We always recommend covering your water bath when you’re cooking sous vide. This helps the water heat faster, slows evaporation so you won’t need to add water during long cooking projects, and prevents things from accidentally falling into the bath. We usually use plastic wrap to cover ours, since we have it on hand in the kitchen and it fits any container. But plastic wrap is single-use, can become less adhesive with exposure to steam, and often bunches or tears when we remove it to check on food midway through cooking.
We’ve seen a number of reusable lids for sous vide cooking and wondered if any were as effective as—or easier to use than—plastic wrap. To find out, we tested five models made by two brands, priced from about $10 to about $25 per lid (all were BPA-free). We focused on lids that were designed specifically to work with either the Joule or the Anova Precision Cooker WI-FI, our top-rated immersion circulators.
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