Sous Vide preheat set to 212 F but temp never gets there.

So what do you do if the App is calling for a Sous Vide Temp of 212 and your Oven never gets there to finish the cook. I finally got tired of waiting for something that wasnt going to happen and changed the temp to 210 f and it continued on. So why will it not reach the 212 that was asked for is it because I reached 100% humidity and it just wont go higher?
Mike

M, consider that 212F is the boiling point at sea level and your wet bulb thermometer can’t function correctly there. That’s the temperature where water changes from a liquid to a gas, called steam. As you discovered you can’t quite attain it because the cooling steam in the oven cavity absorbs a huge quantity of energy.

You made the only possible recipe adjustment.

Pardon my culinary curiosity, what SV cooking requires 212F?

How do you monitor humidity at 100%? That level is all that can be theoretically attained.
101% is impossible.

Steam ovens usually register steam levels at a percentage of the possible level at a temperature. I own another oven brand, thus i am not familiar with your Anova’s system.

Actually there are quite a few Recipes that call this out in the Anova recipe Database. This one in particular was for the steaming step in the Bagel Recipe.
Anova Precision® Oven Recipes | Everything Bagels (anovaculinary.com)

Since this was my first time using the APO I tried to stick to the recipe. When I finaly came to the conclusion that I did I reduced the temp and the oven carried on as it should. I made a mental note that if I see another one that calls for 212 F I will reduce a couple degrees.
Regards,
Mike

As usual chatnoir is correct that it’s an altitude thing. I am in the Interior region of British Columbia, Canada at about 345 meters (1,132 feet) altitude and my APO will get up to 210F maximum in SV mode. It takes a long time to get there and sometimes won’t quite make it past 209.5. (It’s a crazy world these days, perhaps the altitude is fluctuating!) However, as long as the oven is NOT in SV mode (use the setting “SV Off”) then it will get right up to 212F fairly quickly with minimal temperature fluctuation. I have read details on how SV mode differs from non-SV mode in the Anova oven, but I don’t completely understand it - and thankfully don’t need to! Like chat, I might also wonder what item(s) need SV mode at 212F? However, I can attest to several Anova app recipes that use 212F in non-SV mode, with 100% steam. The one I use the most is for pasta and it works beautifully. I think if you test your oven to see the highest temperature it will reach at your altitude, with SV mode “on”, then you would be able to adjust any recipe temperatures as needed (the solution you mentioned already). And being mindful of whether you actually need the SV setting “on” or not might help too. Based on my experience, having SV “off” works fine for anything I’ve needed at 212F. I used to mostly just cook in my kitchen, but now that I have an Anova Oven I have to play at being a physicist too, prompting not-so-fond memories of that being my worst subject in school!

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Hi Happy, if your home isn’t floating on one of BC’s beautiful interior lakes your altitude won’t be fluctuating enough to matter. Daily changes in atmospheric pressure could make a slight boiling point temperature change, but probably too little to notice.

I haven’t looked at an Anova recipe in several years as in the past i found many of them to be inaccurate if not just plain wrong. When i see a SV recipe’s ingredient list with the protein amount listed by weight i stop right there.

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212 is boiling. Why would you want to Sous Vide at boiling?
Ha. Nevermind. Now I see it is the oven not the Sous Vide unit. I wish I wouldn’t get all these oven posts and just get the Sous Vide posts.

Ya talking Bulb temp not air temp. You can tell what topic you are looking at in the title where it is highlighted Anova Precision Oven.
Regards,
Mike