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This week on Meet and Three, we rethink surplus by exploring how innovators are promoting sharing mindsets and responding to excess in creative ways. The whole life cycle 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 to Meet and Three, available wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah. We got uh John who's uh still in uh Lyme, right? Yep.
Hello. Hey, and uh we got Matt in his uh Rhode Island Heidi Hole booth. How are you doing? Doing great. Yeah, but today uh we have on not someone who is pitching uh a book or anything like this.
We have on because of many many requests, we have uh you might know him as Seattle at Seattle Food Geek. Uh Scott Heimendinger from ANOVA Culinary. How are you doing? Very nice to be here this morning. Yeah.
Uh so well, 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, uh the honest truth, uh uh credit goes to my mom. Uh my mom is a hustler, uh, she's a literary agent.
And uh 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. Um, 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 stuck. Nice.
Yeah. Nice. All right, cool. Uh all right, so so here's here's why you here's why uh why you're here. You've you've been with uh ANOVA since they launched their original circulator, right?
No, actually. Uh we were competitors at that time. Uh oh, who were you with then? Uh I I was a co-founder of Sansair. Oh, San Zair, that's right, that's right.
Okay. Apologies. No worries. I remember I remember I was talking to you back back in the uh in the day, and like later on, if we get time, and you know, encourage people in the chat room to lob bombs into us. Um ANOVA is uh interesting.
Um just before we get into what we're gonna 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. Yeah, right. Uh we in general talk about uh Nastasi and I talk about reasons why we uh self-loathe each other, we talk about funny stories we we've done, we uh go on rants and raves, and then sometimes we talk about culinary technology, right, Sas? Yeah.
Yeah. Uh so one of the favorite pieces of equipment which has become commonplace now is the immersion circulator. And I have the fortune and misfortune of having lived through like the entire circulator revolution. I was working on on it at the time as an educator. So the immersion circulator, which we all know now, and ANOVA has a pretty good market share in the you know, not crazy expensive like chunk of it, right?
They were two thousand dollar pieces of lab laboratory equipment prior to uh the mid-2000s. Then in the mid-2000s, um, you know, they they went down to about $800. Um, and that's where they stayed for a number of years. One of my old interns at the French culinary uh was one of the founders of a company called Nomiku, which was the first emergency circulator to break the $500 barrier. Uh, and then you know, after that, um, you know, Sanserre, Enova broke the $200 barrier.
Uh, 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 poly science's uh food, and you know, they're not doing as much with it as I think they they could have. And uh ANOVA 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 um Europe, um, you know, and obviously uh, you know, and it's not doesn't just go with what you know, circulators, it's a lot of these more niche, what were niche pieces of equipment. It seems that what the big folks are doing is um is buying small companies that they like and then growing them that way. And so uh with that, I guess after the I guess after the electrolux purchase, ANOVA went into what is a much more complicated thing to build uh as opposed to an immersion circulator, which is uh a combi oven. Am I about right here?
Yeah, uh, although I would clarify that complicated is an understatement. All right, so and it's the combi oven that brings you here today. So, like uh like our listeners, like some of them are professionals, been in a professional kitchen and know a lot about uh 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. Uh and they came almost primarily from Europe, rationale, uh Electrolux being another big supplier, uh, then there's you know, Auto Sham, etc.
And then goes down on the line. Um these things called combi ovens. And what is a combi oven? Because uh, when I first heard combi oven, you know, 25 years ago, combi, what do you mean combinate the combination steam and oven? Because it started out based basically as a combination, like here's an oven and we're gonna put a steam function into it, right?
But because of companies like Rationale, they who have uh they rationale pioneered some of the early like uh 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 uh a way for um cooks in restaurants to do very high volumes of very high quality products, and we could talk more about why later, but um this technology, which is de rigor, like even like a mid-level operator now, if they have the money and they're doing a lot of volume, is gonna 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? Uh I th for full height, I think your starting price of entry is around 20 grand, maybe 25.
Uh, and then it goes way up from there. Yeah, so rich people have them in their house, like Nathan Mirvold, he has a rationale because why wouldn't he? Yeah, he know what I mean. He does have it in over precision oven too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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 yacht's always a little bit bigger than your yacht. You know what I mean? It doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter what your yacht is. His yacht's 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, yeah. Uh 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 uh home there are home, home, quote unquote home, but they've been decidedly high end. Gaganow's uh home combi oven is what is that? That's like eight grand, something like that. Yeah, they're pretty spending. Yeah.
Miele's is like what, three grand, two grand, something like that? Yeah. Uh and Cuisinart came out with a toaster oven combi. And I have to say, as I I know some people who enjoyed it. I never enjoyed uh I never enjoyed Cuisinart's toaster oven combi.
I have to say, like the control not only were the controls unpleasant, it had the worst rack of any oven I've ever used in my life. It was like, imagine like uh uh Jack and the giant bean stalk 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, okay, Jack. And then like the giant's 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 gonna droop down and it's be kind of gonna become unpleasant. Did you notice this? Uh yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Um, but that's not the first thing I notice about ovens of that class, the the Cuisinart, you know, combi steam one that developed a little bit of a cult following. Um the the thing that catches my attention there is that it's what we call uh steam as a feature, as opposed to steam or humidity control.
So that oven uh is very much akin to taking a toaster oven and a closed steamer and smashing the the two together. Uh it allows you to inject steam into the cooking process, but without any sort of monitoring or control or feedback, as opposed to what uh 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, uh, which turns out to be like a much more important thing to do. Yeah, I I have to tell you, uh, just as an aside, whenever anyone says feature, like um the words that my dad used to say to me over and over growing up, my dad's a double-e engineer. Uh-huh. And uh 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, right. There are no bugs, there are just new features. Yeah, sometimes anytime anyone says feature, that's what I say. Sometimes undocumented features, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Undocumented feature.
It's feature. Yeah. Uh okay. So what's miraculous about this is is one, yes, they are trying to give you uh control, but it's at this, and I'm very familiar from my centerfuge work with uh Nastasia and John. Uh like you are in that you are in that zone of price where this is an unbelievable value, right?
It's $600, right? Roughly $600, something like that. Yep, $600 in the US. Yeah, it's roughly $600, and for that you are getting a fully functioning controllable, electronically controlled combi oven. Now let that sink in.
Now, here's the issue, right? $600 is not free, right? So it's it's way above like an impulse buy, right? But it is unbelievable deal for what you're getting. I mean, like I don't think anyone can argue it's an unbelievable deal for what you're getting.
Um 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. Um 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 or what I could talk about some of the tests that I've run and you can talk about tests that you've run. Um 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 it's a relatively large oven.
Uh it's larger than the uh Breville Smart Air, which is kind of on the large size of what people will call a toaster oven, right? So it frankly it still fits on your counter. I can tell you that because I know I currently have it sitting on the counter in in my in my house, right? But the main limitation that you guys who have used professional combi ovens are gonna realize. Because the way a professional combi oven is is they use a phenomenal amount of power.
A phenomenal amount of power. Like uh I looked at a full rack electric combi oven uh once for a friend of mine, and uh, you know, she was like having some sort of issue with it, and I looked at her circuitry, and that combi oven, uh, when we calculated it, uh, took more than twice the entire power input into my apartment. More than twice the entire power input into my apartment. Plus, they're plumbed, right? Now, what do you get for that?
Uh you turn on, uh you turn on a uh a professional combi oven and they come up to temp fairly quickly. They recover fairly quickly, right? Uh on the downside, a professional combi oven's controls aren't actually as accurate typically as what you have on the ANOVA. The ANOVA, the ANOVA seems to have taken a strategy where they're saying, look, we're gonna we're gonna take X amount of power out of the wall. We know what that limitation is, so we're gonna be fairly accurate and parsimonious with the way we dose things out.
We're gonna be fairly well insulated. Um also I'm assuming that your choice of all low emissivity sit uh 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. Um 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, even emissivity just means how well it it absorbs and and and uh releases uh radiation, right? So the simple way to think of it is when I say high emissivity uh uh oven, think any black internal oven, anything with uh an enamel surface on the inside, and you're getting a huge uh amount of your heat in a high emissivity oven from radiation. And the the the good thing about that, right, is it's good for it's good for browning, and it's also good for recovery because uh the surfaces of things don't cool down as fast as uh the air does.
And so if your oven has a large balance of radiative heating on the inside due to it's 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 ANOVA, 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 uh you know you can you can do a bigger amount of work in uh with less power.
Would you say that's an accurate statement or no? It's an accurate statement, but it also uh speaks to the type of cooking scenarios that this oven uh is designed for, which uh a large part of that is as uh a replacement or an alternative to water bath sous-vide. So the oven has a dedicated sous-vide mode uh where we expect that you're gonna do long, low temperature cooks at high humidity or at low humidity if you want, depending on the uh the food. If you've got something with skin, uh doing a low humidity version of that cook is really cool. Um it's designed around all of that where accuracy matters, where our ability to meter uh our power in and not overshoot, you know, overshooting by uh a few fractions of a degree for you know any considerable amount of time in a sous-vide scenario is just not good enough.
Uh and so these decisions factor into that. Yeah, yeah. Um 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 relatively, 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, uh for things like breads, is it just takes a it takes a while to heat up. And the temperature drop, 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 fogie such as myself, I'm not used to dealing with uh 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 the really sophisticated, powerful stuff. Uh, the phone is the control service for that. Yeah. Now, before I go further, and uh I gotta answer some questions because people I I guarantee you a good chunk of people have no idea what the hell we're talking about, right?
Uh but I I gotta indulge myself one more time because I'm gonna figure it. Do you allow third parties to write applications for this oven yet or in the future? Will you? No, uh not currently, and it's not in the plan. Um we know that there are members of the community who would jump at the chance to do it.
Um but we have to keep safety uh in mind. We're still on the hook at the end of the day. Uh and right now the risks of you know, creating a program that caused a 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 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 deprioritized so far that that I can safely say no. And uh people are gonna want to know can you upgrade the firmware via the uh internet connection? Absolutely. Uh the firmware, we've actually released maybe half a dozen firmware updates since we started shipping uh in the fall. Uh they happen automatically if you're if you've paired your oven to Wi-Fi, they they get pushed out, you know, overnight uh and it's sort of invisible, or you can do it on demand through the app.
Uh and we we keep making continuous improvements, both firmware and app updates. All right. So let's talk about I'm gonna 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 uh 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.
Uh you have a uh a port, which I guess is where the steam comes in, and you also you have an air sensor, you have an internal probe uh jack attachment, and you have uh uh in addition to the air temperature, you have what's called a wet bulb uh sensor, which is fundamentally I 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 uh uh a thermosker. Right.
Okay. So uh for those of you that and and and you know, there's a couple of rules, right? There are rules to the oven. Uh like if you want to use uh, 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. Yep.
Uh you know, there are some rules, but in general, when you open up the phone, unlike let's say the Queas Nart or even like you know, some full-size combi ovens, you can have fairly uh minute control of all of the different functions. So uh for those of you that have never for those of you that have used a combi oven, uh I'll say this. The control works very well. The control on the um for the sous vide works. I have never in my life, so uh mo 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. So I I don't know I don't know that I mean the good news about it 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 uh in your in a standard circulator. I would say that. Yeah.
I'm I'm detecting a little hesitation in your voice about Sous vide in the oven, Dave. Uh 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 uh that you know weren't working in in and around or teaching or you know, doing education with chefs in and around 2005, when uh 2004, 2000, 2005, when the when the Sous vide panic hit New York City, um there was everyone was starting to use circulators and starting to use vacuum uh machines, and we got hit. And uh 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 D Rigur.
And so there there wasn't a lot of opportunity for people to move away from um move away from uh 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 CVAP. CVAP 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 gonna 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, when we're trying to like hit takeout really hard to you know help keep uh 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. Uh that like the the intersection of quality and laziness is pretty amazing. Uh check this, check this. People, people, has this happened to you? You make pancakes, right?
Your recipe for pancakes takes a uh two cups of uh two cups of uh buttermilk, right? So you have X amount of pancakes, but you know, with COVID, maybe you don't have that many people over. You 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 you you put them in a in a zippy, you take the air out, and you freeze it, right? Now, it 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 300, 325 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 I would you you 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's 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 like banana bread because you're pounding through that last slice of banana bread. What you should be doing is uh let it cool for a long time, overnight. Banana bread takes a lot longer to cool than you think because it's so freaking dense, which is why it takes so long to cook. That's why banana bread takes uh 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 uh the oven at 300 degrees, 75% steam. That's what I use, mean Scott, you can tell me what you use. And oh my god, does that reheat like a mother? Yeah, it's fantastic.
The the killer scenario for me here though is we've um so my it's it's just my wife and me in our apartment here, and to try to break up uh the monotony of the you know the same walls and have some experiences during COVID, uh, we've done fancy Friday. So Friday we would, you know, do a little extra indulgent meal or get uh get one of these sort of really cool to-go boxes from a fancier restaurant in town. And sometimes these boxes were like, you know, a beautiful piece of protein, a nice steak 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 rethermed at home in a normal oven, is going to have plummeted compared to what it tasted like uh uh you know when it 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 temperatures, you know, 425 or for 15 minutes or whatever until it's warm in the center, instead we get to use sous- vide 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, uh, whatever that translates to in Fahrenheit, at uh 100% humidity, and I'll throw the protein in there in the paper box that it came in, because I know it's never gonna overheat uh, 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 or setting up the laser, whatever we're gonna do for the night. And when we take that protein out, it is perfectly re-thermed to the same internal doneess uh as when it was delivered from the restaurant, uh, and and like zero compromise, and it's it's just kind of amazing.
Yeah, yeah. So uh here's also, and this is gonna tie back because I realized I didn't finish what I was talking about when you said uh when you said I sense intrepidation about sous-vid in the oven, I started talking about CVAPs. CVAPs, so people couldn't afford combi ovens, so what they got is this thing called a CVAP. And a CVAP functions similarly to the way that Scott is 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 wet bulb. So you're controlling, we can talk about it in a minute, you're controlling the humidity in the oven.
And they it was intended, it was built to keep fried chicken, uh, like literally Kentucky fried chicken, uh holding for hours in a Kentucky fried chicken. And so the theory is that uh by correctly setting the difference in how hot the air is, right, versus how uh hot uh uh 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 uh something into a normal oven and you set that oven temperature uh higher than the local boiling point of water, even lower because it'll evaporate, it's just gonna get drier and drier and drier and drier. If you set the humidity uh 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 uh set that moisture level to the immediate and permanent detriment of the stuff on the inside, right?
And so uh that's why these ovens were developed. Now, on the reheat side, that what that means is you you don't just have to reheat proteins or wet things, you can also, and I tested this because my son uh Booker enjoys nothing more than ordering fried calmari from uh outside of our house, right? You can reheat fried foods in this sucker, right? Uh just by getting the humidity right now. Now you still have to be careful because duh, it will still dry out because duh, the oven is still real hot.
But you can uh, 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 Sous-Vide. So all of these uh high-end chefs think like your John Georgies, think like Jean-Georges and like these kind of people were getting this oven, this uh this uh CVAP, this like this uh wet bulb uh oven into their kitchens, and they were turning all of their uh all of their uh things to 100% humidity.
And they were using them as sous- vide cookers uh without bags because the health department was messing with you, right? And uh, and so a lot of people got into Sous vide and then into hot holding with high humidity using these CVAP ovens. And they're also low-powered, by the way, because they plug into normal sockets. So they have a lot of the same, um, they have a lot of the same kind of um if you've used the CVAP a lot, this oven's gonna make a lot of sense to you. I mean, it's make a lot more sense because you don't choose some dumb crispiness level, you actually get to choose like real temperatures, but um 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-size combi.
Um but like the one test that I ran on Sous vide, I wanted to try using Sous vide without the bag. So it's not really Sous vide because it's not with a bag, but low temperature cooking without a bag. And most of the people on the internets who have tested uh the ANOVA with bagless cooking, and by the way, it came up to temperature fairly quickly, right? Uh I mean, in other words, like uh it didn't take that much longer to do in the oven that would have taken in the circulator, maybe a couple of minutes, uh on on a typical inch and something steak, right? Which is what I was doing.
My standard test is rib steaks. Why? Because I like to eat them. Um but I did the hardest test of all. I left it in there without a bag circulating for seven hours.
And it's good 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. And 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 uh 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. And no offense to Trader Joe's steaks, but I don't buy Trader Joe's steaks, so I have no idea whether they're good or bad. Yeah. Uh 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, uh, as I as I'm used to. What are your thoughts on super long holds in a bagless scenario?
So the uh the oven will do just fine in that scenario. Oh, it did. The oven was fine. Yeah, the the only thing you need to worry about is if you're working with a product where um where prolonged oxidation is going to be problematic, and that's not going to be a problem for everything. So, for example, um, I've done racks of ribs in the oven.
You can you could actually fit a lot of ribs uh in this oven, and with uh with a dry rub on them, uh, 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 uh all that salt on the outside of the meat uh is gonna take care of microbial activity. But if you've got something where you know bugs wanna kind of swim and grow and and uh these these don't generally uh uh cause a health concern at SUV temperatures, but can sometimes create uh off flavor profiles, then that's a good use case for a bag scenario uh where these aerobic microbes would be stopped in their tracks because you've created an anaerobic environment. Yeah, and you talked about the oxidation too. Yeah.
Yeah. Uh but it's uh but for most things um it it really is one to one. So we've done head to head tests where we've taken uh you know the the uh uh same piece of meat, in other words, two uh two side by side adjoining cuts off of the same primal. Uh one went in the bag, one went not in the bag, uh cooked in the same conditions, and in fact, a third went in the sous vide bath. Uh and then uh and they were all pre-seared at uh for exactly the same amount of time.
In fact, deep fried uh for our pre-sear, just to get rid of uh any X factor and also because it's amazing. Um and when you cut through them uh 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 uh because you win every time. Um how long were you running those tests? So those were like, you know, two two and a half hour cooks, something like that.
Um so uh yeah, so in that case, you know, that's not a long enough time that you might develop uh off flavors. Um but the good news is you have the option. Uh, if you prefer to cook in a bag for other reasons, you know, if you've got uh if you're if you're doing cook chill or or uh or make a head, or you've got a product that arrived uh cryovaced and frozen in a sous-vid safe bag, and you just kind of want to do it that way, um, you are very welcome uh to do that. But can I tell you a secret? Yeah.
I sometimes I sometimes circulate in the bags that they came in 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 pre-seasoned carnitas or whatever it was. Yeah, yeah, 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 it is heroin for laziness. Yo, 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. You know the seal is good because it's still good and you got it home from the store.
Yep. It's going in the water. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like I am not mad at that.
Um, but I think it's worth pointing out that a bagless scenario opens up some new possibilities that a bag scenario either prevents or is a pain in the ass about. Uh and specifically, um non-equilibrium cooking. So most of the time when people are cooking sous-vid 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. Um, where you say, hey, I like, you know, my steak uh uh cooked decor at 55 C or whatever your preference is. And so you set your Sous-Vide bath for 55 or 56 C, and you use the 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 happy and it's predictable.
And it can sit there and coast uh for as long as you want if dinner's delayed or you or you just want to do a prolonged cook. But uh 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've 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 dundness temperature, which is a really great use case for a probe thermometer. Uh so shove a probe thermometer uh in the food.
That's that's sort of a tall order uh with water bath sous vide because you need to have these really fine needle probes, you gotta have this closed cell phone. Trigger, you're triggering me. I know, yeah. Trigger, trigger! It's work, man.
It is work. Can I tell you? Can I tell you a quick story about that? Yeah, go for it. So uh 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 uh verification. But all of the freaky beaky Europeans who used to do the low temperature cooking based on the teaching of like even Bruno Gusseau did it by Georges Praulou, the original uh sausage fingered, now dead uh butcher who popularized uh foie gras cooking, right? Uh uh Sous vide for the for the three brothers fat, as I will call them, the Schwagro brothers, right?
Uh so he would do it. And so after the health department hit and like you know, turned off Sous vide in uh New York City, you know, in the early 2000s, I went to Georges Pralu himself, uh the uh charcuterie de how how would you say sausage fingers in uh in in French, John? I don't know, but the little literal translation we can say is doigt de saucisson. Yeah, yeah. That's what he had.
Douit de saucisson. And like big ones, like like freaking, like, you know, not like little, not like uh lamb casings, not like uh not a merguez finger. We're talking like, you know, brat fingers. Summer sausage, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Doigt du brat. You know what I mean? And uh from guessing from hanging around him, maybe beer cooked brats, if you know what I mean. Uh but the um anyways, so like this guy, uh Pralu, famous, and I've probably told this story before on the show, but whatever. Uh 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. Uh, like all of these famous New York City chefs are there, like people from uh um what's it called? People from the uh per se were there, like JG had John Georges had people there. It was at Boulet's David Boulet's test kitchen, and like all these people were top, top of their game at the time. Plus, like Wiley was there.
We had we had a whole crew there, right? And Bruno Gusseau from Cuisine Solutions, who's like, you know, you know, the the godfather of not Sous vide, low temperature, or as he calls it, juscaton, the correct temperature. He hates low temperature. Bruno Gusseau hates the word low temperature, and he hates he hates all that because he wants everyone to call it like correct temperature, I guess. Juce Gaton.
I can still hear him saying it, uh, yelling it at me. Anyway, uh, so all of us were there, and uh Pralu McSausage Fingers like takes this foie gras, starts insulting Hudson Valley Foie gras, which was 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 deveining it, and the thing was getting all mutated, right? So then he rolls it into a torchon, packs it into a freaking uh one of those what are those uh ceramic foie gras things called, uh guys. You remember anyone remember you know what I'm talking about? They're white, they're they're shaped like little loaf bricks that you you roll the torchon, and you and if you're not gonna have it free, you jam it into the little white ceramic thing.
Do you guys know what I'm talking about? The square-ish, it looks like a little mini long Pullman loaf thing that you can squish the terrine into. Anyway, so he puts it into that, vacuums it, 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 foie gras de 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 foie gras, like he like cuts it and it's like weeping circulator liquid, and like the fat's fully gone out of it and rendered, and it's like I still remember feeling like, oh geez. You know, like, oh my god. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah.
And so like that's the trigger because anyone who's used tape in a bath knows that you're gonna get a uh uh one of those tapes breaking eventually. Yeah. Uh that uh that is uh a very visceral way of explaining the problem. I love it. Um but if you're in a bathless scenario, and if you're bagless, well, you can just shove a damn probe into the By the way, Nastasio's been calling me bagless for years.
Um anyway, you can do that. Uh you can do that if you don't need to deal with the water bath, right? So you can accelerate cook time, you can monitor core temperature, so that means that you can use a uh hotter than core cooking strategy, you get your food done faster. So here's the difference. That one inch thick steak, right?
Our like benchmark time for for uh cook to core doneness is you know an hour, right? Plus or minus, whatever. Um if you bump up the ambient cooking temperature from let's say 55 C to 65 C, or which is an addition of about 20 degrees Fahrenheit, that hour drops to 27 minutes. Yeah, uh for for those that pay attention to how heat works, uh, heat only flows when there's a delta. So the smaller the and if the the amount of heat you put in at a particular time depends on that delta.
So any delta at all gives you a lot bigger jump than no delta. Yep. But when you said bump up, now in my head, I can't think of anything but uh it's not but bump up the volume, bump up the volume, bump up the volume, dance, dance. That's all I have going through my head now. So it's gonna be difficult for me to make any sort of sense of uh uh of anything.
All right, so uh another uh test that I ran that I couldn't get to work quite right, I was super excited. Maybe you can tell me how to make it work, is uh, and I did this last night as the final test before I talked to you. So another thing combi ovens are fantastic at because they have, again, they take a phenomenal amount of energy, is uh they actually function as full-fledged steamers. So, like if you I mean, if you're a real lobster restaurant, you probably get a pressure steamer, but let's not talk about that, right? But you could throw like uh a boatload of lobsters into a combi, you could do buns, you can do blah blah blah.
So I was like, all right, I'm gonna try to do a bunch of steam work. So I went and got, you know, as because I'm not crazy, you know, I didn't have a lot of time, I I got a bunch of frozen bow, a bunch of frozen uh shumai, a bunch of uh frozen um, you know, but just a bunch of assorted frozen uh uh like uh bun-like and dumpling-like dim sum delicacies. And uh I put them in, but I put them in just at not, I didn't use sous vide. I just put it in as 212 100% steam, and they took about 50% longer than they would in my steamer, and they were dry on the outside, like they're tacky on the outside. So, what did I do wrong?
Can you use it like that? Because if you can make it work, so what I hoped would happen, I put uh for those of you that I'm about to tell you something, I know that all of you already have parchment paper in your house, right? Because come on, people, parchment paper. Like parchment paper is like sweet. If you have room in your house, consider going to a professional restaurant supply and buying the pre-cut sheets of full sheet rack, full sheet tray parchment.
Now I know you're saying that your oven doesn't accept full sheets, and that's fine. Uh, but uh the easiest thing to do, that's the worst thing about home parchment paper is it comes on a roll and it's rolled up and it's a complete nightmare. Like rolled parchment paper. How many times have you cut a small piece of parchment paper off that roll because you're gonna put a bun or a roll on it to rise? And before, as soon as you put it on the counter, it turns into a uh a coil, and then you can't put anything on top of it.
And then you have stuff going over, and I'm the kind of guy that gets virulently angry when this sort of thing happens. And it's another reason why I always I like almost coat all of my pans with spray grease just to keep my parchments down. You know what I mean? Yeah, but if you buy this pre-flattened thing, ain't nothing easier than folding that parchment sheet in half, and just a knife just goes shunk and perf don't use scissors. That's a that's a that's a chump move.
Use scissors. You you fold it in half and knife shoom, and even then quarters, shoom. And if you keep uh uh one of these boxes of flat parchments in your house, you you're not gonna regret it. Am I right about this, Scott? Oh, absolutely.
In fact, uh I found a supplier on Amazon who has uh uh uh recycled parchment pre-cut for jelly roll pan size, which is like perfect for this oven and sheet, sheet, sheet uh all day long. It's awesome. Yeah, so what you do, what I hoped you would do is you would take the uh the pan, you well, you get a pan, we'll talk about pans in a minute, pan, uh rack, parchment, and then all of your steamed, like you know, dim sum a lots on top in the oven and go, and you could do a lot more than you could in a traditional even three-basket decent size uh steamer. But what did I do wrong and can it be fixed? So, first, not totally your fault.
Uh uh second, uh it turns out you'll actually get a better result at 213 than 212, uh, because it's a threshold value for the way that we control steam generation. So if you are at 212 or below and you put in 100% steam, we're actually generating 100% relative humidity. Right. If you put in 213 and above, then you're actually controlling sort of the duty cycle of steam. So 100% steam at 213 is gonna produce a lot more steam than 100% at 212.
That said, um, we also recognize that right now uh the oven is a little deficient in this pure steam mode, exactly the scenario you described, but there's hope. Um our boiler, so we've we've got a dedicated boiler that's in the in the back of the oven, it's behind the rear panel near the convection fan. And uh that boiler is a 1200 watt boiler. Now you add together the the 1200 watt boiler and the 1600 watt top heating element and the uh 1600 watt rear element, whatever, and you get way more power than we can safely pull from the wall without tripping your circuit. So that power budget um gets sort of doled out and metered.
We can't use it all at once. Um right now, we're never actually driving the boiler at its full 1200 watts. Even when you've put in 100%, we've got it like tamed down a little bit. Uh but this is something we're testing right now in firmware updates to introduce basically a a control system, um uh a boiler and heating control algorithm specifically around this pure steaming scenario that we hope to ship out in the next uh couple weeks. Right.
Yeah, okay, good. So like this might be fixed relatively soon. Because it's a killer app if it works. Yeah, yep, yep. Uh absolutely.
Uh we By the way, your your your European version, does it have a lot higher wattage or no? Uh it's got a little bit higher wattage uh budget. So the US version is 1800 watts. That's the total budget we have to play with. Uh European version on 240 gives you 2400 watts.
You ever consider giving me a separate plug plug into a separate circuit or just too much too complicated for the general general joke amount? Uh a little complicated for uh for our general audience here. However, some you know super savvy uh folks or people who are like they cook in their you know home lab uh that's a little less of a kitchen, more of a laboratory, uh will buy the European version because they've got 220 available and they want to take advantage of the extra power. Yeah, all right, cool. Uh let's get to some of the questions.
So from uh long time uh listener, friend of the show, and by the way, purchaser of equipment, Capri Sun. Please go over the current issues with the oven. Cracking tanks, warped pans, steam generator gasket. What's the uh issue? What's the solution and time frame?
I'm close to purchasing, seems great. I love the price point, but all a bit concerned about long-term durability, past a two-year warranty. Yeah, everyone hates your pans, but you know what? It's like almost like you have to include it. It's like you don't care about it, you had to include it, right?
You want people to go out and buy their own pans pretty much, it seems. Well, the pan was a big mistake. Um, so it turns out that uh making a pan that doesn't warp at high temperature uh is hard. Uh and the world's solution to this problem is to use a lot more metal, right? So you can go buy like Chicago Metallics makes uh fabulous pans that don't warp at high temperature, but they use a lot of steel.
And if you've been paying attention to the price of steel lately, like they might as well be made of gold. And so there was a late breaking change just before we went to mass production to switch sort of how our pan looked and felt, and it slipped in before we could fully test it. And so a bunch of customers, basically our first batch of customers, received this super flimsy flat pan that when you got it too hot, uh not too hot, when you got it you know in the upper temperature ranges of the oven would warp and it would make a popping sound, and it was it was really awful. Everybody, yeah. The oven itself also makes a pa-pump sound when after you open and close it.
You want to describe what that is? Uh some of that is our uh uh our valve. So we've got an overpressure valve so that we don't actually accidentally turn the oven into a steam pressure cooker. Uh and that controls whether steam is staying in the cavity or is being exhausted out uh in the front port. So sometimes you'll hear a clunk there.
Uh you'll also occasionally hear a little clunk, you know, these are sort of subtle things, uh, when we are dosing the boiler or the wet mold. We've got valves in the back of the oven that are going boop boom uh open and closed just momentarily there. Anyway, regarding the pan, um uh we stopped shipping that pan and instead shipped uh a different pan that doesn't warp. Unfortunately, that pan is not perfectly flat across the bottom. It's got these little it's ribbed.
Um I don't like rib pans, I have to say, Scott, I hate ribbed pans. Me too. Uh I I am not a fan, but it is our stop gap uh for the moment. Anyone who received the original flimsy pan, email support, and we'll get you a better pan for now. But we're just good support.
I like that. Hear that? That's like that's like John level support right there, right, John? Yes, it is. Thank you.
Yeah. So we've been we've been sending out pans galore to anybody who asked for one. Uh who can I have that word going through my head. Use galore, you know where I'm going with it anyway. Okay.
I haven't heard this one. Uh, what's going on there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So uh, you know, I mentioned combi ovens are complicated, and this is this is uh a V1 product. We're very proud of it, but we discovered a bunch of stuff that we're working hard to do with it.
First of all, what's the tank made out of? Is it Triton? Yes, uh, it's Triton. So it's uh it's uh very fancy plastic that would be used in your like high-end outdoor plastic wine glasses, like that kind of thing. Ooh, high-end plastic wine glasses.
Nastasia, can you hear that? High-end plastic. Occasions. Um the reason that we use tri like yellow yellowtail approved plastic wine glasses, am I right? Uh-huh.
Um, you gotta get yellowtail to sponsor us. We've called them out some. I know we insult them, but like, all right. We tried to just get all the merlot so that we could get our friends to jello wrestle in it, but you know, I don't know, whatever. I'm I'm picturing like uh uh like Ina Garden with uh like a uh a pastel sweater draped over her shoulders, drinking white wine out of our oven tank uh uh on the beach.
Um so it's that it's that kind of fancy. Um and we chose that because it is uh a food safe plastic. It's uh BPA free. Um so they say I use it as well, so I'm not saying anything. But yes.
Sure. Okay, here's the problem. Made by the Eastman Corporation, in case you guys care. Um when we are venting steam uh out of the oven, so whether you're you're cooking in a high steam mode or you're just cooking something that has a lot of water in it, like chicken wings, and we're driving that water off. Shaking wings, yep, go ahead.
That steam vents out part of the oven, and there's this little gap between the wall of the oven and where the tank sits. And that gap experiences thermal stresses. If it's hot, it cools off. It gets hot, it cools off. Those thermal stresses cause fissures in this triton material of the tank.
So these are these are tiny little cracks that are actually internal to the material. So almost, almost never will water leak out of those cracks. But like if you've had any of these, you know, fancy backyard plastic wine glasses uh that maybe you've put through the dishwasher and you've noticed they've developed these little fissures inside in the standard. You might want to call that crazing and not cracks, because no one thinks that crazing is going to go all the way through. Right.
This is crazing. That's that is exactly the right word for it, unless uh you know, unless it's happened to you, in which case you're gonna call it a crack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So uh so this is this has happened to the tank. Um, it does not uh in almost all cases, the structural integrity of the tank is just fine, but it shouldn't happen, right?
You you you spent good money on this oven, you want it to look beautiful, you want it to behave right. This shouldn't happen. Um problem is there are very, very few materials that can withstand these thermal stresses and are food safe and are clear. Well, why is that so that's another but the issue is also like for those of you that can picture an oven like a black, like like uh Darth Vadery, it's definitely this was built by the Empire for sure. Like it's it's not a rebel oven, it's built by the Empire.
And if you look in the lower right corner when you're at steam, it's pumping steam like the little engine that could out of that lower right corner, right? To the extent that, like, you know, Dax and Jen were like, is it supposed to do that? And I'm like, yes, it's supposed to, it's fine. It's fine. But you have to tell people it's fine because otherwise they think it's not, right?
Yep. Yep. There's a definitely a user expectation, uh uh sort of understanding around, you know, steam's gonna come out. And in fact, like your built-in oven at home when you're uh cooking at high temperature with something's got a lot of water in it, it's driving off a ton of steam too, except that that steam is spread out over a very large area. So by the time it is visible uh, you know, uh fog wherever it's entering your kitchen, it's so diffuse that you don't really see it and notice it.
In our case, in this oven, it's much more concentrated, and so it it looks like uh, you know, you could froth your latte in that part of the oven. All right, so there's no so like it's just it shouldn't happen, but you don't really have a fix for it, but it's not actually gonna cause a problem, but you understand why it ticks people off. That's right. And uh if it bothers you, uh email support and we'll send you a new tank. Um, but uh just understand that that new tank is not a long-term fix yet.
We're still trying to find the right material that's gonna withstand uh these thermal stresses. And what's what what is what are you saying? What are the problems with the steam generator gasket? Are they are you talking about the actual blip bloop? Because you use a when I say blip bloop, for those of you that ever had a um like uh a humidifier, there's a there's a little, there's a little megilla at the bottom of your tank that allows you to remove the tank without it spilling all over the floor and yet still be gravity fed.
So I'm gonna call that a bloop bloop. Is that what they're talking about? Is that the problem people are having? Uh no, uh, we've had uh a very small number of users. Uh so in the middle of the floor of the oven uh is a stainless steel disc.
Uh that's the evaporator plate. So it's part of um part of our method of steam generation and to use less water total, uh excess moisture that condenses in the cavity pools up in the middle of the floor of the oven, and then we have a separate heater right there to boil that back off and put it back into the air of the oven. And that plate has a rubberized gasket around it. And in some cases, for reasons that we don't totally understand yet, maybe people uh had placed hands directly on the floor of the oven captured too much heat, we don't really know. Uh in some for some users, those gaskets um started to uh separate or come away.
Um it, you know, it's not really a leak concern uh for most cases in the oven. The other thing to note is that um in the US and and to be deployed throughout the rest of the world, uh we actually do in-home repair service uh for this. So sometimes uh, you know, if the oven's just totally kaput, we'll just exchange it for a new one for you. Um you mail it to us and we mail you a new one. But if it's uh an issue, a repairable issue or something that we can identify uh from the symptoms, we'll actually send an electrolyx technician to your house and they'll make the fixes for you.
Well, all right. Uh that's the advantage of working with a big company. By the way, I got a bunch of sesame seeds caught under mine. So I just used the uh, I just gently used a bamboo skewer to get it off. Is that kosher or not kosher?
Totally works. Uh if it were a teak skewer, you we'd have problems. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. Uh all right, Johnny Baseball writes in: uh, do you think the ANOVA precision oven?
And by the way, the the forums, they call it just the APO. They call it the APO. Yeah. Uh do you think that the uh APO would be good for frozen burritos? Yes.
Yes. Absolutely. Asking for a friend. Sure, Johnny. Sure, Johnny, you're asking for a friend.
Yeah. Do you think the APO would be good when my girlfriend left me and uh and I'm crying into my frozen food? Yes, it's good for that too. Or it's 4 a.m. and I had a different kind of delivery, and I need something that's out of my freezer, maybe.
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Put the fastest growing egg brand on your menu. Get a free sample of Just Egg for your restaurant at J U.st slash H R N. Dale Harris writes in, hey, uh combi ovens generally, Innova in particular for bread or pastry, as a coffee uh so this person also basically Dale Harris uh is uh is like a world champion barista, recommends the nine barista machine, says it's nicely in which is from last show. It's that it's that kind of cool espresso concept where they um again I've never touched one in the real life where you uh they generate the heat and the pressure, legitimately generate the pressure, and then use a heat exchanger to drop the the temperature of the heated liquid back uh before they put it through the thing. Says it makes uh legit espresso, and as a world champion barista, I guess he would know.
But uh he's asking about combi ovens in general for bread and pastry, and I had uh somebody else wrote in a similar question, uh Aragost via Twitter. Every sourdough bread recipe, not just sourdough, Aragost, every like crusty bread recipe, agrees that baking breads need steam. If I have a steam oven, can I avoid using the pot plus lid method? How does steam help the formation of crust? Um I have uh those uh in there about bread and and pastry.
I'll you know, let you say I'll give you my two cents, you know, because again, I don't work for the company, so I'm you know theoretically I'm less biased. Uh I found that the results were indistinguishable from using a uh Dutch oven when um I used uh the what you guys recommend, which is a higher than uh what I would normally my normal recipe would be 450 degrees Fahrenheit on convection. Put a uh a Dutch oven in for about 45 minutes, uh allow it to fully heat, uh put it in uh uh that way. I use the convection just to speed up the heating of the of the iron, get it all up to temperature, and then put the loaf in. I cook for between 25 and 30 minutes at that, then remove the I do inverted cooking so then I remove the large part of the cloche.
It's not sitting in the Dutch oven anymore. And then another, probably depending on the loaf, 10 to 15 with the convection usually off. And nowadays I also then put it in the vacuum machine to freaking crustify the crust. Like the vacuum machine is my new favorite toy when I'm pulling bread out of the oven. Anyway, so that's my standard.
When I'm doing it in the ANOVA, I do what's your top 482? I do 482 with 100% steam for a half hour and then drop it to um and then drop it to probably 400 at 0% steam for the remainder of the bake. Is that what you guys recommend or no? Uh yeah, uh for you know, for a big crusty sourdough loaf, something like that. Now, of course, your uh times and temperatures will vary based on the characteristics of your dough and sugar content and the way you proof and all this kind of stuff.
Uh uh the nice thing is you've got like total adjustability. You set those parameters however you want. Um Dutch ovens are great, right? They produce great bread, no question uh about it. But one of the challenges is that it is it is in a lot of ways black box baking.
Uh so if if something goes wrong, if you don't get a great result, like you know, if you're whatever, you your ear doesn't open the right way or you're gonna blow out or something like that. It's really hard to debug and diagnose because you're only seeing the bread at that snapshot in time once you've removed the the uh the top uh off that Dutch oven or the or the bottom in your case with with inverted uh Dutch oven baking. It is amazing how much information you get about what's going on when you can watch the whole bake through the glass of the door. And you can you can see, you know, in slow motion, but a lot of people will point their time-lapse cameras at it. Uh, the way that you get your initial oven spring, or the way that uh your score is unfolding to reveal the ear or the rate at which the crust is browning and all this kind of stuff, um, is super super useful for identifying like what's going on or what's going wrong.
So uh so it's fabulous for that, but it's also a case that like uh baguettes are a little challenging to do inside a Dutch oven. And so the versatility uh that you can do we partnered with baking steel um uh out of Massachusetts uh to develop a uh a steel slab that's sized for this oven. Uh and you put it in on the rack, uh preheat it, uh, and it gives you a lot of the characteristics that you get from a deck oven. So direct steam injection, and now this like really nice hot uh reservoir of thermal energy uh for under your baking. Um by the way, if you if you guys, I'm not trying to say anything against like go go get the fancy one that's all food grade stuff, but you can also just get 12 by 12 sheets of steel like for like nothing.
Nothing. Like anyway, um but well, just to show you about like kind of like the benefits and the by the way, it also works well to proof. Um, but uh, you know, so the issue, the only issue with it was the the quality of it was was great. And I think the reason that you stick it at 482 is it takes about ooh, it takes like 25 minutes to heat up to 100% steam and uh 482 degrees Fahrenheit. That's the I only have so much power coming out of the wall phenomenon.
And once you have the moisture and you're making that steam and you're heating it up, it takes a good long time to get up there, right? So like that's what and that's why I think you want to heat your temperature up a lot higher than you necessarily normally would for your normal cast iron bakery, because when you put that loaf in, right, and by the way, for me the big advantage of this is I detest manipulating that freaking 450-degree uh Dutch oven. I hate having to open and close everything a million times. I hate the fact that when I do the inversion into the Dutch oven, I get sesame seeds and wheat bran everywhere. I don't flat I hate the whole thing.
I hate all of it except for the results, right? Uh whereas this, you know, you're over by your sink, you you you do it on parchment, you load the parchment in on a peel, you don't burn yourself, you're not worried. That all I appreciate. But uh the reason you can think you go up to like such a high temperature is because the temperature immediately drops to about 400 degrees and then comes back up. You know what I mean?
4004 20. So you get a big drop because remember what I told you guys, you're not taking a lot of power out of the wall. You have uh a relatively low emissivity, i.e., shiny. You have a uh uh a shiny oven, and so it doesn't store a lot of its own energy. So And then we've got a we've got an energy hungry piece of wet dough uh sitting in the oven that uh that you know we're trying to transmit as much energy uh as quickly as possible into the surface of that loaf uh once it hits the oven, so you get great oven spraying.
And there is where steam, uh, real steam is a real benefit, because that steam carries the latent heat of vaporization, so it's it acts like an energy battery and can deposit tremendous amounts of energy really fast onto the surface of the bread. Yeah. It's also this. I think really good strangely for sometimes like later in the bake, stopping stuff from drying out when it needs to go longer because the inside's not done, but the outside's done. I mean, uh, anyway, so I think, yeah, I mean, I haven't fully sussed it out, but I think uh I haven't fully sussed it out, but I think you know, there's a lot more for me to learn.
I've only been using it. And the good news is about the uh well, the good and the bad news about uh the application, right? Is that you have a bunch of people who have done recipes. Now I'll talk about some recipes I've tried. I've done your bacon, I did your bacon 101 recipe.
Uh it's it's good. You do need to dry it out a little bit. I think I will I go a little bit on the longer side, but for those of you that have again use parchment. I wouldn't use the pan that comes with it. I would put your bacon into a uh black or an enamel pan, something that has uh high emissivity, because it's gonna give you kind of a uh a crispier result.
Um I did actually I did your chicken, but I cheated, Scott. Uh huh. Uh I I didn't have time to let it dry. Who the hell has all these recipes on your website take like three days because of the pre prep on it? Who the hell has time?
You guys have a dehydrate function. Why not just dehydrate the freaking chicken in the oven before you uh do it? That's what I did. I just threw it in the oven at a hundred degrees on dehydrate for like 45 minutes to tack out the skin before I did the roast cycle. That works too.
Uh that works too. I, you know, I like to let my chicken sleep on it uh in the fridge just to break up the prep and it makes me look like a clean kitchen hero when I'm making dinner the next day. Yeah, all right, fine. By the way, the recipe, if you if you make the recipe, if you've never had the full like combi sous-vieed combination chicken thing, it's real wet. So some people love it and some people don't.
It's a very wet bird. And by that I mean the meat hasn't like lost a lot of its juices, which sounds great, but it's not great for everyone. It is perfectly cooked. And and Wes Hendrickson says, can you do Delta uh Delta T low temp with the probe? Absolutely.
And it's really good at switching over modes once the probe hits what it wants, which is how I did it with the chicken. Uh, but just be aware that that that's an issue. Now, the downside of that freaking thing, and I can't figure it out, and I was hoping you could help me is I'm an old guy. This is why I ask you about third-party things, right? I'm old school, right?
So I like to F with things in the middle of a cook. Yep. So, like, and it's not clear to me if you have a three-step cook lined up, it's like if you're the kind of person that doesn't care about it, like doing you press go, it does all three steps, and you're good, right? But if I want to adjust the middle step, I find it hard to figure out whether I've accurately adjusted the middle step or not. I wish I could have a third-party box that just had all the literal knobs.
I'm such a knob guy. You know what I mean? Where I could just tweak tweak the knobs. I mean, I know this is a software thing, and so it can change at any time, but do you have other people who have issues with figuring out whether they've changed the settings properly? Yes.
Uh it's it's a place that we're trying to actively improve. Um we, you know, there's this balance between like power and simplicity. Uh and we veered in the direction of power, basically, complexity, uh, making sure that that if you wanted to approach this like an engineer, you've got all the controls available. So you can do what you're describing. You can change the values in the middle of the cook.
And in fact, even in a multi-stage thing where you just hit go, at any part of the stage, you can walk right up to the oven and tap the temperature button and change it, or change your temperature. Right, but I can never figure out exactly because it doesn't then like like the app doesn't say you've changed the middle setting. Are you cool with that? Yeah, that's what actually what I wanted to have happen. You know what I mean?
Yep, uh, completely understand. So we're uh we're working on improvements to what that UX is like to really make it clearer uh what you're changing, what you're interacting with. The power is all there right now, but it's not as usable as it ought to be. Yeah, it's not clear to me exactly what's happening. And I like to I like especially with cooking, it's like, you know, like the yes chef phenomenon.
You want your oven to say yes chef, you know what I mean? Yeah, to let you know that it has uh, but again, that's a that that that that's that's a software thing. So now on the other side, a couple of things because Matt's gonna rip me off uh of the air. Oh, someone wants to know Yemble writes in what can't it do that a full-size oven can, two dozen cookies, a decent size scratch pizza. It can do a decent sized pizza.
Uh yeah, you can fit a 12-inch pizza. We had people doing 15-pound turkeys uh last Thanksgiving. Uh, you know, almost everything. Maybe if you want to do like a whole king salmon, then you're out of luck. Yeah, you can you could do a tall cheesecake unless it's really big.
And by the way, uh is if you don't mind oblong pizzas, it's basically 17 by 12 is the inside uh platform. So and you can get a good size steel. Uh, uh it's 16 and three quarters by like a steel that will fit easily. Yes, yeah. And so, like, it's roughly anything that's under 17, 12, you're gonna get in there.
And so, like, uh, that's pretty big pizza if you can go lengthwise. Um, two dozen cookies. I mean, uh, it doesn't fit a full sheet rack, it fits like a jelly roll pan. So anything you can fit on two jelly rolls, it's kind of the things that are difficult for me to buy is I can't get a decent black pan for like someone makes a Detroit pizza pan that'll fit, but it's like $70. So stupid.
Why the hell does it cost that much freaking money? I'm thinking of spray painting the by the way, for those of you that care, don't do this because it's not food grade. But it doesn't matter. The the color of the pan that's touching the food doesn't matter. It's the color of the pan that's facing the oven that matters.
So uh if you're doing pan pizza, so you can just spray paint the bottom of your pan as long as you don't let the paint touch your food. And as long as you get a paint that's not gonna rub off on your oven. But I didn't tell you to do that because it's not a good idea. Anyway, um, one of the things that first literally the first thing I tried was toast because Dax and Jen both came in and were like, what? I just want to make toast.
Yeah, now that I'm gonna have to go ahead and put it this way. Like, you might want to, if you're using this to replace a toaster oven, you might just want to get a toaster to sit next to it. Now, Scott, the eight-minute toast, it it's fine. By the way, you guys familiar, John, Anastasia, Matt, you familiar with the $300 Balmuda toaster, $400 Balmuda toaster. Makes like one, it's a Japanese toaster, makes one slice of toast at a time, maybe two.
Uh one American slice of bread and two of those little milk milk toast bread. And it's a steam toaster, and all it does is make toast. And it takes a while to do it, but it went crazy, and people bought all of these several hundred dollar, like relatively large for the amount of, I mean, really large for the amount of toy toast it can make, toasters, right? You can buy them in the MoMA design store. And every and uh a couple years ago when they first started getting popular on the internets, people were like, Dave, is this steamed toast a thing?
And I was like, I don't know. I'm not gonna spend $400 to figure out whether or not I like this, you know, fancy Japanese toaster or not. Uh and but the the good news is if you want to try fancy Japanese toast, the uh, you know, uh they've written, uh I forget it wasn't you, Scott, it was someone else at ANOVA wrote a uh uh a toast recipe to mimic the Balmuda uh toast uh procedure. And I'm here to tell you folks it's fine. Like it's fine.
Yeah are are you gonna be like, oh my god, I need to wait eight minutes for toast because this toast is the most toastiest mctoast of all toast on the toast lands. No, it is fine. Uh and so uh there you have it. Uh, you know, i if what you want is to wake up in the morning and you're extremely bleary-eyed, uh, and you don't want to pick up your phone, might want to have a good old-fashioned four-sliced toaster sitting next to it. Just saying.
I hope that's not insulting you, Scott, but I'm just saying that if you have the room, might want a toaster. This is not a toaster oven, people. It is not a toaster oven. Yeah, that is fair feet, fair feedback. Yeah.
Uh did I miss anything, John or Nastasia? No. No. No. Anyway, so uh you guys can stop asking me about the uh ANOVA precision oven because we have now told you probably more than you want to know.
Although uh you can ask questions later about uh combis in general or why you would want them, uh why you would use them. Oh, I talked about the toast. Any other weird uh things that people try, like uh cult recipe, Scott, on the way out? Uh grilled cheese actually has a cult following. Uh uh uh on a griddle in the oven uh and then using the steam to get that cheese super melty throughout, and so you get fluffy bread, crispy outsides, and fully melted cheese.
Yeah, one last thing on the way out. Like I know I said this, but if you're if you're okay, so like I have a lot of gas in my apartment, and not just from you know the family members. I mean, like we have a lot of gas. I have very high output equipment, right? But uh ever since I had you know a good uh controlled induction burner, I use that a lot for holding and reheating like liquids and braises.
And I have a feeling that I'm gonna be using this one a lot for hot holding. It definitely beats the piss out of anything I've used for hot holding and reheating. Um if you are the kind of person who's like me who likes control, like you have to assess your family members and you have to talk to your family members about it. And like I say, like if they're the kind of people that want to get up and make toast, you might want to buy them a toaster oven because uh how many people out there can afford to have a toaster oven and one of these sitting on your counter? Who has that much counter space?
I I know I don't. But uh so I hope we've given you the pluses, the minuses, the drawbacks. Uh hopefully, you know, Scott, you enjoyed coming on talking about it. We appreciate it. Uh all of your non combi uh related uh questions we'll get to uh next week on uh oh, was there anything else we was there anything else we uh missed, John that we needed to talk about?
No. On the way out, listen to this people. We'll talk about it more next time. In my neighborhood, crab restaurants and the new thing, crabs everywhere. Nastasia, do you have any new crab restaurants up in Connecticut?
They're popping up everywhere. I don't know what's going on. It's takeover of the crabs. There are four new crab restaurants in my neighborhood. I need people to discuss why are crabs.
Crabs are the new poke. What's going on with that? Also, if anyone cares, Passover's coming up. Uh and when I was uh when when Booker was a small kid, everyone on our floor had a mazuza on the on their door except for us because we were the only people who weren't orthodox on our floor. And the mazuza's the little the little scroll with a prayer on the door that you put on every door at the angle if you've ever seen them.
And so we went and we bought one. Uh I I went to the, you know, the the local, you know, the uh religious item shop, and I was like, hey, you know, uh, is it offensive if we buy this mazuza and put it on our door, we're not Jewish. My son just, you know, we feel left out on the floor because everyone else has it, and you know, he who wants one on the door. Is it cool? And the guy was like, yeah, sure, I don't care.
It's cool, fine, buy it. So we bought it and we put it up. And we sold that apartment, I don't know, seven, eight years ago. But I went and uh a local group of Lebovichers who are, you know, doing outreach put a whole bunch of uh fancy schmura matzah on the on the at our at our old doorstep and we were visiting, and the Shmuramatza is the one where like they make it by hand, they they they literally see it from the minute the wheat is grown to make sure that it never gets leavened. It's like the most overlooked matza in the world.
And I feel like we won like all these years later, I get payback because I get the free, awesome fancy matzah. So as soon as we saw it, because we went and visited, you know, my sister in law lives there now. We're like, fancy Matza, Mazuza, yes, cooking issues. Cooking Issues is powered by Simplecast. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network.
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