Cinder Grill Review: Sous-vide's even geekier rival

The Cinder grill really wants you to enjoy the perfect steak, and it doesn't want you to have a headache making it. As a greedy geek with a counter crammed full of kitchen gadgets and a taste for meat, that certainly appealed, as did Cinder's promise of sous-vide style cooking without the hassle of preheating water baths and bagging up your meals. Question is, at 2-3 times the price you'd pay for an entry-level sous-vide machine, does this grill do enough to justify its existence?

Cinder is not a small appliance. At 13 x 17 x 7 inches it's larger than most sandwich toasters; with plenty of metal in the construction it's heavy too, to the point where you're unlikely to want to move it once you've found a space for it. To open the lid fully you'll need an 18-inch gap between the counter and any wall cabinets above it: in my case, that meant moving it to another spot since the cabinets were just too low.

With the exception of a slightly wobbly control knob on the fascia, I can't knock Cinder's build. Open the top and you find the two non-stick plates, each measuring 10 x 9 inches. They can be removed with a pair of corresponding latches, though since they're filled with tiny heating elements you can't put them in the dishwasher. Indeed, the only part that supports that is the drip tray.

That gathers any juices or run-off from a "moat" that runs the periphery of the lower grill plate. It's flat rather than angled like a George Foreman grill, which Cinder says means you can even fry eggs on it. Still, forget sauces. I also found that most of the liquid that emerged during cooking either stayed pooled on the lower plate or in the moat, never actually making it to the drip tray itself.

You can use Cinder from the front-panel controls entirely, if you prefer. The small monochrome display shows current plate temperature and target temperature, adjusted with the dial to the right. There's no clock or timer, however, so you'll need to keep an eye on that yourself.

Alternately, there's the Cinder app. Currently that's available for iOS and it's a fairly uninspiring design. It covers the basics, like setting the temperature, monitoring what state the grill is in, and choosing from a small selection of recipes. Unfortunately, where sous-vide star Joule, for example, has a large database of potential meals together with guide videos and web links, Cinder's version is somewhat more limited.

Meats are the most well catered-for, with most typical cuts of steak catered for. There are a few vegetables, along with a handful of fish. Each usually has a choice of temperatures organized by the final result: whether you want a rare or medium rib-eye, for instance, or flaky salmon versus "buttery soft". If you create a free Cinder account you can save your own presets too, though you're on your own when it comes to picking the right temperature.

Cinder uses a combination of those recipe presets with the thickness of what you actually put between the grill plates, relying on sensors in the lid to figure the latter out. At that point it gives an estimate of how long you'll have to wait. With a pair of inch-thick pork chops, for instance, I was warned it would take 65 minutes to get to medium-rare. Hit "start" and the grill begins heating up.

It's not terribly communicative while the cooking actually happens. If you've used the app to control Cinder, the grill's own display only says "Remote Control" rather than an indication of time or temperature. Still more annoying, the "time's up" alarm is on your smartphone only: while the grill does have a speaker, it won't make a peep if the app was used.

I love a good pork chop, but my track record with traditional pan-frying is mediocre. It's all too easy to skate through of the narrow sweet-spot where the meat is just cooked but hasn't quite started to dry out. My best DIY chops have been in a sous-vide, then finished off in a hot pan to give that Malliard reaction browning.

I was curious, therefore, to see if Cinder could compete. After all, the company says that the grill borrows some sous-vide principles like precision heating and a fairly sealed cooking compartment, but without messing with vacuum sealing bags or a big container of water. So, I brushed a couple of pork chops with oil, slapped them between Cinder's plates, and picked medium-rare in the app.

Turns out, it's worth keeping an eye on the time. After about 45 minutes, the app was telling me it would take another 14 more before the pork was ready. Seconds later, I got a notification saying it was done. Like with sous-vide, the idea is that the precisely controlled heating means even if you leave the meat in there for an hour or two, it won't be spoiled. Still, I was hungry, so instead I whipped the two chops out, wiped the plates down with paper towels, and turned on sear mode.

As sous-vide cooks have discovered, meat doesn't generally look too appealing when it's first out. Since the temperature is low, there's no browning: sure enough, the pork was an uninspiring grey. Cinder gets around that with a 450 degree Fahrenheit mode it calls sear, which basically cranks the grill up to its max so you can get your steaks crispy.

Going from the 140 degrees the Cinder app had used for the cook, to the 450 degrees searing required, took around a second per degree. After waiting five minutes, I put the two pieces of meat back within the plates and watched a 45 second countdown on the grill's display. A buzzer sounds at that point, but Cinder keeps searing just in case you want a deeper brown. Bear in mind you won't get the picturesque griddle lines, though Cinder says it's working on ridged plates which will snap in instead; they're due later in the year.

Even without the lines, the resulting chop looked decent, though probably could've done with another 5-10 seconds building up a crust. Cutting in, meanwhile, it looked closer to medium than medium-rare. The pork was still reasonably juicy, though it lacked the fluffiness of its sous-vide counterpart. Much better than doing it all in a regular pan, however.

In the time that followed I tried vegetables, other steaks, and even fried eggs. Some work better with the grill lid open rather than closed; none overshot their estimated cook time, though food being ready sooner than expected proved to be an occupational hazard.

Overall, I feel like the sous-vide comparison is a little misplaced. Cinder is a very tightly controlled grill pan which, with some familiarization, proved capable of very consistent, near foolproof meat cooking. Indeed, the closest similarity to the water-bath method is that you need to tinker with the temperature settings to find your own personal sweet-spot.

If part of Cinder's charm is doing without the water bath of sous-vide, then it has to be said its downside is cleaning up. The two grill plates are the easiest: you can wait until they cook down, pop them free, and give them a quick scrub, but I found a non-stick-friendly sponge was enough to get rid of any burnt-on leftovers. Unfortunately, the moat around the edge proved a little trickier, especially at the back by the hinge where it's easy to catch a finger on a still-hot plate. Instead, you have to wait until everything has cooled down, at which point the drippings have congealed and tend to smear.

The other annoyance is trying to clean the inside of the lid. It's a trap for condensation and grease spatters which have a tendency to drip down and onto the counter top behind the hinge. Again, while the grill plate itself is removable the lid as a whole is not. Best make sure you have plenty of paper towels on-hand.