Hello, everybody, and welcome to a brand new series on heritage radio network called the culinary call sheet where we give a peek into the back kitchen of culinary media. I'm your host, April Jones,

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The whole lifecycle of food would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China and the United States if it were a country,

you know, in the age of COVID, where a lot of those institutional processors did grind to a halt and a lot of farms had to dump milk in Pennsylvania. Even while supermarket cases were bare. The organic market stayed strong.

They source all these ingredients. They do all of this work. And then they just boil it for a few minutes and then they throw it away. Tune in

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Hello, and welcome to cooking issues. This is Dave Arnold host of cooking dishes coming to you live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. joined as usual Anastasia hammer Lopez in Stamford, Connecticut. Yeah, we got John who's still in line, right? Yep. Hello. Hey, and we got Matt in his Rhode Island hidey hole booth. How you doing? Doing great. Yeah, but today, we have on not someone who is pitching a book or anything like this. We have on because of many, many requests. We have. You might know him as Seattle at Seattle Food geek. Scott Hyman dinger from a nova culinary. How're you doing?

Very nice to be here this morning. Yeah.

So what first of all, Seattle, a town of many, many food geeks? How did you get Seattle Food geek as your handle you just first to the club or what?

You know, the honest truth. Credit goes to my mom. My mom is a hustler. She's a literary agent. And way back in the early days of food blogging, you know, when when everyone was doing it for narcissistic reasons, not just not just me. I was trying to figure out like, what's the branding? Like, how do I make a niche or whatever. And my mom was like Seattle Food geek and it's duck. Nice. Yeah.

Nice. All right. Cool. All right. So so here's here's why. Here's why. While you're here, you've you've been with a nova since they launched their original circulator, right?

No, actually, we were competitors at that time. Oh, who are you with then? I was a co founder of sans air.

Oh Sonterra That's right. That's right. Okay. Apology. No worries. I remember I remember I was talking to you back back in the in the day and like later on if we get time, you know, encourage people in the chat room to lob lob bombs into us. So a Nova is interesting. Just before we get into what we're going to talk about, maybe like the circulator wars might be an interesting topic for some people. So for the for those of you that don't know anything about who don't know why you're here and don't know why you're listening to this show, right? We in general, talk about the stars, and I talk about reasons why we self loathe each other. We talk about funny stories we have done, we go on rants and raves. And then sometimes we talk about culinary technology, right says yeah, yeah. So one of the favorite pieces of equipment, which has become commonplace now is the immersion circulator. And I have the fortunate misfortune of having lived through, like the entire circulator revolution, I was working on it at the time as an educator. So the immersion circulator, which we all know now and I know that has a pretty good market share in the, you know, not crazy expensive, like chunk of it, right? They were $2,000 pieces of lab laboratory equipment prior to the mid 2000s. Then in the mid 2000s. You know, they went down to about $800. And that's where they stayed for a number of years. One of my old interns at the French culinary was one of the founders of a company called Nomi Koo, which was the first immersion circulator to break the $500 barrier. And then, you know, after that, you know, Sancerre, a nova broke the $200 barrier. And, you know, then there's kind of this wave of circulators. And the interesting thing is, some of them got bought by big companies. And so you have now Breville owns Polly sciences, food, and you know, they're not doing as much with it as I think they could have. And a nova now is owned by Electrolux, correct? That's correct. Yeah. And so like, it's interesting to me that the mode that these kind of the bigger players because Electrolux is a huge player, especially in Europe. You know, and obviously, you know, it's not doesn't just go with what, you know, circulators it's a lot of these more niche, what were nice pieces of equipment, it seems that what the big folks are doing is, is buying small companies that they like, and then growing them that way. And so with that, I guess after the I guess after the Electrolux purchase, a nova went into what is a much more complicated thing to build, as opposed to an immersion circulator, which is a combi oven Am I about right here.

Yeah, I would clarify but complicated is an understatement.

All right. So and it's the combi oven that brings you here today. So like, like our listeners, like some of them are professionals been in a professional kitchen and know a lot about, like, you know, what I would call commercial combi ovens. So for those of you that aren't right and don't have a lot of experience for the past, oh, I don't know 20 years or so they started becoming more common. And they came almost primarily from Europe, rationale, Electrolux being another big supplier. Then there's you know, alto, Sham etc. And then goes down on the line. These things called combi ovens and what is a combi oven because when I first heard combi oven, you know 25 years ago Combi when we combinate the combination steam and oven, because it started out basically as a combination, like here's an oven and we're going to put a steam function into it right. But because of companies like rationale, they who have they rationale pioneered some of the early like of highly electronic control as wonky as it was back in the day, highly electronic control of the oven and the steam functions along with the convection functions. And they become much more than something that you can operate as a steamer or as an oven or even just as a steam injected oven. It's become a way for cooks in restaurants to do very high volumes of very high quality products. And we could talk more about why later but this technology which is de rigueur like even like a mid level operator now if they have the money and they're doing a lot of volume is going to get a bunch of combi ovens even though they are fantastically expensive. How much is a is a is a full height rationale. Now Scott, do you even know?

For full height? I think your starting price of entry is around 20 grand maybe 25. And then it goes way up from there.

Yeah, so rich people have them in their house like Nathan Myhrvold. He has a rationale because why wouldn't he? Yeah You know what I mean? He

does have an ANOVA precision of two.

Right? But like, but like, you know, he has a rationale because what I like to say about Nathan and this is no knock on him, but his yachts are always a little bit bigger than your yacht. I know what I mean. Like doesn't matter. Yeah, doesn't matter what your yacht is his yachts always a little bit bigger.

If I could have gotten them installed in my kitchen, I would have followed suit. But Oh, hell yeah. Yeah. But but we thought it was sort of high time that the rest of us had access to this way of cooking.

Right and so you know, and then there have been home there are home home quote unquote home but they've been decidedly high end Gagauz home combi oven is what is that that's like eight grand. So like that. Yeah, they're pretty. Yeah. Mealies is like what three grand two grand. Yeah. And Cuisinart came out with a toaster oven Combi. And I have to say, I know some people who enjoyed it. I never enjoyed. I never enjoyed Cuisinart, it's toaster oven Combi. I have to say like the control, not only were the controls unpleasant, it had the worst rack of oven I've ever used in my life. It was like imagine, like a jack and the giant beanstalk got together with the giant Jack did. And Jack was like, I'm gonna design this oven to be my scale giant, all you have to do is work on the rack. And the Giant was like, oh, good Jack. And then like the Giants toast is like five feet across, right? So the giant doesn't understand that like for us, if you have very wide spacing between your rack things that the toast is going to drop down, it's become going to become unpleasant. Do you notice this?

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. But that's not the first thing I noticed about ovens of that class. The Cuisinart Combi steam one that developed a little bit of a cult following. The the thing that catches my attention there is that it's what we call steam as a feature, as opposed to steam or humidity control. So that oven is very much akin to taking a toaster oven and a closed steamer and smashing the two together. It allows you to inject steam into the cooking process. But without any sort of monitoring or control or feedback, as opposed to what high end combi ovens do and what our oven does, which is depending on the mode, lets you actually control the relative humidity inside the cooking cavity, which turns out to be like a much more important thing to do.

I have to tell you, just as an aside, whenever anyone says feature, like the words that my dad used to say to me over and over growing up, my dad's a web engineer, and whenever anything would like suck that he was working on or break, or like not work the way he had intended, like the software wasn't working properly. He would say, don't worry, we'll sell that as a feature. Yeah. There are no bugs. There are just new features. Yeah, sometimes anytime anyone says feature, that's what I say sometimes undocumented features. Yay, undocumented feature. Its feature. Okay, so what's miraculous about this is one yes, they are trying to give you control. But it's at this and I'm very familiar from my centrifuge work with Anastasia and John. Like, you aren't in that you are in that zone of price where this isn't an believable value. Right? It's $600. Right? Roughly 600, something like that. 600 in the US? Yeah, it's roughly $600. And for that you are getting a fully functioning, controllable electronically controlled copy of it. Now let that sink in. Now here, here's the issue, right? $600 is not free, right. So it's way above like an impulse buy. Right? But it is unbelievable deal for what you're getting. I mean, I don't think anyone can argue it's an unbelievable deal for what you're getting. Now that said, right, and this is where I'm going to start going we have a bunch of questions I'm going to get to them. Before we can maybe get to some of the questions we'll get to the you know, why you why you want to do this or what it's for what I can talk about some of the tests that I've run, or you can talk about tests that you've run. There is no such thing as a straight win. And I know this from when I was doing the centrifuge work. So the main you're not losing for the $600 you're not losing really like anything other than its main. Its main issue is that it's only taking 20 amps out of the wall. Yep. Right or 18 amps out of the wall, right. So if a relatively large oven. It's larger than the Breville smart air, which is kind of on the large size of what people would call a toaster oven. Right. So if frankly, it still fits on your counter, I can tell you that because I know I currently have it sitting on the counter in my in my house, right. But the main limitation that you guys who have used professional combi ovens are going to realize, because the way a professional combi oven is, is they use a for nominal amount of power, a phenomenal amount of power. Like I looked at a full rack electric combi oven once for a friend of mine. And, you know, she was like having some sort of issue with it. And I looked at her circuitry, and that combi oven, when we calculated it took more than twice the entire power input into my apartment, more than twice the entire power input into my apartment. Plus, they're plumped right now, what do you get for that you turn on, you turn on a professional combi oven and they come up to temp fairly quickly. They recover fairly quickly, right? On the downside of professional combi ovens controls aren't actually as accurate typically as what you have on the a nova the Nova, the Nova seems to have taken a strategy where they're saying, Look, we're going to we're going to take x amount of power out of a wall, we know what that limitation is. So we're going to be fairly accurate and parsimonious with the way we dose things out, we're going to be fairly well insulated. Also, I'm assuming that your choice of all low emissivity surfaces was so that you didn't have to spend a lot of time heating up the actual walls of the oven or with a high emissivity service. Yep, we can get more into that later for those of you that really want to get into the weeds, but something that people don't think about with their ovens and their pans nearly enough is their emissivity. And like the difference in emissivity, emissivity just means how well it absorbs and and, and releases radiation, right. So the simple way to think of is when I say high emissivity oven, think any black internal oven, anything with an enamel surface on the inside, and you're getting a huge amount of your heat in a high emissivity oven from radiation. And the good thing about that, right is it's good for it's good for browning. And it's also good for recovery, because the surfaces of things don't cool down as fast as the air does. And so if your oven has a large balance of radii radiative heating on the inside due to its the fact that it's high emissivity, it's black, it's enamel, whatever, right, you get fairly fast recovery. The downside is it's longer heat up time. And it's less energy efficient. If you're dealing with something like the Innova, where it's all stainless on the inside, and your only high emissivity element is your top element, which you know, you don't even use for a lot of the cooking right? Then the you know, you can you can do a bigger amount of work in with less power, would you say that's an accurate statement, or no,

it's an accurate statement. But it also speaks to the type of cooking scenarios that this oven is designed for which a large part of that is as a replacement, or an alternative to waterbath suevey. So the oven has a dedicated suevey mode, where we expect that you're going to do long, low temperature cooks at high humidity or at low humidity if you want depending on the food, if you've got something with skin during a low humidity version of that Cook is really cool. So it's it's designed around all of that where accuracy matters where our ability to meter our power in and not overshoot, you know overshooting by a few fractions of a degree for you know, any considerable amount of time and a Soviet scenario is just not good enough. And so these decisions factored into that.

Yeah, yeah. Right. So what I would say for people looking at it, and they're like, well, what's the catch, right, the catch for me so far, the catch is just, it takes a relative especially if you're doing the kind of work that I I find interesting, which are high temperature with steam, so we need to talk about that in a minute. But high temperature with steam work for things like breads is it just takes it takes a while to heat up. And the temperature drops, especially on the higher temperatures when you're putting a very high heat load in like you notice it, it pops up and down. The other thing is that for an old fogies, such as myself, I'm not used to dealing with you can operate the oven from the front, but really the oven wants you to operate itself from the phone. I mean, honestly, the oven wants you to use your telephone, like, you know what I'm saying?

All the all of the really sophisticated powerful stuff. The phone is the control surface for that.

Now before I go further, and I got to answer some questions because people I guarantee you A good chunk of people have no idea what the hell we're talking about. Right. But I got to indulge myself one more time. So do you allow third parties to write applications for this oven? Yeah. Nor in the future, will you?

Not currently, it's not in the plan. We know that there are members of the community who would jump at the chance to do it. But we have to keep safety in mind, we're still on the hook at the end of the day. And right now, the risks of, you know, creating a program that caused the safety problem outweigh the potential benefit to unlocking that to the community. So maybe in the future, it's definitely like, that's, that's sort of the type of folks we are, it's sort of in our spirit to enable that sort of thing. But But for right now, it's just deprioritize so far that that I can safely say no.

And people are going to want to know, can you upgrade the firmware via the internet connection?

Absolutely. The firmware, we've actually released, maybe half a dozen firmware updates, since we started shipping in the fall, they happen automatically. If you're, if you've paired you up into Wi Fi, they they get pushed out, you know, overnight, and it's sort of invisible, or you can do it on demand through the app. And we we keep making continuous improvements, both firmware and app updates.

Alright, so let's talk about I'm going to talk about everything that you can do in a regular combi oven, what the different things that are in this oven are and what why you would want them so you have a box, you have a big box, you have in that box, a fan, you have a rear heater, right? You have a heater on the bottom, both the rear heater and the bottom heater are not radiant. Okay, so like, you can't there you you can't, they're not radiant. Then on the top, you have what looks like a fairly standard electric radiant element heating element. Yep. You have a port, which I guess is where the steam comes in. And you also you have a an air sensor, you have an internal probe, Jack attachment, and you have an addition to the air temperature, you have what's called a wet bulb sensor, which is fundamentally I would guess, a thermometer with a wet sock that's dipping into the tank. Is that about right?

That's about right, it's a tiny little reservoir surrounding a thermistor.

Right. Okay. So for those of you that nuts, and you know, there's a couple of rules, right, there are rules to the oven. Like if you want to use, you know, like certain times you have to use the rear, if you use the rear heating element, you need to use the fan, because I'm guessing that's how it actually puts the heat into the oven. You know, there are some rules. But in general, when you open up the phone, unlike let's say the Cuisinart or even like you know, some full size combi ovens, you can have fairly minut control of all of the different functions. So for those of you that have never used for those of you that have used a copy of and I'll say this, that control works very well, the control on the, for the CEU the works, I have never in my life, so you can still cook in the bag. So for those of you that are saying, Can I use this as a replacement for the circulator? You can see, I don't know, I don't know that. I mean, the good news about as opposed to a circulator is if you get the two racks and you keep everything separate, you could probably do a higher total volume with less worry in this unit than you can. In your in a standard circulator. I would say that

I am detecting a little hesitation in your voice about CBT in the oven dish.

No, well, no. So here's the test. So the test is and I looked up several other people's tests, and I only did one and I did the worst. I did worst case scenario test. So for those of you that, you know, weren't working in and around or teaching or you know, doing education with chefs in around 2005, when 2004 2000 2005 when the when the Suvi panic hit New York City. There was everyone was starting to use circulators and starting to use vacuum machines. And we got hit. And at the time, very few even higher end chefs had combi ovens in their kitchens because they hadn't done renovations, since combi ovens had become de rigueur. And so there wasn't a lot of opportunity for people to move away from move away from the circulator and keep the effects they wanted. So everyone was scrambling. And what they ended up using was a piece of technology called the C Vapp. C that was invented as a holding oven for Kentucky Fried Chicken and we can talk about this later because this to me, this to me what I'm like later, remind me somebody remind me is the killer app for this kind of oven killer, killer, killer. I'm just gonna tell you now, this oven reheats things like a freaking beast. If you reheat things, right? Everyone's going to talk about cooking. And like cooking, cooking, great. Cook this cook this cook that cook, cook, if you ever reheat things. It is like without any shadow of a doubt, the best reheating implement I have ever used in my life, it is a freaking miracle for reheating,

especially in the last 12 months would be trying to like hit takeout really hard to you know, help keep restaurants afloat, to be able to put your takeout containers directly in the oven on the rack and set a setting and walk away and not worry about time. And things are as if they were being served fresh. That like the the intersection of quality and laziness. It's pretty amazing.

To check this check this people people has just happened to you. You make pancakes, right? Your recipe for pancakes takes a two cups of two cups of buttermilk. Right? So you have x amount of pancakes. But you know, with COVID Maybe you don't have that many people over Yeah, have extra pancakes. What are you gonna do? You're gonna throw them away? No, because you're cheap like me. So what do you do? You put them in a in a zippy, you take the air out, you're freezing right? Now, in the old days, I used to call those weekday pancakes because I would never eat that because it's not a fresh pancake, right? But you take that pancake, you turn your oven on to like 303 25 and 75%. Steam. And holy holy cow, because it doesn't dry out on the outside. It heats through relatively quickly and evenly. And it's like for a pancake. It's not quite 100%. But it's like a I would you can adjust the temperatures but for reheating things like waffles, pancakes, you make banana bread. You freeze when you make banana bread, right? The mistake is, is that you're like banana bread is moist, it's gonna stay good forever, right? Banana Bread does not stay good forever, right? It just keeps getting a little bit crappier every day. And you don't notice it until the first slice of banana bread is great. And the last one, you're like powering through the banana bread, right? You forget why you liked banana bread. Because you're powering through that last slice of banana bread. What you should be doing is let it cool for a long time overnight banana bread takes a lot longer to cool than you think. Because it's so freakin dense, which is why it takes so long to cook. That's why banana bread takes a full hour to cook. Whereas like a loaf of bread can be done in like a half hour, whatever I digress, slice the banana bread, put parchment in between the slices, freeze it, and then put that sucker into the oven at 300 degrees 75% Steam, that's what I use mean, Scott, you could tell me what use and oh my god does that reheat like a mother.

Yeah, it's fantastic. The killer scenario for me here though, is we've so my it's just my wife and man our apartment here. And to try to break up the monotony of the same walls and have some experiences during COVID. We've done fancy Friday, so Friday, we would do a little extra indulgent meal, or get get one of these sort of really cool to go boxes from a fancy restaurant in town. And sometimes these boxes were like, you know, a beautiful piece of protein a nice steak or, or some shellfish or whatever, right? That was pre cooked and then allowed to cool and they give you the reheat instruction, you know, set your oven to 400 degrees and put it in for fit, whatever, whatever. But I can I can picture the chef crying. Knowing that the quality once it gets returned at home in a normal oven is going to have plummeted compared to what it tasted like, you know when when it was put into the box when it was fresh. But in this case, we get to play by a different set of rules. So instead of using those traditional temperature, you know, for 25, or for 15 minutes or whatever until it's warm in the center. Instead, we get to use stupid rules here. So I'll set the oven to you know, if we've got a piece of beef or something, I'll say you know, 56 Celsius, whatever that translates to in Fahrenheit at 100% humidity, and I'll throw the protein in there in the paper box that it came in, because I know it's never going to overheat, you know, to the point where that would be a problem. And then we can casually take our time enjoying the salad course or having a glass of wine or doing a dance party, you're setting up the laser, whatever we're going to do for the night. And when we take that protein out, it is perfectly refurbed to the same internal doneness as when it was delivered from the restaurant. And and like zero compromise. And it's it's just kind of amazing. Yeah,

yeah. So here's also and this is going to tie back because I realized that in Finnish I was talking about when you said when you said I sent some trepidation about subida Yeah, I started talking about CF apps, save apps. So people couldn't afford combi ovens. So what they got is a sinkhole to see that and a C Vapp functions similarly to the way that Scott was talking about with the ANOVA in that they have a separate control where you're controlling the air temperature, and then you're also controlling what's called the the wet bulb so you're controlling we could talk about it in a minute, you're controlling the humidity in the oven. And the the it was intended it was built to keep fried chicken. Like, literally Kentucky Fried Chicken holding for hours in a Kentucky Fried Chicken. And so the theory is that by correctly setting the difference in how hot the air is, right? Versus how hot essentially how hot a wet thermometer is, right? You can, you can keep the outside of something crispy. This is the miracle of moisture management that I'm actually writing my current book about, right? Oh, right on. Yeah, it's like you can keep the outside crispy. And without drying out the inside. If you put something into a normal oven, and you set that oven temperature higher than the local boiling point of water even lower, because it'll evaporate, it's just going to get drier and drier and drier and drier. If you set the humidity, exactly right in the oven, you will still eventually dry out the product. But basically you get to choose the moisture level that's at the surface right where the crust is, and also not set that moisture level to the immediate and permanent detriment of the stuff on the inside. Right. And so that's why these ovens were developed. Now, on the reheat side that what that means is you don't just have to reheat proteins or wet things. You can also and I tested this because my son Booker enjoys nothing more than ordering fried calamari from outside of our house. Right? You can reheat fried foods in this sucker. Right? Just by getting the humidity right now you still have to be careful because duh, it will still dry out because the the oven is still real hot. But you can you know, fried reheated fried foods always pretty sad. But you can do is it 100%? No, but you can do the best job I see possible on reheating fried foods using humidity in this now back to what I was saying on cvwd. So all of these high end chefs think like your John John Giorgis think like John George, and like these kinds of people were getting this oven this up this CPAP this, like this wet bulb oven into their kitchens, and they were turning all of their, all of their things to 100% humidity. And they were using them as Suvi cookers, without bags because the health department was messing with you, right. And so a lot of people got into Soviet and then into hot holding with high humidity using the CPAP ovens. And they're also low powered, by the way because they plug into normal socket, so they have a lot of the same. They have a lot of the same kind of if you've used the CPAP a lot, this oven is going to make a lot of sense to you. It mean it's made a lot more sense because you don't choose some dumb crispiness level, you actually get to choose like real temperatures. But it will make sense to you in terms of like the power requirements as opposed to people who are used to just brute forcing the way their way through things with a full sized Combi. But like the one test that I ran on soothie I wanted to try using suevey Without the bag. So it's not really suevey Because it's not with the bag, but low temperature cooking without a bag. And most of the people on the internet who have tested the ANOVA with bagless cooking. And by the way, it came up to temperature fairly quickly, right? I mean, in other words, like it didn't take that much longer to do in the oven that would have taken in the circulator maybe a couple of minutes on on a typical inch and something steak right which is what I was doing my standard test is ribs steaks, why? Because I like to eat them. But I did the hardest test of all, I left it in there without a bag circulating for seven hours and ski because like one of the things about hot holding without a bag is that everyone is like you can do it for a certain length of time. I don't know what that time is. Have you done bagless I also don't know because I didn't I stupidly because I was lazy and I haven't had a lot of time to test I didn't do one in the bag for seven hours like on the on the circulator next to me and then one in the oven. So it could have just been that I didn't like that particular steak because it was from Trader Joe's I didn't have time to go get the steak I normally get a no offense to Trader Joe's steaks, but I don't buy Trader Joe's steak so I have no idea whether they're good or bad. Yeah. So But anyway, I like I was like I didn't get quite the texture I wanted out of a seven hour hold on it. As I as I'm used to what are your thoughts on super long holds in a bagless scenario.

So the the oven will do just fine. In that scenario it did the oven was fine. The only thing you need to worry about is if you're working with a product where where prolonged oxidation is going to be problematic and that's not going to be a problem for everything. So for example, done racks of ribs in the oven you can you can actually do fit of a lot of ribs in the southern and with a with a dry rub on them, you know they can go 12 hours, you can go 24 hours, you can go even longer if you want, you don't really need to worry about oxidation because all that salt on the outside of the meat is going to take care of microbial activity. But if you've got something where you know, bugs want to kind of swim and grow and and these, these don't generally cause a health concern, it could be temperatures, but can sometimes create a flavor profiles, then that's a good use case for a bag scenario where these aerobic microbes would be stopped in their tracks because you've created an anaerobic environment.

Yeah, and you also have the oxidation to Yeah,

but it's, but for most things, it really is one to one. So we've done head to head tests where we've taken, you know, the same piece of meat, in other words to two side by side, adjoining cuts off of the same primal one went in the bag, one went not in the bag, cooked in the same conditions. And in fact, the third one in the Suvi bath. And then they were all pre seared at for exactly the same amount of time. In fact, deep fried for our premiere, just yeah, just to get rid of any X Factor. And also because it's amazing. And when you cut through them, and you and you look, you know, one next to the other, they are indistinguishable. It is like the best version of the ball and Cup game, because you win every time.

And how long were you running those tests?

So those were like, you know, two, two and a half hour cook something like that. So, yeah, so in that case, you know, that's not a long enough time that you might develop off flavors. But the good news is, you have the option. If you prefer to cook in a bag for other reasons, you know, if you've got if you're if you're doing Cook, chill or or, or make a head, or you've got a product that arrived cryovac and frozen in a stupid safe bag, and you just kind of want to do it that way. You are very welcome to do that. But I

can't tell you a secret. Yeah. I sometimes I sometimes circulate in the bags that they came in from the store. Mm hmm.

Me too. I have I have floated away more than one grocery store label that was adhered to my you know, preseason, carnitas or whatever. Don't tell anyone I know. I know. This is the this is the dirty little secret. Is that like with all of this culinary technology, really? It is heroin for laziness.

Yeah, the truth of the matter is you come home, like the house is freaking torn upside down. You thought you had all this energy? You don't you see the thing in the bag? It's in a bag. I know the seal is good, because it's still good. And you got it home from the store. Yep, going in the water. Yeah,

I am not mad at that. But I think it's worth pointing out that a bagless scenario opens up some new possibilities that a bad scenario either prevents or is a pain in the ass about. And specifically non equilibrium cooking. So most of the time when people are cooking CBT at home, in fact, 99 point something percent of the time, you're doing an equilibrium style cooking method. Unless you're you're quite advanced, where you say, Hey, I like you know, my steak cooked to Korea at 55 C or whatever your preference is. And so you set your sushi bath for 55 or 5060. And you use the lookup table to know how long it needs to stay in there until it's done. And then you pull it out and you're done. And you're happier, it's predictable. And it can sit there and coast for as long as you want if dinner is delayed, or you just want to do a prolonged cook. But if you increase the temperature of the cooking environment, even just a little bit, it can dramatically speed up the time it takes for that food to reach your desired core temperature. The problem is you have created a strike zone for yourself where if it stays in that higher heat environment for too long, you'll overshoot your temperature. So what you really want is a way to keep tabs on that internal doneness temperature, which is a really great use case for a probe thermometer. So shove a probe thermometer in the food. That's that's sort of a tall order with waterbath suevey Because you need to have these really fine needle probes and we got this closed cell foam

trigger. You're triggering me.

I know. Yeah. Trigger trigger. It's work man it is work. Can I

tell you a quick story about that? Yeah, go for it. So when when Okay, so what we're talking about is if you need to measure the temperature on the inside of food when you're cooking in a wall in a water bath the old way was everyone had their own foam tape that they bought from different industrial suppliers. There was never any one real supplier, right? And you would put that tape on and then you would shove a fine probe in and then you'd put it in the water bath and you would pray. Now you had to start doing this once the Health Department got on because they required verification. But all of the freaky deaky Europeans who used to do the low temperature cooking based on the teaching of like even Bruna was so did it by George perlu. The original sausage fingered now dead butcher who popularized foie gras cooking right? Severe for that for the three brothers fat as I will call them. logro brothers, right. So he would do it and so after the health department hit, and like, you know, turned off cvwd in New York City, you know, in the early 2000s I went to George perlu himself, the Sharky charity, how would you say sausage fingers in? In French? John? I don't know. But the literal literal translation we can say is what? ditional Cecil? Yeah, that's what he had dwad associates on. And like big ones, like, like freakin like, you know, not like little not like, lamb casings not like, not immergas finger. We're talking like, you know, brown fingers. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. Do I do that? You know what I mean? And from guessing from hanging around them, maybe beer cooked brights if you know what I mean. But the anyways, so like this guy? Probably famous. And I probably told the story before on the show, but whatever. Maybe I'll try to tell it differently. In case you've heard this. So he goes in there and well known and I'm there. Like all these famous New York City chefs are there like people from what's it called people from? per se were there like JG had John George had people there. It was at belays David Blaze Test Kitchen. And like all these people were top top of their game at the time. Plus, like while he was there, we had a whole crew there. Right. And Bruno was so from cuisine solutions, who's like you know, you know, the godfather of not suevey low temperature or as he calls it, you Scott on the correct temperature. He hates low temperature, brutally so hates the word low temperature. And he hates he hates all that because he wants everyone to call it like, correct temperature. I guess you Scott don't. I can still hear him saying it. Yelling it at me. Anyway. So all of us were there and probably make sausage fingers. Like, takes this flog raw starts insulting Hudson Valley for Agra, which is a huge mistake in New York City to be insulting Hudson Valley foie gras, because I think it had been treated poorly. And so he was having trouble defining it and the thing was getting all mutilated, right? So he rolls it into a torsional packs it into a freaking one of those. What are those ceramic Fogra things called guys remember anyone remember you know I'm talking about they're white. They're they're shaped like little loaf bricks that you you roll the torch on. If you're not going to have it free to jam it into the little white ceramic thing because No, I'm talking about this squarish. It looks like a little mini long Pullman low thing that you can squish the terrain into anyway. So he puts it into that vacuum that puts his tape over, puts an extra piece of tape over shoves the needle in and here's where the trigger comes from, throws it into throws, puts it into the water bath, right, and then immediately, the tape lifts off, the needle comes out the bag fills up with water, it then gets an air bubble lifts up floats upside down, the entire thing fills with water and you have flog rod to circulator bath. And he still the guy, I don't think had done actual cooking in a number of years. He was already pretty old at that point. He does. I guess what I would have done is like kind of pretend it didn't happen. And then like pulled it out of the bath. And then if you've ever had poached frog rod, like, he like cuts it and it's like weeping circulator liquid and like the fats fully gone out of it and rendered it's like, I still remember a feeling like I'm cheese, you know, like, oh my god, you know what I mean? Yeah, and so like, that's the trigger, because anyone who's used tape in a bath knows that you're gonna get a one of those tapes breaking eventually.