Nomiku 2.0 lets you cook sous vide through your smartphone

It used to be that the machinery needed to cook sous vide (a technique in which food is placed in a vacuum-sealed bag and cooked in a tightly-controlled low temperature water bath) was big, bulky, and so prohibitively expensive that only restaurant owners and wealthy gastrophiles had access to it. But then a couple years ago, that changed. Suddenly a myriad of compact, affordable sous vide cookers hit the market and brought sous vide within reach of home chefs. And now that these 1.0 versions have been floating around for a while, many of the companies who created them are circling back with new and improved designs.

The latest company to do so is Nomiku. Just two short years after successfully launching its first product on Kickstarter, the company is back with a fresh redesign and a new crowdfunding campaign to get it off the ground.

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Nomiku 2.0 is essentially a smaller, smarter, cheaper, and overall better version of the original — a product that was already one of the best sous-vide cookers on the market. This new version comes with a number of big improvements over the original, but the most obvious is definitely the product’s physical design. Rather than rocking the pseudo-cylindrical form factor, Nomiku 2.o is more oblong and compact. It’s also got a bigger face and temperature dial, which, this time around, is designed to face outward from the pot rather than inward.

But the changes aren’t merely physical either. The new Nomiku boasts a few technological improvements that make it considerably more suer-friendly. Version 2.0 is equipped with Wi-Fi radio that allows it to connect to your home network and communicate with a smartphone or tablet. Not only does this mean you can control it from the comfort of your sofa, it also drastically simplifies the cooking process.

With the older Nomiku (and other first-generation sous vide cookers), you generally had to memorize the correct temperature and cook times for different foods — steak is 57 celsius for two hours, chicken breast is 60 Celsius for about an hour and 40 minutes, and so on. If you didn’t know these things off the top of your head, or were cooking something new, you typically had to hop online to find the proper time/temp settings. Nomiku’s new mobile app fixes this problem, and allows you to enter the ideal settings at the touch of a button. Just specify what food you’re cooking, place it in the water bath, and Nomiku will do the rest.

Whats amazing is that, despite the fact that it’s considerably more advanced than the original, it’s also quite a bit cheaper. If you back the project now on Kickstarter, you can lock one down for about $150 — half the retail price of Nomiku 1.0. The project has already crushed it’s $200K funding goal, and expects to ship to backers as early as March 2015.