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This cooker is the smallest and most powerful model we tested, and it works with less water than most other options. But it lacks physical controls, which may be a dealbreaker for some people.
Breville’s The Joule Turbo Sous Vide outperforms the competition in several ways. It heats water faster than our top pick, has a much smaller body, and works with an app that’s easy to pair, simple to use, and loaded with recipes. Some of those recipes can take advantage of what’s known as delta-T cooking, which can drastically speed up the typically long sous vide cooking process.
But the Joule Turbo costs a lot more than our top pick—$170 more, at this writing. And it’s devoid of physical controls, so it doesn’t work unless you tether it to a phone or tablet via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.
For all of the great things the Joule Turbo has going for it, the lack of buttons is a big enough omission that we can’t recommend it as our top pick. But for people who can overlook that shortcoming, want the best overall performance from a home sous vide circulator, and are willing to pay for it, the Joule Turbo is the obvious choice.
We wish it had physical controls, but at least the app is polished. The Breville+ app (Android, iOS) is the best sous vide app we’ve tested, though it’s not perfect. We particularly like that the Bluetooth functionality makes pairing simple; in our tests, the app recognized our device right away, immediately downloaded and installed a firmware update, and then launched us right into cooking.
It’s also full of vetted recipes that include step-by-step instructions to adjust the cooking temperatures and times to account for the specific cut of meat you’re using—specifically, its thickness and whether it’s thawed or frozen—and your preferences in doneness and texture. The recipes guide you through the cooking process, though you can instead set these parameters manually.
The Joule Turbo uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for communication with the app and switches between the two based on your proximity to the cooker. If you want to share your Joule Turbo with a family member or friend, they can easily control it through the app (as long as they have a Breville account and are logged in).
Turbo mode works well, but just a fraction of the recipes take advantage of it. The Joule Turbo is named after its unique Turbo mode, which uses algorithm-based delta-T cooking to achieve sous vide results much more quickly than standard cookers. Essentially, the app asks you for the thickness and weight of the item you’re cooking and then uses that data to determine how much it should overheat the water bath to reach the desired core temperature as soon as possible.
The result is that you can cook a piece of filet mignon, for example, in as little as 30 minutes. We tested this feature on some filets, one cooked with the Joule Turbo recipe, the other cooked with an original Anova wand for two hours at the same temperature (122 °F). The results surprised us: We actually preferred the Joule Turbo version, which had the same edge-to-edge doneness but retained a more traditional steak texture—more fibrous, less mushy than the portion cooked with Anova for two hours.
The Breville+ app has a growing number of Turbo recipes—52 as of this writing, for everything from salmon and scallops to beef and chicken. But you can’t simply toggle Turbo mode on for other recipes, so if a Breville recipe doesn’t exist for the cut you want to cook, you have to do it the old-fashioned way.
It heats fast, even without Turbo mode. The Joule Turbo’s 1,100 W heating element heats water quickly. In our tests, it brought 4 quarts of water to cooking temperature one minute faster than the Anova Precision Cooker 3.0 (which has the same power rating) and six minutes faster than the 800 W element in the Monoprice Strata Home Sous Vide Immersion Cooker 800W, achieving a heating rate of about 6.8 degrees per minute.
It’s tiny compared with most other sous vide wands. At about 12 inches long and 1.85 inches in diameter by our measurements, the Joule Turbo is a little over 3 inches shorter and half an inch thinner than the Monoprice wand. As a result, it could easily fit in pretty much any utensil drawer, whereas the Monoprice cooker (with its larger head, housing the display and controls) could fit only in our cabinets or deeper drawers.
It can work in shallower water than the competition. Another way the Joule Turbo preserves resources is by requiring less water. Whereas the Monoprice sous vide machine needs to be in at least 4.25 inches of water to operate, the Joule Turbo needs only 1.5 inches.
The Joule Turbo pulls in water through an opening just above the base, heats it, and then spits it out through a rectangular opening that doesn’t have to be submerged. The device also has a magnetic foot that allows it to stick to the bottom of some pots.
We were able to use a Dutch oven for sous vide cooking with the Joule Turbo, a task that would have been difficult with the Monoprice cooker because of the pot’s curved, relatively short walls. The Joule Turbo just stuck right to the bottom, and we were ready to go.
It isn’t the quietest cooker, but it isn’t annoying either. The Joule Turbo is slightly louder than the Monoprice and Anova cookers we’ve tested, but it’s not bothersome. All three are perfectly pleasant-sounding; the Joule Turbo’s sound signature in particular is defined primarily by the white noise of rushing water.
When the water pump outlet isn’t underwater, it gurgles like a fountain backed by a faint whine and registers about 70 dB; when it’s fully submerged, the sound is smoother, and the noise level dips to around 50 dB.
Breville’s short-term support is solid. The Joule Turbo comes with a one-year warranty, which is more or less standard in the industry and matches that of our top pick from Monoprice. Anova is an outlier, with a longer, two-year warranty.
Long-term support is unclear, but Breville seems committed. Our biggest concern regarding the Joule Turbo’s app-only nature has nothing to do with the quality of the app: Rather, it’s the question of what happens to your sous vide machine if Breville stops selling it and supporting it with software updates or simply goes out of business.
That question doesn’t seem to have any easy answers. Breville’s warranty covers the Joule Turbo for just one year, and despite Breville representatives telling us via email that the app has “a 30-year certification to operate in the cloud” (we’re honestly not sure what that means for actual owners), the company doesn’t make any explicit promises of future software support.
