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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Dave Arnold

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.

Full Transcript: Our Interview With Dave Arnold

Late last year, I checked in with Dave Arnold to talk about his new product idea, the Spinzall (which he has since started to move into production), as well as talk about his book and how to make great ice.

Needless to say, Dave has a lot of interesting things to say, so we thought we would present the full transcript of the conversation for your reading pleasure. The transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Michael Wolf: For the listeners who don’t know, we jumped right into it, but I’m going to step back and introduce you. You’re Dave Arnold. You are host of the Cooking Issues podcast. You are also a creator of products. The first one was Searzall, which is an after-sous vide burner or finisher, if you will, you can probably explain it better, and now you have the Spinzall, which is your centrifuge for culinary explorers, consumers, whatever. Did I do a good job? I missed a few things, I would imagine.

Dave Arnold: Yeah. We have another product that we never even did but it exists because I wanted it to kind of exist. It’s called the Cocktail Cube, and it’s to get the texture that a professional would get using big ice when you’re shaking by using regular garbage ice. It’s basically just a texturizer. But again, it’s never going to put a dent in anything, so we built it just so it exists and I thought they’re on Amazon but we never do any publicity around it, yeah.

Michael Wolf: Some would ask why go through all the trouble of making all these pieces of hardware, trying to create prodcuts. I mean I kind of call you like a culinary mad scientist in a way because you are doing all these things. You write books on how to do kind of really cool cocktails, but why go through the trouble of making your hardware?

Dave Arnold: Well, when you’re working in this field, you notice gaps or things that you wish you could do or things that you wish other people could do, and then it’s in my nature to try to fix that. I have always wanted to do it. That’s one of the reasons I kind of started the company, struck out a way from my old job as the director of culinary technology at the French Culinary was I wanted to actually build and make some of these products when I see a gap.

I noticed that people can’t really generate the heat required to do finishing of low temperature products, meats, sous vide, so I built the Searzall basically like a high-powered handheld broiler but very small, so it’s very focused, so you’re never going to do like 1,000 steaks with it, but you can do one and in fact I use it 90 percent of the time for non-intended purposes just because it’s handy to have like a broiler like a handheld broiler sitting around with you at all times.

Michael Wolf: Is 100 percent of that food purposes or other purposes outside [laughter]?

Dave Arnold: No. I use it only for food, but it’s like because you always had it there, so I kind of use it as a jail-free like hit the top of an egg a little harder or I just use it all the time – melt cheese on a burger as it’s always next to wherever I’m cooking, so I end up using it all the time. My wife uses it when the delivery pizza is a little too coagulated on top, she just like hits it when it’s top of her plate, so it sits on the table. We end up using it a lot for not the intended purpose but it’s good. It’s certainly has more purposes than you think.

The one with the Cocktail Cube that I was constantly going to events and not having decent ice to shake with and you need really big ice cubes to get a perfect like the bar quality texture on a drink that we would get. I just got sick of going to events and providing something that I thought was not a top-notch product, the shake and drink, so I was never happy with them.

I did some tests and it turned out that it was not the fact that you were shaking with big ice. It was just the dimension of that cube was what was important. And so, I basically built something with that dimension that has the same density as ice that won’t break in a shaker, that won’t flake off, it’s food-safe. It has low thermal mass so it won’t affect the chilling and so yeah. I was like I wish I had this product, therefore I made it.

Michael Wolf: People are very specific about their ice.

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: The texture, the shape of it. FirstBuild built their own ice machine because they wanted a certain type of restaurant-style ice.

Dave Arnold: Who did?

Michael Wolf: FirstBuild, the GE ‑

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: Hacker space, whatever. They made an ice machine that allows you. I like McDonald’s ice because it is a very specific type of ice, even though McDonald’s is a terrible place to eat.

Dave Arnold: Right. It depends also like if there is no one perfect kind of ice for what you want to do, but like for shaking cocktails, you want this kind of like large-dimension ice. You can freeze it so you can buy like a 2-inch change mold that doesn’t need to look good this ice and freeze it, but then you’re throwing them away and then you have to bring them to events. And so, the people that I know that have them are mostly actually people who have access to that ice who keep the cube in their kit in case they’re in a situation where they have to shake their cocktail and they don’t have the good ice. But again, I haven’t publicized it so it hasn’t spread that far.

Michael Wolf: All right, so talk about the Spinzall. Why do we need a lower-cost centrifuge and aren’t there already kind of cheap centrifuges out there? What was different with yours?

Dave Arnold: Yeah, so the cheap centrifuges that are out there are functionally worthless for doing anything. They’re good just for proof of concept of being able to play around with them. That’s what I always said is I told people years and years ago, I bought one of the inexpensive $150 brand they put out there for people to buy was a Champion E-33, and I think it’s somewhere like $150 but it spins these little tubes and if you ever as I have been in the basement of a hotel in Bogota, trying to spin out banana Justinos with an E-33.

Michael Wolf: I’ve done that in that hotel [laughter].

Dave Arnold: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s terrible, right? I mean so like you’re sitting there, but the worst part of it isn’t even the tiny yield, although that is horrible. The worst part of that is actually those tubs are impossible to clean out. It’s just a nightmare to clean all those tubes, so you have to rack all these tubes and you’re spinning constantly to get anything. It’s just they’re a horrible nightmare. The big ones are nice, but you can’t take them with you. No one can afford the space really even if you have the money. Even if you have $8,000 to $10,000 or you’re willing to buy used, very few people can afford the space and so these techniques, both in the bar and culinary are techniques that I have always thought deserved a much wider audience.

People are like, why do I need a centrifuge? When they focus on it, they’re focusing mainly on like the things that you see in Modernist Cuisine like pea butter and things like this but really the bread and butter of a centrifuge for someone who’s into cocktails is juice and liquors like Justinos. But then even if you stand from a non-culinary standpoint like the day-in day-out that they that they use it… I know someone was running it over there, is herbal oils. He made these fantastic herbal oils. It makes very fast, very low mess butter, and so the quantities that you make in these because it holds 500 ml in the bucket at a time, which is vastly more than a Champion E-33, less by a factor of 4, say what a full-sized benchtop 3-liter centrifuge actually holds. It doesn’t actually hold 3 L. You never actually put 3 L into it when you’re running it, so you end up putting about 2, so we have a quarter of that capacity. By the way, you could buy one of these and still be weigh, weigh, weigh less than one of those and a lot easier to store and easier to run. But I digress.

All these things that people don’t know that they want it for, that it’s just awesome to have. I want more people to be able to use a centrifuge and get this kind of results. I especially we started because I was kind of always been a little miffed that the techniques that I’m really interested in the bar tend not to spread. I think it’s because of the difficulty of them spreading.

Michael Wolf: Right, right. It’s not democratized from a tool standpoint.

Dave Arnold: Right, right. And so even though this is expensive for a human being, if you’re buying it for a business, once you – one of the reasons I thought it’s like, look if you’re trying to have a centrifuge at the bar, very few bars that I know of can afford the space and the money. But then even if you do make that leap, you don’t want to pin your whole program on having an ingredient where any second maybe it breaks and then you’re done, you know what I mean? It needs to be small enough and kind of inexpensive enough that if something hit the fan, you could just replace it or get it fixed and it wouldn’t end your program, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah, yeah. I still see the centrifuge as something that needs someone. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s like I think you were on a road tour. You showed it to Chris Young at ChefSteps. I think you may have sent one out to Kenji, I’m not sure.

Dave Arnold: I stopped by.

 

Michael Wolf: But you need a guy like him or you or Chris to write the book on it or maybe it’s someone we don’t know who just backed it on your site, who’s going to take it, blog about it because I think people don’t know what to do with it yet. Is that right?

Dave Arnold: Right, and so I think what’s going to happen is that see what I’m banking on is there’s a certain number of people that bought Modernist Cuisine when it came out and there’s a certain number of people that bought my book, Liquid Intelligence, when it came out, and they see that I have a chapter where I’m like basically everything that I actually do at the bar, I do in a centrifuge. Then here are ways to get around the fact that you don’t own a centrifuge. Then if they didn’t have to get around that, if they could just own an centrifuge, why wouldn’t that be better. And so, what I’m hoping is that we get some early adopters who can see how non-intimidating and useful a centrifuge is just by virtue of using it more, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Are you hoping, Liquid Intelligence, that chapter is kind of the ground zero, kind of like Modernist Cuisine was for a lot of what happened afterwards, or do you think you’re going to see some other folks writing books, and then do you also need something like on the culinary side to write a book about how you do this for culinary purposes?

Dave Arnold: Yeah, I mean as far as I’m concerned right now, I’m going to write the manual for this. It’s going to have some recipes in it, but yeah, I want more and more people to want – the only thing is when people write books, they don’t write books for stuff that you can’t have, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah.

Dave Arnold: They just don’t do that.

Michael Wolf: They won’t sell very well [laughter].

Dave Arnold: Yeah, right. So I think it’s probably more something is going to get pushed in kind of in the Internet in the blogosphere at least initially because it’s just I’m imagining going – I actually went to my publisher. I was like, “I want to write a book on cocktails.”

They’re like, “Cocktail books don’t sell that well.”

I was like, “Yeah, but this one is going to be incredibly complicated and talk about equipment that nobody can own.”

They’re like, “Oh, yeah. Sell it to me.” Do you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah [laughter].

Dave Arnold: It’s like ‑

Michael Wolf: The publishers are already trying to like they know their business is dying. You come there with this idea.

Dave Arnold: yeah, but the thing was they let me write it and I think the good news was that I told people how to do things if they didn’t have it, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah.

Dave Arnold: My assumption was that people wanted to be treated like I cared about them and what that means to me is I’m going to tell them how I actually do things. Then I’ll also give them ways how to do it without those things, but I wouldn’t want to buy a book where someone had to pull a bunch of punches, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah. one of the cool things about the sous vide machines now you’re seeing with Chris, you’re seeing to a certain degree with Anova is the app connected to it. I don’t like to dismiss apps and let’s say, “Okay, you could turn it off, get notifications, great.” But I do think like there’s just this concept of guided cooking I’ve been writing about, just the idea like having some sort of whether or not it’s a recipe to kind of be fused with the hardware. Do you see an opportunity with your centrifuge to maybe have some sort of connectedness, maybe not this generation where you can actually fuse it with software, do interesting things? Or is it like getting too far out there?

Dave Arnold: I don’t know. I mean it’s a pretty simple boneheaded machine. In fact, the ‑

Michael Wolf: So I’m making things way too complicated by saying let’s put an app on there [laughter] ‑

Dave Arnold: No. I mean you got to remember I’m old too, right?

Michael Wolf: Yeah, so am I.

Dave Arnold: I don’t understand like I just like to cook, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah.

Dave Arnold: I’m not I was at Kenji’s place and as a demonstration was like Alexa turned on my jewel to some temperature. I was like, “You, man.” I push buttons, I turn knobs, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah.

Dave Arnold: The engineers in China were actually not happy with me because I was like, “I want two knobs. I want knobs, three knobs now. I want knobs and switches.”

They’re like, “No, we’re going to put a membrane thing here.”

I was like, “here’s what I want. I want knobs and switches.” [laughter] you know what I mean? My theory is ‑

Michael Wolf: This is for a year, this went back and forth?

Dave Arnold: Yeah, even though I’m old and maybe wrong about this, my gut tells me that when you’re trying to get someone to use a new piece of technology, you want to make it as friendly as possible. If there’s anything their way, right, it’s going to piss some people off more than it’s going to exciting to the people that get the extra bells and whistles, but I could be wrong.

Michael Wolf: You initially offered this at $699?

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: I think that’s right, and where do you see going forward? Is this something that you ultimately see 5 years from now as a $299 price point? Do you want to be in Target or is it something ‑

Dave Arnold: I have to sell a lot of them exactly like after the presale, the price is going to go up because like to make, I mean the cost that we pay now is high like our tooling costs is high, our per unit cost is high because I don’t anticipate making that many of them. If someone said to me, “Hey, Dave, we’re pretty confident that you’re going to sell 15,000 of this a year,” then I could drop the price substantially, you know what I mean, but I just can’t, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Who knows? I think Anova is doing hundreds of thousands of circulators. I’m not saying like sous vide is an analogue, but maybe at some point you get a bunch of cocktails ‑

Dave Arnold: Well, it is. Remember back in the day, a circulator costs $2,000?

Michael Wolf: Right. Maybe you’re kind of like looking at those volumes down the road, who knows? I mean you’re a blog post person?

Dave Arnold: I mean yeah, look at it this way, right? All the circulators prior to 2005 or 2006, I forget when the exact date was, were $2,000. Philip Preston dropped the price of circulators to under $1,000 and they started taking off in the chef community, along with the fact that I got them to give one to Wylie. Wylie put it on Iron Chef against Mario, plus with the Spanish invasion coming over of chefs, circulators started to pick up, so there was a reasonable number of people buying circulators at $1,000 apiece.

I know a number of other people, but I started teaching courses on how to do low-temperature sous vide work and so people started to train up on it. More and more people are buying them. There’s also always a steady supply of people buying them used on eBay, right? Then eventually people started making their own. You have this price point of $800, which is almost reachable for people, then all of a sudden, a guy at [unintelligible 0:23:08] Nomiku and [unintelligible 0:23:09], they broke the $500 mark and quickly got it down to $300, and then I think the floodgates opened. Now you’re down under $200, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah.

Dave Arnold: So, it could happen. It’s just you need to do volume to be able to manufacture stuff at those prices.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, I think that Gourmia Sous Vide Pod maybe around $99 from $129 or something, so they actually have those down at that price point now.

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: It’s crazy. You have a lot of other things you’ve beyond this centrifuge. You’re the guy behind MOFAD, the Museum of Food and Drink, and I think you’re actually talking to me from there right now.

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: So tell people what that is all about?

Dave Arnold: It’s just the first idea I had. I knew I wanted to be in food but I actually didn’t think I wanted to be involved with the actual restaurant world, so I could have a fine arts degree, and I was like there’s no museum in New York. There was at the time actually Copia, but there was no museum devoted to what I thought was like the most important subject, food and drink, so like there needs to be kind of a large-scale museum. This is an idea I had of opening back in ’04, and then it’s just been for the first 8, 9 years, I didn’t have the ability or any real team to start it with.

It just never really happened, and then I teamed up with Peter Kim, who was our pro bono lawyer, who have just been slowly building it up now. Now we have a brick and mortar lab space. It’s kind of a museum incubator, which is where I am now. We did an exhibition on flavor, on the kind of the birth of the flavor industry, the advent of organic chemistry and the birth of the flavor industry.

Michael Wolf: It’s a really cool topic, by the way.

Dave Arnold: It’s cool and people love, people don’t understand it. In fact, very few people understand it and it’s tied up with a very particular mentality and point in time and understanding of things like real versus artificial that are just fraught words, and then now we have an exhibition up on Chinese-American cuisine, kind of how it came to be because it’s kind of if you look at a Chinese-American restaurant, its existence has a different trajectory from any other that I can think of ethnic cuisine in America. It’s also loved, intensely loved and also sometimes maligned as being inauthentic when in fact it is authentic for what it is, Chinese-American food. We have an exhibition up on the roughly 150-something year history of that.

Michael Wolf: I love that. I love the idea of like flavor trends and food trends, analyzing those because I would imagine there’s a pattern to what happened to Chinese. I don’t know with the other ethnic foods take that same pattern, Japanese food for example, but like is anyone doing that from the museum perspective besides you?

Dave Arnold: People do individual exhibits on food because it’s such a popular way to kind of get people in but in general they don’t have the same focus that we have. Our main thing, we were looking at culture of food, culture, history, commerce, society, science through the lens of food and most like a lot of these impact very heavily on all of those domains. It’s a good topic through which to look at almost anything and we all eat. Most of us enjoy it.

Michael Wolf: [laughter] Pretty much everyone eats.

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: Last question in terms of where people can buy the Spinzall now. Where they can get one?

Dave Arnold: Sure, sure. So preorder the Spinzall now, please, because we’re doing preorders at Modernist Pantry, so it’s modernistpantry.com/spinzall, and you preorder now. We have a special preorder price. We were trying to sell 1,000 of them preorder so that we are guaranteed to have the money to be able to get the tooling and the first run built and then we will deliver them in July, it’s what we’re shooting at. The money is fully refundable up until ‑we’re not going to charge the cards until we get to the point where we know that we have the funds to complete the run. Then it’s fully refundable until the moment we ship. However, if you do back out, you lose the deal. You lose the deal. You don’t get back in line, but yeah, preorder it now. Be the first kid in your block to have a centrifuge that is the size of a food processor but still make enough product to serve a whole bar.

Michael Wolf: And people could find you at Cooking Issues on Twitter. I think the Cooking Issues podcast, they could search iTunes for that.

Dave Arnold: Yeah. Cooking Issues and I’m on Twitter and Instagram, yeah, and then call into the podcast on Tuesday.

Michael Wolf: You do a live calling show.

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: You’re a much braver than I am.

Dave Arnold: most of the people actually end up emailing me questions, so I think I lot of the people can’t listen during the day anyway, but I do get live calls. you know what, here’s the thing: you shouldn’t worry about being stumped because if you don’t know, you just say I don’t know. That’s always a valid answer. You don’t have to know everything, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: I like it. We all do it.

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: All right, Dave, thanks for spending time with me, man.

Dave Arnold: All right, thank you.

Dave Arnold Moves Forward With Production Of The Spinzall

We’ve been following Dave Arnold’s latest project, the Spinzall, since the very beginning, and today the chef-meets-mad-scientist released an update on the crowdfunding campaign for his culinary centrifuge system.

In a video update which can be seen above, Arnold said despite missing his crowdfunding target, he was able to reduce the number of Spinzall units required for the first production and, as a result, “we’re going to move forward.”

He goes on to show off early production parts for the plastic portion of the Spinzall and gives updates on the first-off tooling for the Spinzall rotor. According to Arnold, they should have firm Spinzall ship dates in early February after a test run of the rotor made with initial production parts.

It’s an interesting choice for Arnold to move forward with production since his crowdfunding campaign was “all or nothing” mode, but because he ran it on Modernist Pantry, an online resource and retailer focused on culinary science tools and ingredients and not on a traditional crowdfunding platform, he wasn’t held to the usual campaign terms required by sites such as Kickstarter. The Spinzall’s original crowdfunding target was $699 thousand, and with a day to go Arnold has raised 69% of that target at $480 thousand.

My guess is backers who know Arnold are perfectly fine with this. After all, they know he and his company Booker and Dax have shown they can ship products and, more importantly, moving forward means not only will they get the Spinzall, but they’ll also get lots more of Dave talking about the Spinzall.

The Year In Smart Bar

Ah, 2016, the year we all needed to take a big ol’ drink. Fortunately a flurry of innovation in gadgets, apps, and platforms has helped make that easier in more ways than one. Here are the most notable happenings and advancements in the past 12 months.

Make It From Scratch

People have been home-brewing for decades, but in the past few years it’s reached a fever pitch, with every wannabe hipster (sorry, Mike) fermenting in their basement. The Pico simplifies this process with a plug-and-play model, including ready-to-brew PicoPak ingredient kits and the ability to brew five liters of craft beer in about two hours. Meanwhile Hopsy premiered its HomeTap so you can enjoy the mouthfeel of a freshly poured pint out of a tap, even if you didn’t brew the beer yourself. And just in case there’s not enough foam, get yourself the Sonic beer foamer device to add the perfect amount.

Even big players like Whirlpool entered this space in 2016: In July its crowdfunding project reached over 220 percent of its goal, and soon you’ll be able to buy the Vessi beer fermentor and dispenser for $1,800. (In other words, crowdfunding is finally legit, with Wired even profiling one of the first companies to run a successful crowdfunding campaign — for 3D-printed cocktail ice.) And foodie inventor Dave Arnold launched a crowdfunding campaign for his Spinzall, a small centrifuge designed for restaurant and home use for under $1,000.

Robotic Bartenders

The ready-to-drink (RTD) market is somewhere around $3 billion, and the hottest thing in the smart bar this year was clearly robotic bartenders. There are a spate of different companies vying for space: Bartesian raised an undisclosed sum, reportedly in the “millions”; Somabar raised $1.5 million; and Monsieur raised $1.2 million. In less professional news, the Open Bar robot was submitted to the 2016 Hackaday Prize contest and is actually open source, so all you eager coders can help perfect it.

Expect the playing field to become even more crowded in the next year with lookalike companies proving our eternal interest in robots.

Pour Yourself the Perfect Drink

Apps for the perfect cocktail, beer, and so on abounded this year. Competing with the Perfect Drink smart bartending platform, the Bernooli device and app make it easy to make a balanced drink, and even Alexa can help you figure out how to make a cocktail or give you wine recommendations. And Spanish chemists have created an app that will tell you if your beer is, for lack of a better word, skunked.

Meanwhile Hooch doesn’t want you to drink at home, alone: The company raised $1.5 million to expand its subscription platform that gives you one drink for free at bars all over New York and Los Angeles.

Totally Unnecessary Technology

What kind of year would it be without some totally ridiculous, over-the-top technology that we don’t need? A boring one, that’s what.

Enter the data cocktail machine that makes cocktails from tweets. Yes, the Arduino-powered robot pulls the latest five tweets from around the world that mention ingredients and then mashes them into a cocktail. Surprisingly, there aren’t any plans to commercialize the machine.

But who knows: 2017 is a whole new year.

Podcast: A Conversation With Dave Arnold, Creator of the Spinzall

Dave Arnold is a culinary innovator who has published a James Beard award winning book on cocktails, is the founder of the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) and is host of the extremely popular podcast, Cooking Issues. He also makes hardware, and his latest creation is the Spinzall, a countertop culinary centrifuge.

Mike caught up with Dave to talk about the creation of the Spinzall and much more.

You can download the podcast by clicking here.

6 Food Science Books That Will Change the Way You Look at Food

In Austin, where I’m from, barbecue pitmasters debate the Maillard reaction as often as they tuck into a plate of brisket and ribs. In other words, the best chefs have long known that science is the secret to their success, but over the past few years, science has become sexy to regular folks too.

Now you don’t have to go to the Institute of Culinary Education or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to understand all of those chemical reactions that make food taste a certain way, or to learn how to make it taste even better. There are cookbooks for that. Here are a few of my favorites.

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, by Harold McGee

Written back in 1984, this is a serious food science bible. Every professional chef has a dog-eared copy and can probably recite word for word sections about her favorite ingredient, cooking technique, and science behind why it works. Get ready for an intense discussion at the molecular level, including a chemistry primer.

The Science of Good Cooking, by Cook’s Illustrated

Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen pioneered the idea of cooking with the scientific method in order to develop foolproof recipes (they totally changed the way I make baked potatoes, for example). This easy-to-read book walks you through 50 experiments and more than 400 recipes that will soon become your new favorites.

The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

Harold McGee has some competition, as J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s new book might just be the bible for a new generation, especially the home cook. His accessible tone, funny anecdotes, and step-by-step photos are the icing on the cake of delicious recipes, developed with the exhaustive scientific method seen in The Science of Good Cooking. I pretty much made all of his Thanksgiving meal suggestions and couldn’t have been happier.

Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters, by Gordon M. Shepherd

If you want to know not only how to make that stuffing for Thanksgiving but also why it tastes so good, this is your jam. Be prepared for a super nerdy analysis of the mechanics of smell as well as how the brain processes flavor in terms of emotion, food preferences, cravings, and memory.

Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson, by IBM and the Institute of Culinary Education

In the 21st century, cooking isn’t limited to humans. A few years ago, IBM teamed up with the Institute of Culinary Education to create a cognitive cooking technology called Chef Watson that could discover new ingredient combinations and recipes that humans would never think of. This book details those recipes (think Hoof-and-Honey Ale), as well as how they did it.

Liquid Intelligence: The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail, by Dave Arnold

And where would the best meal be without a good drink to go with it? Dave Arnold has put together more than 120 cocktail recipes using the most cutting-edge techniques and hard-core science, guaranteeing you the knowledge you need to make the most amazing milk-washed vodka cocktail of your life.

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

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.