting that there’s a potential integration coming down the pipe. Breville also makes the Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro ($550), which is arguably the smartest air fryer / toaster oven out there. It, too, has deep app integrations, so it would make sense that the two Breville apps could talk with each other and work together. When speaking with Breville, they talked about the potential of starting a cook with the Joule Turbo and then finishing it in the Joule Air Fryer. Perhaps it could also help coordinating the sides in the oven so they’re all ready at the same time. That all remains to be seen, though, and you shouldn’t buy the Joule Turbo today with the expectation that integration will ever arrive.
Ultimately, the Joule Turbo is terrific, but it also feels like an incremental upgrade from the original. That’s not a bad thing, really, since the original is still one of the best you can buy. If you don’t already have a sous vide, this is an easy rec. It’s compact but powerful, it looks good, and the food it produces is truly delicious. The Turbo feature really is nice, and considering that cook time is often a barrier to entry for people, this faster way to sous vide is very much welcome, and hopefully, more recipes (looking at you, fish) will be added soon. At $250, it’s on the steeper side when it comes to home sous vide devices (you can get very solid ones for under $100), but it’s easily the best sous vide app out there, and it does a lot of hand-holding to walk you through it if you’re new. If you already have the original Joule, you qualify for $75 off the new one.
Overall, it’s very worth your time and conveniently asks less of it.
Photography by Brent Rose for The Verge
Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it — contracts that no one actually reads. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.
To use the Breville Joule Turbo, you must download and install Breville’s app.
When installing and using the app, you agree to:
To pair the Joule Turbo to the app, you must create a Breville account and give the app permission to use Bluetooth.
Total: four mandatory steps to use the Joule Turbo.