Recipe: Sous Vide Chicken Thighs in Sticky BBQ Sauce (2024)

Sous vide cooking, once the preserve of restaurants and chefs with exorbitantly expensive equipment, has been in the reach of the keen home cook for a few years now with a number of companies producing sous vide water ovens for a few hundred pounds. For those with shallower pockets, and some knowledge of electronics, it is perfectly possible to use a temperature probe and thermostat to turn a slow cooker into a sous vide. I asked Ed to Macgyver me one – Maplin and Screwfix would have provided all the bits but we never got round to it.

A more elegant solution comes in the form of the Codlo, which converts your analogue slow or rice cooker into a sous vide. You simplydunk the temperature probe into a slow cooker full of water, plug the cooker into the Codlo, then the Codlo into an electric socket. Set the temperature and cooking time and away you go. The Codlo turns the power on andoff to keep the water at aset temperature. The device costs £119, so considerably cheaper than a traditional sous vide, and importantly for us is considerably smaller, fitting into the slow cooker when not in use, effectively not taking up any space,as well as being British made. The Codlo is a winner on all accounts.

The Codlo is both attractive (available in red, green and black) and easy and intuitiveto use, simply plug in and go. The display works on a traffic light system – red for stop (whilst heating), yellow for cooking, and green once done. I usually fill the slow cooker with tap hot water, pour in half a kettle of boiling water and swish it around, then leave it to come to temperature which takes about 15 – 30 minutes.

Aslow cooker is smaller then the average sous videmachine so there is usually a 5C drop in temperature when you add the food, but the water soon comes back to temperature – although speeds will depend on the power of the slow cooker – ours is about 10 years old and fairly low wattage and is admittedly quite slow.

Codlo Technical Specs

• 2.4″ tri-colour wide-angled LCD display
• Enhanced temperature stability with the adaptive algorithm
• Traffic light progress bar indicator
• Compatible with manual/analogue switch cookers up to 1kW for all regions
• Available in 110V-120V and 220V-240V versions for UK, European, Australian, New Zealand and US-style plugs
• Temperature resolution: 0.1°C / 0.1°F
• Temperature setting range: 20°C-90°C / 68°F-194°F
• Temperature stability (once settled): ±0.2°C / ±0.4°F
• Timer setting range: 1 min to 99 hours
• Timer resolution: 1 min

I am very impressed with the device and the ease and accessibility of use – it has a far smaller footprint then a sous vide, and is considerably lighter (I can’t lift a full sous vide). This means I use it on a regular basisand sous vide has become a regular way of cooking. the only disadvantage is you cannot cook as much food as you would in a regular sous vide (although as Kavey suggests you could wire it up to a tea urn) but that is not a problem for most people.

If you are interesting in sous vide cooking, have a cheap and cheerful low cooker then the Codlo does everything it promises and is a great entry into the market. Get one here.

• Codlo review for Kavey Eats

Check out my chicken thigh recipe here and below! Or try this recipe with my chicken teriyaki sauce!

We received a Codlo sous vide to review. All opinions our own.