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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

centrifuge

The Spinn Coffee Maker Is Still MIA For Early Backers

(Update: You can see the December 2018 update on my Spinn journey here.)

In 2016, I backed a high-tech coffee maker called the Spinn.

At the time, I was enticed by the combined grind & brew capability of the Wi-Fi connected coffee maker, but the real reason I bought the Spinn was its patented centrifugal brewing technology. The tech, which I talked to the inventor about on a podcast back in 2016, uses a high-speed centrifuge to extract crema-like coffee brews down to the individual cup level.

It all sounded pretty good to me, so I coughed up $300 and waited for my new coffee maker. However, now with the product’s original mid-2017 and revised first quarter 2018 ship dates in the history books, I’m left wondering: will I ever get my Spinn?

I’m not the only one. A casual perusal of the company’s forums or Facebook page shows that many of early backers of the Spinn are getting restless. Throw in the multiple emails I get per week asking me if I’d heard anything (from the volume of email I get about the Spinn, I gather I may be the only journalist monitoring the progress of the product) and it seems like the company has a bit of a trust problem on its hands.

Now, it’s not like the company hasn’t been communicating. They’ve actually done a pretty good job of sending out periodic updates via its forum. The problem for the company is that once they missed their original ship date of mid-2017, they started telling all the first batch purchasers of the Spinn they’d see their coffee makers by the end of the first quarter in 2018. But by the time March rolled around, the company had moved the goal posts once again and said they were only sending machines out to “beta testers”.

Now as with any crowdfunding campaign, I knew I was taking a risk when I bought the Spinn back in 2016. But I’d backed lots of hardware projects over the past few years, and Spinn seemed to check all the boxes. Not only did they have patented technology that was differentiated, but they’d also licensed their technology to Nespresso to use in the newest line of that company’s pod-based brewing machines.

But almost two years later, I’m starting to worry I may have guessed wrong. Not only has the company missed two ship dates and is being vague about when the product will actually ship, but when I asked to talk to a “beta tester”, the company told me they cannot connect me to beta testers as they are “still going through iterations and bugs.”  Add in other potential warning signs like the departure of the Spinn technology inventor last year and one can see why I and other early backers are starting to worry.

To its credit, the company has offered myself and others a refund, but for now I’m going to continue to hang in there because I still really want a Spinn. However, like other early backers, I’ll be more skeptical about any deadlines the company gives since the company missed a long-promised ship date. At this point, I’m just hoping to see my Spinn sometime before Christmas so I can brew the coffee roasted with the Kelvin home coffee roaster, yet another high-tech coffee gadget I backed through crowdfunding.

Wired’s Joe Ray Reviews The Spinzall And The Results Are Cloudy

Let’s get this out of the way: I love to read Joe Ray’s kitchen gadget reviews. Perhaps more than any modern cooking gadget reviewer, Ray not only keeps real-world consumer concerns front of mind as he evaluates new products, but he does so in a way that shows off a strong understanding of advanced culinary concepts all while explaining new technology in an approachable way.

And oh yeah: he’s funny too.

The result of this unique combination of skills makes his reviews a joy to read, and so when I saw he’d written a review of Dave Arnold’s new home centrifuge, I suspected it’d be the definitive wrap-up of this intriguing product.

I was right.

For those of you not familiar with Arnold or his newest contraption, here’s a quick catchup. Arnold himself is a modern day culinary renaissance man: part mad scientist, part award-winning food writer, part museum curator. In 2014, Arnold won the James Beard award for the book Liquid Intelligence, a Modernist Cuisine for the craft cocktail set, which added to an already sizable cult following from years of writing, podcasting and inventing interesting culinary hardware products.

So when Arnold announced his latest product, the Spinzall, there was understandably a lot of interest. The product is an $800 countertop centrifuge. While that price may be somewhat eye-popping, it’s a downright bargain compared to most high-end centrifuges which can cost thousands of dollars.

The excitement was also fed in part by Arnold’s emphasis on the use of centrifuges in Liquid Intelligence. Here at the Spoon we’ve been following the Spinzall’s journey to market, all the way back when Arnold first started pre-selling the device and through his crowdfunding efforts. We even had him on the podcast.

And now the Spinzall is finally shipping, which brings us to Ray’s review.

Ray begins his review in a way that reminds of how my wife reacts every time I bring home a new product: shoulder-shrugging indifference combined with bemusement at how excited I am for something that, for normal people, doesn’t seem all that life-changing:

NOT LONG AGO, I poured a bottle of fancy whipping cream into the gadget I was reviewing, started it up and watched in awe as the machine’s rotor began spinning rapidly, creating a vertical wall of solidified dairy that stayed in place after the machine wound down.

“Behold,” I exclaimed as my wife Elisabeth passed through the kitchen. “I made butter in a centrifuge!”

“Wow,” she said with a tone that foretold bubble bursting. “Did they run out of butter at the store?”

Before long, Ray rolls up his sleeves and jumps into the review with vigor. He makes two versions of a clarified lime juice recipe, one with the Spinzall and one with a method the same Dave Arnold wrote about in 2009 in which he said, “Not only do you not need a centrifuge, you don’t need the bag and you don’t need the vacuum.”

At the end of his lime juice journey, Ray found he got better results with Arnold’s 2009 non-centrifuge technique.

He then tried out making spreadable yogurt and flavored oil to decent but somewhat eventful results:

I made the labneh and spun up some basil oil, and they were tasty but the machine had a hiccup while I was making the oil where the lid rotated toward the open position while it was running. I couldn’t get it to open any further, but it no longer felt fully secure, which is disconcerting when the rotor below continued to spin away at 4,000 rpm.

In the end, Ray suggests Arnold’s centrifuge probably makes sense for bartenders and craft cocktail enthusiasts trying to take their art to the next-level, but the Spinzall didn’t seem worth it for someone without $800 and a surplus of counter space to spare:

The Spinzall certainly has some neat tricks up its sleeve. It might solve a problem or two for owners of small bars (a larger bar would need several machines) or make for good entertainment for food nerds who like to throw parties and have $800 to blow. For the most part, however, it’s hard to justify awarding it a space on your counter.

Go read Ray’s full review here. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Dave Arnold’s Centrifuge, The Spinzall, Is Now For Sale

Recently we caught up with Dave Arnold, the energetic, food-obsessed author of Liquid Intelligence: The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail and the director of the Museum of Food & Drink. He told us all about the new centrifuge he’s making for home and restaurant use.

And now it’s officially for sale! Called the Spinzall, it’s available now for a promotional price of $699 (it will eventually cost $999.99, so hurry and buy one now), exclusively on Modernist Pantry. The sale is part of a crowdfunding campaign where he is looking to hit a goal of just under $700 thousand. He’s off to a good start, with $155 thousand in sales with 30 days to go.

So why would you want one? Well, you can use it to clarify any liquid you could ever want, for starters, especially fruit juices or even coffee. But where the centrifuge really “blows everything else out of the water,” Arnold told us, is with flavored and infused oils. “I don’t anticipate there being any other tool on the market that will touch it,” Arnold said. “Throw [the spices] in a centrifuge and the flavor is just like, ‘Sploooosh!’” Same for other recipes that don’t yield high amounts, like the famous pea butter from Modernist Cuisine, which he said is better made at home for a small family than in a restaurant with lots of hungry patrons. It also apparently makes delicious baby food, is dishwasher-safe, and comes with a guide and recipes.

Now, this might seem like a pretty unlikely appliance, but considering that the rest of the centrifuges on the market cost around $5,000, the Spinzall is a huge steal. It’s also only Arnold’s first attempt at a centrifuge, and he has promised to keep innovating until he finds something with “mass market appeal.” With the success of his first product, the Searzall, we believe him. Because it’s clear that consumers want more and more specific kitchen tools, with the power of science behind them.

Watch the video below to hear Dave talk about the Searzall:

How the Spinzall Works

Want To Give Centrifugal Coffee Brewing A Spin? Now You Can

Centrifuges aren’t just for uranium enrichment anymore.

Of course, chefs have been using centrifuges, machines that rapidly spin its contents to separate fluids, for some time, and culinary mad scientist Dave Arnold is busy creating a low-priced centrifuge for food hobbyists.

But now, coffee and centrifuges are the latest kitchen combo to go together like, well, coffee and cream. First there was Nespresso Vertuoline coffee and espresso maker line, which uses centrifusion within the brewing capsule to create creamy espressos and lattes.

And now there’s the Spinn, which uses a centrifuge to make coffee without the coffee pod.* This week is the first time you can preorder a Spinn, the culmination of years of work by Roland Verbeek, Spinn’s inventor, and the rest of the Spinn team. When we interviewed Verbeek early this year, he told us the story of how the company wanted to create not only a product that brewed coffee in a very different way, but also one that enabled consumers to buy coffee from small independent coffee growers.

The device, which starts at $499 when it ships in mid-2017, is available for preorder at a 40% discount for a limited time. While the core innovation is the centrifugal brewing, it can do lots more, including app-control, in-machine grinding, subscriptions & replenishment, and mobile app control/alerts. The preorder allotment is currently limited to two thousand machines.

To hear the full story of Spinn, check out the podcast here.

Spinn - The key to the Best Cup of Coffee

*The two efforts are related, as Nespresso licenses the centrifusion extraction technology from Spinn, an exclusive license for capsule-based brewing. 

Interview With the Greats: Dave Arnold on Innovation in the Kitchen

Dave Arnold never stops. The fortysomething owner of Manhattan cocktail bar Booker & Dax is exactly the kind of madman inventor that we need to push the food world forward, and lucky for us, he’s always working on a cool project. Even luckier, he always wants to tell you all about it.

Arnold is also the director of the Museum of Food & Drink in New York City, the host of Heritage Radio Network show Cooking Issues, and the author of Liquid Intelligence: The Art & Science of the Perfect Cocktail. He’s inspired an entire generation of chefs to innovate with technology in their search for ever better food and drinks, with wacky inventions like the Searzall blow torch for your steaks and milk-washed spirits for your cocktails. (And he’s working on a centrifuge for restaurant and home use!)

We sat down with Arnold a few weeks ago to talk shop about the future of food and technology. Here’s an abbreviated version of our conversation.

TheSpoon: Do you see a difference between technology for professional kitchens versus for home kitchens?

Dave: One-hundred percent. It can go both ways. In a professional kitchen, if something’s accepted, people will learn how to use it, because they have to. People in professional kitchens put up with things that you’re not allowed to sell to people at home, things that are very hot or very large or take a lot of energy.

The problem with restaurants is that chefs are extraordinarily busy, and they don’t trust that every one of their employees is a rocket scientist. So stuff in a restaurant has to be fairly intuitive to use and bulletproof. It has to withstand intense abuse. That’s why if you take off the label that says Vitamix and put on one that says Vitaprep, the price goes way up and the warranty goes way down, because everyone knows that in a commercial establishment, people beat the heck out of things. Commercial equipment needs to have a level of robustness and intuitive use that is not necessary for home equipment.

But home equipment — it depends on who you’re shooting at. When you’re shooting at people who aren’t avid cooks or who don’t cook that much, it has to be intuitive at home in a different way. It has to have a lot more convenience and bells and whistles on it. It has to polish out nicely, to tell you when your breakfast is done. Also, most home equipment is built around maximizing kitchen space, which is super important commercially as well, but typically home people don’t have to put out as much product out of a particular square footage. You’re maximizing a different problem.

Where it can get interesting is, you can have something that home people can experiment with because maybe you can’t make that much of it, so it’s hard to do in service because the product takes too long or maybe it’s a little too complicated to train everyone on. So things that I can do at home better than in a commercial kitchen? Rotary evaporation. It’s illegal to do rotary evaporation in a commercial kitchen because you’re doing distillation. But at home you’re dealing with a tinkerer. Someone who sees themselves as a learner, a hobbyist. There’s a weird sweet spot there for home people to do interesting things that are difficult to do in most commercial restaurant environments. Because as much as commercial restaurant environments are creativity driven, it’s business, and it’s hard to justify the cost of building in super-high levels of creativity.

Molecular Cocktails from Booker & Dax with Kate Krader and Dave Arnold

Molecular cocktails from Booker & Dax with Kate Krader and Dave Arnold; photo courtesy Flickr user Meng He

TheSpoon: Let’s talk about that creativity.

Dave: In the wake of the popularity of the Spanish style at El Bullí, there were a bunch of people who had positions in higher-end restaurants as research chefs. Not the way Chipotle would have a research chef; it was specifically for fine dining. I don’t really know how that trend is doing now, but it’s hard: Customers’ interest in visibly creative stuff goes up and down. Everyone always wants something to be different and new, but sometimes they want it to be different and new in a way that doesn’t look like people have been hypercreative with it, and sometimes they want hypercreative.

Look at the mid 2000s , with WD50, Alinea, Moto: All over the country a lot of the new techniques were being used and pioneered by restaurants that weren’t advertising that that’s what they were going to do. Modernist Cuisine is fairly good at documenting where a lot of these recipes came from. You can treat it as a library of where these ideas came from.

Even Michael Laiskonis at Le Bernadin was using hydrocolloids a lot. Dominique Ansel at Daniel, Greg Brainin at Jean-Georges. All the cooks who went there were smart people interested in these new techniques because they knew it would allow them to achieve something different, new and good. None of those folks were using it in very obvious ways that said to the customer, “This is using a new technique.” That’s what I mean by the hypercreativity isn’t always obvious.

When it is obvious, and people are actively trying creativity that way, there tends to be acceleration of what happens. People push the boundary faster and harder, make more mistakes frankly, so you try 10 things that suck and come up with 1 good thing. If you can do that you’re super winning.

TheSpoon: Right now with connected kitchen appliances it seems like everyone is trying way more than 10 things. How do we move away from gimmicks into useful technology?

Dave: I have a particular opinion on this. Ninety-nine percent of the applications that people are positing today will be the future, are not the future. If they are the future, God help us. It’s so dystopic that would someone would print your meal out. It’s a horror show. Luckily I don’t anticipate you ever pushing a button and it printing whatever paste it has, applying food coloring to it to make it look like a hamburger, and then you eat it.

The current printing technology is either working with liquids (in that case it sucks because you need your viscosity to be right), or you’re dealing with paste that has to be extruded through a very fine nozzle. There’s only so much you can do with current technology.

True, that technology will change and get better. Let’s say someday you could find what you think is going to be the best-tasting pig and then recreate it a million times with a transporter beam where you store the information and keep recreating it over and over again. Or maybe it’s the best meal ever. It would be like a CD player of meals: You could have your favorite chef create it, scan it, and then whenever you want, you could just have it. When you get to that level, sure, print me some food.

The issue isn’t that the current technology sucks (which it does) or that the way people are using the current technology is wrong and bad (which it most certainly is). All that’s important is that you push the technology. Someone will find a good use.

Look at the development of almost anything: Steam engines sucked for a while until someone got one that worked right. You need to have the person who has no idea what’s going to happen in the future just work. They need to work and make stuff and throw stuff against the wall and see what happens: Push technology, create. Eventually someone will do something amazing.

Searzall_FlickrArnoldGatilao

The Searzall in action; photo courtesy Flickr user Arnold Gatilao

We all have to play this game. Well, I don’t tend to play it, but most of us play it, where we pretend that the gimmick idea is reasonable when we all know it’s not. Of course it’s not reasonable!

Remember when they had the first car phones? If you had said, “That’s dopey, who the heck is going to use that?” we’d never have what we have today. Or as I said when I was a teenager in the 80s and somebody showed me email and I was like, “That’s not ever going to go anywhere.” Who knows? That person was wrong about why it was going to be great. The person who showed me had no understanding of how the technology was actually going to change the world, but they just kept at it.

TheSpoon: Are there certain food-tech trends that you’re excited about?

Dave: There’s stuff that I thought was going to have a lot of potential for a long time and never has. If you’d asked me over 10 years ago, I’d say by now almost everything would be completely traceable, RFID and that safety would be on lockdown and that we wouldn’t have recalls and all of this other nonsense. Once everything is traceable that way, I’d assumed we’d already be in a situation where — and we’re getting there — your grocery list would be more integrated with what you’re doing.

I didn’t expect FreshDirect and Peapod and all that to make as big a dent as it did, in the same way that I didn’t understand how the whole retail world was going to get flipped by Amazon the way it did 10 years ago.

Especially because in the late 90s, there was Urbanfetch. I was like, “Oh yeah, this is never going to work. You’re going to be connected on your computer and someone’s going to go show up in half an hour with your ice cream.” I used to mess with them. You weren’t allowed to tip them and they had no minimum order. So I was like, “It’s 4 AM. I’m going to hit this button, and you’re going to deliver me a pack of gum in half an hour?” The guy’s like, “Yes.” And they showed up with the gum and I’m like, “And I’m not allowed to tip you?” He’s like, “Nope.” And every time they were late they’d give you a free pint of ice cream. It’s a crazy business model. They were losing money, but that was back when people thought it was okay to lose money as long as you lost it in very large quantities. That was a sign that wasn’t going to work. That means someone comes along and does it right, like FreshDirect.

Here’s another situation where I was totally wrong. Who’s going to order vegetables off of a website? Turns out everybody, except me.

Most of the time, on these kinds of predictions, I’ve been wrong.

The only time I’ve been right — I predicted low-temperature sous vide cooking is going to grow and it’s here to stay. And that people will be interested in the why of cooking. It’s not a fad. The general trend is toward deliciousness. I think I’ve been proved right on that.

Foodie Inventor Dave Arnold Is Making a Centrifuge

Dave Arnold wants to help you make the most delicious food you’ve ever tasted. The energetic, food-obsessed owner of experimental cocktail bar Booker & Dax and director of the Museum of Food & Drink has already created the Searzall torch attachment to help you, well, sear it all, and now he’s working on a centrifuge for home and restaurant use.

He uses the centrifuge at the bar to make his signature milk-washed spirits (think egg-white cocktails without the egg white), among other things, but practically speaking, a standard centrifuge is pretty impractical for anywhere but the lab. It costs about $8,000 and is “the size of a washing machine,” he said, and it doesn’t even allow you to make large quantities at a time.

Arnold’s centrifuge, on the other hand, is “designed for kitchens,” meaning that it operates at a lower rate (think 2,000 times the force of gravity instead of 4,000) and is much safer, smaller, lighter, and less expensive. He actually designed the centrifuge himself, quite a technical feat, and is micromanaging the manufacturers in China and the States to make sure they get every detail right.

He’s hoping to start discounted presales on Amazon Prime by the end of 2016 for less than $1,000.

That means restaurants will be able to afford to run four at a time, automatically increasing their ability to innovate and experiment.

What the heck would they be innovating and experimenting with? Well, clarifying any liquid you could ever want, for starters, especially fruit juices or even coffee. But where the centrifuge really “blows everything else out of the water” is with flavored and infused oils. “I don’t anticipate there being any other tool on the market that will touch it,” Arnold said. “Throw [the spices] in a centrifuge and the flavor is just like, ‘Sploooosh!’” Same for other recipes that don’t yield high amounts, like the famous pea butter from Modernist Cuisine, which he said is better made at home for a small family than in a restaurant with lots of hungry patrons.

Now, this isn’t going to change home cooking forever: Few people can afford a $1,000 gadget that makes flavored oil. And only the highest-end kitchens will probably consider using it. But those who do use it will find their food improved with little effort, which I personally hope will translate to higher standards for all food going forward.

Of course, Arnold acknowledges that there might be a little (read: giant) learning curve. “The way I tend to think about things isn’t the way most users think about things,” he said. “I’m not thinking about the recipe, I’m thinking about what’s happening inside the machine.” So he’s completely rewriting the protocols of how to use this thing (which he originally outlined in Liquid Intelligence: The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail).

“The problem is that people are going to go off the reservation, and it’s not going to fail in a predictable way,” he said. In other words, follow his directions. Or else suffer the wrath of a cloudy cocktail or imperfect curry oil. And no one wants that.