It's Here!: Spinzall Edition.

Yesterday evening my Spinzall arrived!

 The Spinzall is the latest product from Dave Arnold's company Booker and Dax, makers of the Searzall torch attachment.  It is the first centrifuge designed for the home cook.  Late last year Booker and Dax launched a crowdfunding campaign at Modernist Pantry to fund the tooling and initial production run and since I'm a bit of a gadget hound I jumped in.  The delivery was made in the evening while I happened to be at the grocery store so I picked up some fresh basil and a neutral flavor vegetable oil so I would have something to play with.  After unpacking the Spinzall I cleaned all the parts that would contact the food with hot, soapy water, rinsed well and allowed to dry while I finished reading through the instruction book.  For the first trial run I cooked some whole garlic cloves in about a cup of the oil until they started turning brown, then turned off the heat and added another 3/4 cup of room temperature oil to stop the cooking.  I cooled the oil further by placing the bottom of the saucepan in cold water, then put everything in a blender jar with about 1/2 cup of fresh basil leaves and blended on high for about a minute.  After reassembling the Spinzall the basil/garlic/oil mixture was poured in the rotor, the lid and bowl locked in place and the timer set to 15 minutes.

In the video below I had left the cap off the feeder, so it's a little louder than normal.  I also may not have one of the fins in properly.

I should have taken a photo of the basil oil before spinning to show all the particulate matter it contained, but here is the final product.  Some of the bits came loose while I was removing the rotor from the bowl and the fins from the rotor, but they could have been easily filtered out if I had bothered.  Definitely could have used more basil and there are probably some enzymes I could use that would break down the leaves more.  I ordered the Spinzall Pre-Treatment Starter Kit from Modernistpantry.com this morning so hopefully I'll be able to make a better product in the near future.  Videos of different things that can be made with the Spinzall are starting to pop up so I'll be able to explore more possibilities for this piece of equipment.

It's Here: Paragon upgrade kit

I've had my Paragon Induction Cooktop for a while now and have been using it mostly for deep frying.  I know it's capable of doing much more, but I prefer using the gas range for sauteing and an immersion circulator (Nomiku, Anova, Joule) for sous vide.  Recently they offered an upgrade kit that would expand the cooktops abilities so I jumped in.

As noted on the box, the upgrade kit includes a mat, a temperature probe and a sensor module.

After opening the box.  Pretty sparse documentation but all the important stuff about getting the sensor paired to to the cooktop is easy to follow.  So what does the upgrade kit do?  The new mat goes between the cooktop and a pan and measures the temperature of the pan so you can control the surface temperature, this will be very useful for things like shallow frying, tempering chocolate and candy making where you want to bring your sugar up to a specific temperature.  The battery/sensor module is a separate piece that fits in to both the mat and the sensor probe, the original module was an integral part of the probe.  This should make it much less of a hassle to charge it and if something fails you won't have to replace the entire probe assembly.

Here is the mat in action, depending on which mode you're using you'll get some degree of overshoot with an empty pan (especially in "Rapid Mode") but the sensor reading from the mat seems to mesh pretty well with the actual surface temperature reading from my IR thermometer.

One downside of the upgrade kit is that the mat can only go up to 375°f, same as the temperature probe.  That means it probably won;t be particularly for post sous vide searing.  There is a new product coming from First Build called the Tasty One Top that appears to be basically the same technology.  From the description it looks like the surface temperature sensor is built in to the unit rather being a separate mat.  It also will feature Bluetooth connectivity for control via an app, but minimal on-board controls.  It will also have a higher temperature range up to 450°f making it useful for searing.  These are not out in the wild yet (expected shipping date in November) so I have no idea about the quality of the hardware, but may be something to take a look at if someone is interested in this type of technology.

Next week I should recieve my most expensive kitchen gadget yet, a Spinzall home culinary centrifuge.  Once I've had a chance to play around with it a bit I'll post a review.

Labor day dinner

Just wanted to make a quick post about Labor Day dinner this past week.  More of a lunch, we had to go to a funeral that evening so the meal was pretty early.  On the menu was sous vide ribeye steak, air fried potatoes and broccoli puree.

The steak was seasoned with salt, pepper, minced dried onion, minced dried garlic and ground togarashi (found this stuff at my local supermarket and have been using it on everything lately!).  It was vacuum sealed with the trusty old FoodSaver and cooked in a 130°f water bath (heated with my Joule immersion circulator) for about 2 1/2 hours then pressed under a weighted sheet pan for 15 minutes and finally seared in a screaming hot skillet.  The potatoes were first boiled to get the cooking process started, then allowed to dry out a bit before dressed with salt, pepper, togarashi and olive oil and placed in my air fryer to crisp up.  The broccoli was trimmed and cooked in the same water as the potatoes, once tender it was put in a blender with a little of the cooking liquid and pureed.  I added a bit too much water to the broccoli which made the puree little too loose, so I added a few of the potatoes to tighten it up.  All in all a great meal.