Sunday prep household here, two adults, two kids, currently done with oven trays and a rice cooker and it works fine. I use the circulator for weekend cooking and love it, but I keep circling the idea of running the whole week's proteins through it and I can't decide if that's genius or a hobby inventing chores for itself.
The case for: my oven-tray chicken is fine on Monday and absolute sawdust by Thursday. The case against: the bag situation is already getting silly with just weekend use, the freezer is a bag mountain, and my husband has started calling the circulator "the solution looking for a problem". He's wrong obviously, but I'd like ammunition. People who batch cook this way, is it actually better midweek or does it just feel more organised? Convince me in either direction, I'm easy.
Strongly pro, and your sawdust-by-Thursday problem is the exact problem this solves, so you're closer than you think.
My Sunday routine: big batch of chicken thighs in the bath while I do everything else, bags straight into an ice bath after, then the fridge. Wednesday night those thighs come back like they were cooked that evening, that's the entire sell in one sentence. The bag keeps the juices in through the reheat, which is the part no oven tray can do for you. Weeknight dinners went from cooking to assembly, ten minutes, and I stopped ordering takeout on the nights I was too tired to care.
On the bag mountain: reusable silicone bags handle everything except my long cooks, that complaint mostly retired itself when I switched.
Honest answer from the other half of the church: for weeknight veg, rice, traybake stuff, your oven and pots are already perfect, don't let this board talk you into bagging carrots. Where the bath earns its counter space is proteins you'll reheat, and big weekend cooks you portion out for the month. Half in, half out is a legitimate answer.
The funny thing about this debate is that "cook, chill fast, hold cold, reheat to order" is not a home experiment, it's how a large share of professional kitchens run, we just call it cook-chill and nobody argues about it. So the method is sound, and your husband is outvoted by the entire catering industry.
The part home cooks skip, and the part I'd actually insist on, is the unglamorous middle: get the cooked bags cold quickly in a proper ice bath rather than letting them slouch to room temperature on the counter, date every bag, and keep an honest fridge life instead of a hopeful one. Speed of chilling and labelling are what make Thursday's dinner safe rather than merely convenient; the cooking was never the risky part. The site's meal prep guide has the whole routine end to end, including the chilling and storage times.
Do that and Mike's split is about right: proteins and weekend projects through the bath, and let the oven keep the jobs it was already doing well.
My freezer is currently 40% unlabelled mystery bags and I regret everything except the ribs. Label your bags, that's the post.
