Sous Vide Tools: how it all began

That was the industry side of things sorted, but what about home cooks? After meeting with the owners of Sous Vide Supreme – one of the original sous vide water ovens designed for home use – Alex realised he had been missing out on a potentially huge market. So nine months after starting the company, he started selling to the public. ‘Up until around two years ago about sixty-five percent of our trade was to professional chefs, but since then it’s completely switched the other way around,’ he says. ‘Now three-quarters of what we sell is to home cooks. I think that’s down to an increased awareness of the method, more and more chefs using it and people seeing it on programmes like MasterChef and Great British Menu. It used to only be used in fine dining restaurants, but now you see it in gastropubs and even places like Starbucks.’

With sous vide equipment selling like never before and more and more home cooks using the technology in their own kitchens, Alex decided to branch out into other areas. But while things like the barbecues – including an incredible Yakitori grill of which only a few hundred are available in the UK – might look unrelated to the Sous Vide Tools name, they’re actually closely intertwined. ‘Everything else we sell on Sous Vide Tools is there as a sort of accessory to sous vide cooking,’ explains Alex. ‘Our barbecues, whether they be the ceramic ones or the yakitori grills, provide the ultimate way to finish off sous vide dishes. Then we’ve looked at other things like the smoking gun, which adds a nice smoked flavour either before or after you sous vide something. In the past year we’ve also started selling equipment we think will become a trend in the future – things like dehydrators, which you can get for around £100 now. We’ve been very lucky as there’s such an increased awareness in food and how we prepare and cook it, so there’s plenty of demand for lots of different products.' And with costs for this high-tech kitchen kit becoming more and more affordable, home cooks are getting their hands on fantastic new equipment all the time.