Molecularly Gastronomical

of cannibalism, I would totally eat Jonathan's eyeball. Yeah, yeah, I don't even have my glasses to protect me right now. So, you know, back in the day, the day, like way back in the day, like like like the cave day. Yeah,

even before I was born, Lauren. Back in that day, food science was essentially all about sending out an unlucky gave man to try and eat a particular mushroom and find out if that's going to make if it's for recreation or for nutrition or for dying dying one or the three right if if if if he comes back and talks about how the dinosaurs were jamming out to uh to fish, then obviously that would have been in the recreation category. If he said that was very tasty,

that would clearly be food. And if he didn't come back at all, well it could be one of several things, but possibly means probably we shouldn't eat. Yeah, so today food sciences is more about well, it's still about safety, but it's also about nutrition. It's about the taste of food.

It's about the presentation, preparation and preservation of food, keeping it fresher longer to right, and food science really right now when we when we use that term, it tends to be used in relation to keeping food fresh and safe longer so that we can get it from and one massive quantities right in an industrial sense, is usually what food science means, although we wanted to point out that all cooking is really technically food science because it's

physics and chemistry is what makes it go. In fact, one of the shows that we talked about before we came in Here to podcast was Alton Brown's Good Eats, which really he focused very much on the science angle of cooking and explained what the food was going through when you would actually cook to explain, you know, why food comes out a certain way when you prepare it one way versus another, right right kind of kind of You know, if you've never seen the show a go

go find it. It's terrific. But you know it's it's very Mr Wizard and Mr Wizard meets Julia Child, It's it's great, it's great, and that I mean that completely. Brown is more of a scientist than a culinarian, and um, you know self admittedly he's learned about cooking through his love of science and so as books are very much the same way. So you know, it's all about chemistry, biology, physics, engineering.

It's all about making sure that the processes you are going through are keeping the food in its most nutritional, tasty and safe format as possible. But we've kind of developed beyond that, I mean, beyond just the here's what happens when you introduce eggs to a hot surface. You know, we've gotten to a point now where we've got some mad scientists getting involved in the preparation of food like crazy.

I just imagined these guys in in their kitchens which look a lot like Dr Evil's laboratory, and just cackling as they as they move one molecule of substance into a vast vat of boiling liquid and it just the smoke comes up and then you you know, it's one of those things where if you get a whiff of it, you do that little cartoon thing where you float through the air following the odor. Yeah, that's kind of what always goes through my mind. But I don't think that's

exactly what happens. But but but there are some really cool things being done in UH in A and food science UH and be in molecular astronomy, right, Like, like one of the things we talked about in food science, one of the things that perplexes us is the whole cake mixing, right, cake mix It's science, cake guys. The fact that you can take this this box of questionable carbohydrate and flavoring substance and add like oil and then

it's cake. I don't I don't think that that I this this is something that I'm not positive that we should be eating as human people. I'm not sure if it counts as food, But the fact that it exists is some kind of feat of chemistry that I do not personally understand. When you think about when you think about the actual you know, making cake from scratch, right

if you were to do it yourself. A lot of that includes a large number of dry materials, right, flour and in that kind of it's a basic flour and leavening agent. Really, the the leavening agent and the protein and the facts that go into a traditional buy hand cake are what is going to make these chemical reactions to make something rise, right, Right, So, so when you think about it that way, putting all of it in

a box, is it quite as mysterious. Although you might say, like what about the eggs, and uh yeah, a lot of these these cake mixes that don't require you to add eggs have dried eggs in them, in fact, to the point or some other kind of powdered protein site that will have a similar effect, right, you know, some some mixes require you to add fresh eggs and some do not. And there were lots of interesting theories on why the kind that did not require you to add

eggs didn't sell so well. One of the theories, which I think is or maybe I should say hypotheses, which I think is a little apocryphal, is that in the nineteen forties, when cake mixes were first being introduced. By the way, this is all based upon the theory and hypothesis. I it's gonna start sounding really misogynist, and I want to apologize, but cast yourself back into nineteen forties America

and here's how it goes. The thought process was the housewife, she needs her her world to be efficient so that she can do the most with the least amount of time because she's caring for a busy family. Her kids are in school, and her hubby is off bringing home the bacon exactly. Um, So the you know cake mixes

were thought of as being this great time saver. However, there was this you know, the hypothesis was that women did not want to buy the cake mixes that didn't require you to add eggs, not because of anything different, any kind of perceivable change in quality, but because they felt like they weren't doing enough work. So they had cake guilt. Yeah, like, this isn't real food because it didn't require any real effort on my part. Therefore, this

is bad food. That was the hypothesis. Now, from what I've read, it seems like that's kind of apocryphal because the sales don't really reflect that, and also that a lot of the the the ones that didn't require you to add eggs into the mix had dried egg in them, which meant that the taste was a little eggy. So maybe that is an apocryphal story. But anyway, it's interesting to me to think that we could make creating a meal so easy that we would feel guilty about how

little effort it required on our part. Me. Man, I don't care if I opened up the fridge and there's a full meal there. I'm just like bonus. I think I think that that that translates into you know, um with with frozen meals and stuff like that. I think that some people feel bad serving those. I mean there's there's a nutrition issue in that. I mean, if you're serving cake, it's cake. You know, no one's really eating that for the nutritional value at least I hope not.

Guys don't do that because the cake is a lie. Yeah, so let's talk about molecular astronomy. Now, Now where did this idea come from? All? Right? So there were these there were these two dudes. Um, I'm sorry, molecular astronomy people. These these people were, um it was. It was a physical chemist named her Vates and a professor of physics named Nicholas Curtie who got together and they had separately been experimenting with food and things for years and years

and years. Curtie was a Jewish physicist who left Europe back in the nineteen thirties during the rise of the Nazi movement and came to the US to work on the nuclear weapons projects at Los Alamos. Yeah, so from there to molecular gastronomy, huh. But he but he got interested after after the project was over. The story goes that, um that he, like many of his other colleagues, wound up really wanting to get into something more creative and

and so he he started getting into it. And one time, supposedly he was demoing how to make a sou fla at the Royal Institution in London, which is which is a scientific institution. Um, this was, this was in the night sometimes and he said, I think it's a sad reflection on our civilization that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we don't know what goes on inside our sou flays. Wow, okay, Um.

So so he was he was passionate about this. And Tease was the sort of guy who reportedly used a lab ultrasound box to emulsify his mayonnaise. So this is the kind of people we're working with, right, Yeah, I can just imagine you're walking. This makes me think of any science fiction film where you walk into the engineer's lab and there's this really advanced piece of equipment that always turns out to be the thing that the engineers

using to make his coffee. Something along those lines. You don't want to talk about stereotypical thing, No, absolutely, I and so supposedly Teas got into uh got into food. Like I said, he was a physical chemist after he royally messed up a sufla recipe by adding all the egg yolks at the same time, so to one at a time to one at a time or two at a time the way that the recipe books said. But he was like whatever, physics and just did it and and it it fails. So then he said, well why

is that, Why is it doing this thing? And how can we determine what is the actual process that's going on so that we can make food in a way that is going to be superior the best way to make whatever dish we want to make. And you know, anyone who really enjoys food. I mean not not just like I'm hungry, I need to eat, but someone who really enjoys the experience of dining and they like that experience to be rich and not necessarily the food is rich, but they like it to be a really um uh

rewarding its rewarding experience. Yeah, then this is the sort of stuff that they get really interested in. Uh, they got interested in it on a molecular level, which is you know, the molecular gastronomy is where that comes from. So, first of all, to really understand this term, first we got to talk about what is gastronomy. So gastronomy is the art of selecting, preparing, serving, and enjoying fine food.

So a gastronomic experience would be one where you are having this fine food that's been prepared in a specific way, perhaps by an expert chef, and you know, it's it's it's it becomes an event. It's not just a meal or just nourishment. It's beyond that. There's there's also a very classic cookbook, if you've never heard of it, is called the The Larus Gastrono Meek, which was originally published in ninety eight and is this kind of encyclopedia of

cooking technique. It's actually very dense to parts if you've never if you're not really familiar with cooking, but it's like a physics manual. And I find that fascinating that this has gone back that long of people just describing a method rather than the kind of breezy blog like thing that we have going on in cookbooks today, which is also fabulous and gets gets newcomers into the industry,

but right doesn't have the same level of precision. And part of that is that, you know, preparing food is a very it's very difficult to be precise because while you can have certain materials and and have very specific measurements like you could you could say, all right, add x number, add sugar. When it comes to add one egg,

not all eggs are created equal. So even if you are to follow the exact same recipe as closely as you possibly can, if you have ingredients that fall into that kind of category where the quality of the ingredient itself is going to be a little different, every single time they can do is go and yell at a chicken, and really that chicken does not care. Trust me, I have spent way too much time yelling at chickens. It is a waste of time. They they find it confusing

and the eggs come out scrambled. So um. Yeah, it's just it's just an odd thing. It's one of those things about cooking is that even if you follow the procedure exactly the same way two times in a row, there are enough variables there depending upon what you're preparing, that your outcome could be a little to a lot different. But this was all about trying to really boil that down.

And in fact, there are some critics of molecular astronomy who goes so far as to say that it takes the fun out of it and to make it a science instead of an art, or or that even or even that it's it's largely meaningless because of situations like this where you have ingredients that aren't always going to be exactly the same. Like you know, when you're working with chemistry, if you're if you're using pure chemicals, you're going to get that same right right, you know you're

avoiding contaminants. Then every time you do the same experiment, the same procedure, it should come out exactly the same with cooking. It's a little different because it's not that exact, and some people have argued that you've taken an art and tried to turn it into a science, when really it belongs somewhere in the middle. Now. Molecular gastronomy specifically is the study of the actual physical and chemical processes

that food undergoes during preparation. So it was originally called molecular and physical gastronomy or physical and molecular astronomy, essentially shortened just to molecular. The coin the coin was termed, the term was coined and abound eight or nine. I'm having the same kind of day, Lauren, I really am. Uh yeah, And and it's it's interesting because when it was first developed, it was even more of a scientific approach, like almost clinical. They were going super nerdy with it um,

which I love. I you know, I'm certainly not complaining about that, but that they were really breaking things down to their very physical chemistry elements and uh and being extremely precise and doing things like like using laboral ultrasound boxes to care multifications. And eventually they kind of loosened that up a little bit and acknowledged that individual expression, an artistic uh, an artistic merit play a part in

prepared preparing food. It's not just you know, let's down the gloves and the goggles and get into the laboratory. And also beyond that, you know, I was mentioning the ingredients issue. Another issue is the equipment that you have available to you right like, and we're gonna talk more about the equipment in the second half of this podcast.

But for example, if you're very specific scientific procedure involves heating a particular mixture to a very specific temperature and keeping it there, that could be tricky with a lot of kitchen equipment. It all depends on the kind of cook surface you have. You know, whether or not you can have that level of precision. You might be able to get within a couple of degrees, and that can

mean the difference between success and failure. Yeah. By by the way, speaking of this, if if you find that things don't come out of your oven quite the way that you think they should, most most home kitchen ovens are wildly inaccurate. So it's it's uh, it's it's very worthwhile getting a probe thermometer or or other independent thermometer to check out the temperature on that just kitchen tips

from Lauren. Yeah, that's a very good point. I mean it's one of the things that Alton Brown and his show always said was, you know, make sure you have

some sort of thermometer. He had. He had a lot of infrared ones where you could just point it at the food and find out what the temperature was, but he had other ones to like probe thermometers as well and everything to to kind of give you that that idea so that you would know specifically what you're dealing with, what you're dealing with, Yeah, because you know, like I said, not an exact science. Unless you have someone coming in and calibrating your cookware all the time, it's probably not

going to work out that way anyway. So what did molecular gastronomy people what what are these gastronomers extraordinaire? What did they concern themselves with? Well, they mostly concerned themselves with the three main groups of materials that are in chemistry, which are elements, compounds, and mixtures. Okay, so an element is a fundamental element, right, that is the basic unit

there that can't be broken down. So for example, if I, if I, you know, just an example of any kind of element iron iron as an element, you don't break iron down into something less than iron other than iron atoms, and you could break atoms down, but then it's not iron anymore. Um, then you have compounds. These are materials that have properties that are distinct from the individual elements that combine to make the compound. But those elements are combined,

they're locked together now. So this is sort of the molecule levels of water. For example, exactly, water has different properties than hydrogen and oxygen, which when they're combined make water different properties there, And then you have mixtures. And mixtures are a combination of substances that aren't held together chemically, so that means you could actually mechanically separate them. So again, and let's say, um, let's say that you can have

a mixture that also has a compound in it. So let's say for some reason you have iron filings and salt. You can mechanically separate the iron filings from the salt. That's a mixture there, it's not chemically bonded. Salt, by the way, is a compound because that's sodium and chloride. These are very different elements. Sodium, of course, is a metal that can react very violently with water. Uh chloride not the most lovely chemical to come into contact with.

It is quite toxic. But when they are bound together into sodium chloride, that's table salts, super tasty. Yeah, makes food better. So anyway, food dishes are colloidal systems. And I know all of you out there know this. You're all thinking, Jonathan, come on, this is cooking one oh one. But I'm gonna go through it anyway. Now, Really, a colloid is a material composed of tiny particles of one substance that are dispersed but not dissolved in an other substance.

So here are the different colloidal systems in food. Ready write this down, there'll be a test leader. There's foam, so all of our burrista is out there, no, this one that's gas dispersed in a liquid, so cream whipped cream exactly. Then there's solid foam that's gas dispersed in a solid like a marshmallow, yep, marsh mellon as Spock would say. There's gel which is a solid dispersed in a liquid such as gelatin, So you know jello, that kind of there's an emulsion, which is liquid dispersed in

another liquid. Mayonnaise be an example of an emulsion. And then there's a solid emulsion, which is a liquid dispersed in a solid, and that's like butter or cheese. Some of the tastiest colloidal systems as far as I am concerned, and in some food dishes, you're going to encounter more than one colloidal system, which creates what is called a complex dispersed system or CDs, like ice cream, which is has solids, liquids, and gases in at least two colloidal states.

So you've got uh and the solids you have, You've got some fats, you've got some milk, proteins in the liquid, you've got you know, the water, and the gases. You have air and all of this comes together when you mix it together to make a delicious frosty treat, which is especially appreciated in the summer days in Atlanta. Ice ice cream is actually really chemically complex. It's it's fascinating that you know, with with four ingredients and a bag

of ice and salt, you can make some in your kitchen. So, guys, the next time you are wandering around you see a little kid enjoying ice cream on a hot summer day. Walk up to that little kid, point at the little kid and scream, you're eating science, and then tell them that stuff you should know told you to do that stuff you should know. Remember that it's really important. Okay.

Uh So the molecular gastronomy guys they started describing colloidal systems using formulas like mathematical formulas and uh, you know, like they could break down something like a sauce into a specific formula and explain the molecular makeup and dispersion processes to create that sauce. So you would take a sauce and you would analyze it. You'd say, all right, well, here are the molecules that go into this this is these are the ingredients that make this sauce. Here's the ratio,

how many of one versus another. Here's what kind of um of substance it was if it was a liquid or a solid or a gas before it was put together to make this sauce. Uh, and here's the order it would go in. And you would break that down into like it would look like something that came ryal of an algebra book, I mean, or a trigonometry book. You look at this and like it looks like a proof or something. This is this geometry, And no, it

was cooking. Um And in fact, uh, there was one of the one guy in molecular astronomy took a look at all the sauces used in French cooking. Tea. There's something like, oh, several hundred different sauces explained described within French cooking. But Tease said that all classic sauces belong to twenty three groups of colloidal processes, and that using his system you could create new sauces that were never recorded before just by adding in different colloidal processes while

making your sauce. So, in other words, first he said, the French not that big. Those hundreds and hundreds of sauces could be boiled down to twenty three. And then not only that, but you can actually make a brand new sauce using my method. It's in Yeah, well it's technically the French boil it down to four sauce basses. But yes, his twenty three is a little bit more precise. Yeah, yeah. And then when you get down to the specific types

of sauces, that's when you get to the hundreds. So it's not not that, you know, four bases or whatever can then lead to uncounted sauces in France. That's one of those things that I always regretted about English history was that the French never really had after the Norman invasion, a really successful invasion of England because English food really could have used more sauce. Hey, I happened to like

English food very much. Well, there's there's nothing, nothing wrong. Alreay, sure to boil you a turkey with the bacon bacon pie. Come on, come on, beef and bacon pie. We've all watched Game of Thrones and we all know that the food there is probably the most important part heart from the beheadings. Yes, beheadings and food. It sounds like a red wedding to me. Too soon, too soon, alright, sorry, alright, So let's talk about about some of the techniques that

are used in molecular gastronomy. So this is beyond beyond just distilling food down to the actual scientific processes and and and the amounts you need to create stuff. They've started to create new techniques to give new gastronomic experiences

to diners. Now, this is the crazy stuff that you might have seen on something like Top Chef or one of those other programs, or maybe if you've eaten at one of those super fancy or trendy restaurants or um, there's a whole bunch, right, I mean, like even in Atlanta we have a few, but you know there are other places like New York, l A, San Francisco that have amazing restaurants where you've got these real innovators. Also Chicago, I shouldn't leave out Chicago absolutely. Miami has a couple

of good ones too. Yes, so one of them, one of the ones I liked a lot was Purification, which is making flavor beads. So these are little beads that are meant to to you know, you scoop them up in whatever food you have, and they contain flavor in them, and when you put them in your mouth, they burst and release flavor. So it's like a little flavor bubble. It's it's it's like a little solid sauce container. It usually winds up looking like cavy are and um contains

whatever you want it to contain. And usually these are created through some kind of gelatine process or other starch to liquid conversion. Right, So you might use some sort of chemical composition that uses something like calcium chloride and alginate, which will create this kind of gelatin sort of substance that will provide the shell of whatever flavor you have.

You then have the flavor mixture itself in something like a syringe, and then you would dip the syringe into the gel and very gently inject the flavor and and then you could shape the gel around the flavor and that's where you get the flavor bead, and you can actually shape it in different ways if you wanted to.

But yeah, it's this idea that you can introduce flavors in a way so that the textures of the food hit your mouth at a particular time and then the flavor releases a different time, so it almost becomes like a theater event as opposed to just eating a meal,

like right, right. A lot of the idea of molecular astronomy is is taking these especially classic dishes, you know, flavors that we all know and love and um breaking them down to their component experience parts and and kind of putting them back on the plate in a way that you wouldn't expect anyone to have, right And Another one is presenting textures in a way that you wouldn't

have expected before. For example, uh, flash freezing. Flash freezing is all about freezing the surface of food, uh, but allowing the center of the food to remain in liquid format for example. So that way, again you have this different experience. It's it's solid on the outside, liquid on the inside. You take a bite and then you get that gushy just gonna melt. Yeah. So this is often used in desserts and a lot of sweets use this. UM and we will talk about some of the cool

tools used to create this in the second half. UH. And one of the most important agents used in molecular gastronomy is methyl cellulose, which congeals in hot water and then it becomes liquid again if it cools. UM. It's also important to have emulsifiers, which that's what allows you to disperse one kind of liquid into another kind of liquid. Like if you want to if you want to actually emulsify oil in water, that's what you would you would

need emulsifiers for that. I mean, you can also shake it real good, but you know, oil and water don't mix, they'll separate out. That's why you have to have these emulsifiers to help do that, like uh, soil lessithan. I think it's how you say it in xanthem gum. Xanthem gum is the one that everyone talks about. In fact, I've read interviews with uh these people who do molecular astronomy work and they're like, xanthem gum is is that's like my most important tool. UM. And another one that

they talk about a lot is transgluten. Gluten the mace the way too many syllables, but anyway, this is a chemical that makes proteins stick together. And UH. One thing that chefs use this for is to prepare meat dishes so that they can remove, for example, all the fat from a steak and then uh using uh this to kind of glue the steak together to hold it together, or even using it to form things like special kinds

of noodles from material like shrimp. So it's again one of those things where you are able to prepare different types of food in different formats and you necessarily would would or that you would normally run into uh to give a new or unique dining experience. UM. It's also really helpful when you want to cook meat in a at a particular pace, because this is again another one of those issues like like I said, you know, no

two eggs are exactly the same meat. When you have a cut of meat, it um, it's not all even all the way through like it's you know, it could be thicker in some places, it could be more dense in some places, might have a different different pockets of of of water or fats or so that makes it more It makes it tricky to cook it exactly the way you want it all the way through, which is why uh, these these kind of chemical is really useful because it can let you create a more uniform piece

of meat to cook so that way you get exactly the way you want it all the way through. Um. All right, well, you know what that kind of brings us up to the halfway mark. We're going to take a quick break, but then we'll be talking more about some of the technology and gear that you can encounter, including some of the stuff that you probably are familiar with, the regular average kitchen stuff, and then we're gonna work

our way up to Mad Scientists level. But before we do that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsored Netflix Netflix Dreams TV shows and movies directly to your home, saving you time, money, and hassle. As a Netflix member, you can instant we watched TV episodes and movies streaming directly to your PC, Mac, or right to your TV with your Xbox three, sixty P S three or Nintendo Wee console plus Apple devices, Kindle and Nook.

Get a free thirty day trial membership. Go to www dot Netflix dot com slash tech stuff and sign up now. And one thing you might consider watching since we're talking about food in this episode, Uh, there's a documentary called Gero Dreams of Sushi. It's all about a sushi chef who is known for a restaurant that has ten seats in it. It's a three hundred dollar a plate restaurant. By the time you finish watching this documentary, I guarantee you are going to be starving for sushi. It is amazing,

So check that out. Remember this is subject to availability, so check in your area to make sure it's available. And uh, go to that website www dot Netflix dot com slash tech stuff and sign up. All right, we're back. Well, let's talk about some of the tech and gear that you would need to take. It's some cooking done on the basic end. You know, stoves a lot of a lot of them, have a lot of us have them. Yeah, it's really important for most of my preparation. A lot

of the time they come in an electric or gas range. Right. So of course with gas you're cooking with with flames. So again this is one of those things where you know you have to figure out what where on that range. Certain levels of heat are right because you give it more fuel, which is which is hotter. Basically that's kind of our not terribly specific, right, and then you have

electric ranges which aren't really that much better. In fact that you could argue they don't heat nearly as evenly uh your traditional electric range, depending on the quality of the heating element, which is which is directly heating um the pan. Essentially what you're using here as resistance, right, Like we know that when you run an electric current through a conductor, the conductor's resistance means that some of the energy gets converted into heat. So with things like

cook tops, that's great, that's exactly what we want. That's the purpose of this. So the resistance is high, you get a lot of uh, and you've got a lot of surface area. That's why you've got the coils there as opposed to just you know, a flat surface. UM. And then you end up getting this um, this heated element. So that's what you use to actually transfer heat from the stove to the cookware, which has preferably probably some sort of food in it. One would think you're not

just heating up your pots and pans. I hope that would be bad, but I mean it wouldn't necessarily hurt the potter pan unless it has a fancy coating on it, in which case it would. Yeah, I just don't. I don't any reason too. Yeah, come on, there's no up in the pan having a little creams clearwater revival moment. All right. So but then there are other, like more kind of science fiction a e ways of transferring heat on the cook top, like induction cooking. And this this

is really cool. It's or really warm is the case? Maybe I'm cunning for you. Now this is a terrible development. Um, I'm just gonna sit back and watch. And induction cooktops use electro magnets to um to heat iron or steel cookware directly right right, There's a circuit inside the cook top that has an alternating current, which is very important. You have to have an alternating current because what that

generates is a fluctuating electro magnetic field. Now, anyone who's been listening to tech stuff for a while knows that there's a you know, you can induce electricity to flow through a material by introducing a fluctuating magnetic field. That's the electro and the magnet part there. You know, electricity can create a creates a magnetic field. In magnetic field, if it's fluctuating, can create a flow of electricity through

a conductor. So that's what you've got. You've got a circuit that's creating an alternating current inside the cook top. That alternating current when it comes into contact with the right type of induction cooking cookware, ferrist material, ferres material can induce current to flow. And this is all part of Faraday's law. Whether it's cookware or not. Faraday's law really just involves the electro magnetic effect here. Um, So the coils in the induction cooktop generate this magnetic field.

The ferromagnetic potter pan placed on the cook top will induce about a volt of electricity, So it's not a not a huge amount of voltage. Obviously it's right along the bottom of the surface of the cookware, but that a C current is fluctuating very quickly to generate that molecular movement necessary to heat up the cookware itself. So the cookware begins to heat up even though the cook

top itself is not getting warm. It generates that that resistance heat that we were talking about directly in the pan itself, So the heating element does not get warm. Um if you put glass or say a person down on top of that heating element, it would not heat unless unless you're made out of Ferris magnetic material, in which case you're going to got bigger problems. Yeah, you're probably part of the Avengers, and I bet they're aliens attacking.

So you've got other things to worry about apart from the souffle a sou and they do tend to heat up faster than electric stovetops, and they they're more energy efficient, certainly, and they they usually are at least they're advertised to offer more fine tuning capabilities that you can get it closer to a specific temperature as opposed to UH medium medium high. These have been these have been classically used in um, in industrial kitchens and in professional kitchens, although

they are beginning to be released for home use. And by home I mean people who have a lot more money than I do in my home. There there are and you can get an induction cook top for your home right now, but it is expensive, or at least more expensive than the classic cook tops that we know, like gas and electric cook tops. Um are other ways of heating up food. I mean we we did a full episode of tech Stuff about microwaves back in the day and about how microwaves were kind of an an

accidental invention that occurred. It was someone someone was standing near some kind of microwave element and antenna and uh and and realized that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Yeah, and uh and it was like, hey, maybe I should wear some kind of clothing and be huh this could have applications, right, And then a few decades later there's a microwave in every home and yeah. Microwaves essentially are using electromagnetic radiation, specifically microwaves to excite

polarized molecules that make them vibrate so liquid. For example, water inside your food starts to vibrate very very very quickly as excited by this radiation. And because the vibration, you know that that it generates heat, and that's where you get the heat from microwaves. Um. You know it's again it's it's something that the radiation itself is making the food heat up. Not it's not applying heat from an external source and heating the food that way. Uh,

the food is cooking from the inside. But those are your basic ways of heating food up. There are also some other cool ways of doing it. Uh. Yeah, there's um an infrared grilling is is a thing that has become a thing recently. These infrared cooking surfaces um uh use an electric or gas element to heat a a solid ceramic usually um to a certain temperature that will make it radiate far infrared waves directly into food that is sitting on some kind of element nearby. So you're

not heating a pot that's heating the food. You're heating the food the way that you would in an in a microwave, except with with far infrared waves instead of interesting. Well, and then there's also immersion circulators also known as su vie machine right, and these are these are fun. One of my friends actually has one, so so we've played around with it a little bit. Yeah. So here here's the principle behind souvied. You may have heard that term

before and heard people talk about it. It's a way of of cooking foods, specifically meat, but not necessarily only meat, so that it cooks thoroughly but retains all the delicious moisture and juices. Savita is French for under vacuum, because vacuum sealed pouches are often used, although they don't necessarily need to be. For example, if you wanted to um drop a whole egg, you know, shell and all into a suvie immersion bath, right, you could you could soft

boil and egg for hours. Yeah. So the way this works is that the water is heated to a very specific temperature, very precise temperature, by that immersion heating element. Yeah, there's a there's a heating element that there's there there several parts to this, right, They've got the pot that holds the water tank. Really you've got a essentially a tube that pulls the water through. There's a ump that that pumps water through this tube and inside the tube.

But there's a heating element. The heating element is at a very specific temperature run by a computer very small. There's a little computer chip essentially a micro controller if you will. That is, it's got a thermometer based in that or a thermostat where it's it's set so that it keeps that water at a very precise temperature. And it all depends on what you're cooking. Right, there's not like, you know, you don't just turn this on and it goes.

But what happens is this water will very at this temperature, will slowly cook whatever it is you put in there, and it's very The reason why it's such a slow process is so that it preserves all of that tissue inside whatever the food is, so that it doesn't become tough or dried out. Like if you have ever cooked a steak and thought, well, the flavor is great, but it's really chewy. Some of that material starts to stiffen

as you cook it. This idea is that you're using a much more gentle process so that you can you can cook food at a lower temperature for longer, which um which the same way that if you've ever had a really tender barbecue or roast, it's it's the same principle, except you know, you're sealing it in a baggy and putting it in this water bath. You wouldn't want to just drop a steak into the water bath. That would

you get like steak soupy, different different thing. But then what the idea usually is that after you've cooked it this way, you then cut the bag open and then sear the meat if it's a if it's a meat dish like a steak, to get a nice caramel process going, so we can get that nice seared exterior and still have that tender, juicy interior. Souvie machines are pretty cool. I mean not like literally cool. They're actually quite warm, a little bit warm. But yeah, it's a pretty neat thing.

And so often another thing you would might you might want if you're getting a souvied machine is a vacuum machine, which of course is a sealer that just pulls air from plastic bags and then seals them. And that can be used for preparing stuff for souvie, like of meat,

or you might use it to intensify flavors. So for example, you might put fruits or vegetables in a vacuum machine along with some flavored oil, and when you pull that air out, fruits, some fruits and vegetables have lots and lots of air in them, so when you pull that air out, that vacuum ends up pulling the oil into the fruit itself and infuses the fruit or vegetables with the flavor of whatever oil you're using. So that can

make these super intense flavors. It's one of those things that, um, you know, I've had some some of these sorts of dishes and it is pretty phenomenal. I mean, when you have something like this, your eyes just kind of pop open, like wow, that's that's an intense flavor that you've created there,

And at first you think where did you buy these strawberries? Um. It also the process of vacuum ceiling allows that food to then cook at a lower temperature um because of physics, because because science, because because when things are are at are at a very low pressure um, the boiling point changes. So so you can you can retain more of the texture, color, or nutrients or tenderness of a given piece of food, UM by not needing to use his intense heating process

on it. Yep. And then um, there's another tool. This is this is getting more into the science less of the tech that that molecular gastronomists like to use. This tool is liquid nitrogen. Yeah, yeah, the same stuff we use to to help cool uh like superconductors down. Because because at uh it sits at a negative three degrees fahrenheit,

which is negative one centigrade. That's that's pretty cold. Yeah, it's um cold enough so that it would cause you serious injury if you were to put yourself in contact with it. Also not a great idea to dump a bunch of this in a pool, no, no, no, no, no, very unsafe due to the fact that you will probably suffocate somebody. Yeah, they could. The the the gas that's giving off is heavier than oxygen, so it displaces oxygen and then you can't breathe it at least not for

long and then you can at least yeah. Yeah. In fact, there was the reason why we even bring this up is that there was a promotional event and I think it was Mexico and I want to say it was yeagermeister that did this and um and as part of the promotional event, they dumped a whole bunch of liquid nitrogen into a pool so that you get this cool smoke effect. But there were people in the pool and they ended up passing out because they couldn't breathe because

they that oxygen had been displaced. So this is dangerous stuff on multiple levels. Be really really careful. However, it's really fun to make ice cream with. Yeah, and also it can let you do stuff so that you can work with materials in a way that you couldn't work with them otherwise. For example, if you were to take peanuts and grind them up, normally, you would get peanut butter like that's you know, all the oils and everything would combine, so that's what you get with peanut butter.

But if you use liquid nitrogen, you could actually a peanut you coun actually, yeah, you could grind it up and create peanut powder, so you could use the peanut powder and stuff instead of peanut if that's if you needed a powdered peanut, that's what that's how you could do it. So there's certain materials that using liquid nitrogen will let you work with them in ways you couldn't work with them before. Uh, speaking of getting stuff cold, I hear that you have some sort of weird alternate

reality version of a griddle to talk about bizarro griddle. No, it's called anti griddle. UM. This this is made by by a company called poly Science that does that does a few a few interesting pieces of equipment like this um UM. It pumps a refrigerant through a compressor to remove the heat from a steel surface. Um, the same way that that if you if you listen to our refrigeration episode. Um, it's the same way that a refrigerator works, but just on a small steel surface, uh, instead of

pumping that air through a throw a box. So it will very quickly reach negative thirty degrees fahrenheit or negative thirty four degrees centigrade. That's pretty chilly. So you can use it to freeze the surface of stuff instantly essentially, So that's wh wh while leaving that fun creamy center that we're talking. Yeah, so I've seen I saw a thing where they were using this for again, sort of like a strawberry type dessert, where it was freezing the

outside keeping the inside unfrozen. So that way you have this interesting effect when you actually bite into it. A lot of this is all about trying to create an experience you would not otherwise have if you were to prepare the food in a more traditional way. Right, So it's kind of thinking outside the box in a way, or outside the ice box if you prefer goodness migracious. Another one that's made by Polly Science is UM is a smoke gun. I believe it's the proprietary term is

a smoking gun. And this is yeah, yeah, UM. This This is essentially UM a pipe that that has a pump attached and UM it will draw smoke from from wood chips that you that you like in the little basket of the pipe through a tube. As the smoke is drawn through the tube, it's cooled so by the time it gets to whatever food item you're applying it to, UM, it's it's a cold smoke that still infuses a lot

of flavor interesting into whatever it hits. UM. I've I've personally seen this applied to UM to a bottle of of nice whiskey, which which gives it an extremely lovely smoky flavor. UM. Yeah, my wife would hate that. She hates smoky flavors. Uh So, Also, I wanted to talk a little bit. We're kind of wrapping up here with our discussion, oh tech, but I want to talk about a design competition that's gone on for a while, the

electro Lux Design Lab. It's a contest that challenges designers to come up with innovative consumer products and technology's and a lot of that, not all of it, but a lot of it has to do with kitchens and uh, you know, cooking and the kitchens of tomorrow. And many of these designs end up looking like something you would see at Epcot down at Disney, you know, one of those things where you're like, wow, yeah, this this looks

very futuristic. I can't imagine it ever actually becoming part of someone childly impractical but but super awesome, right like jet packs. Um, kind of these are the jet packs of the kitchen. Uh. And some of them, you know, you may end up finding some of these entering into the kitchens of tomorrow, but perhaps not in the exact

implementation of the design competition. But one two thousand thirteen semifinalists is the Global Chef, which is described as a smart bowl with a projector Yeah, it's a it's a bowl that can somehow, through means uh undescribed in the material I read, detect the ingredients that are placed inside of it. So let's say that you are preparing something

like I don't know, let's let's go simple. You're just preparing the hetas, and you've got all your chopped vegetables and you put them inside this bowl, and the bowl is able to detect exactly what you are cooking with.

It can then go through a essentially a social network that would be designed specifically for this type of equipment and look for other people who are cooking with similar ingredients, and then you could the projector in the bowl would project a screen and image of other people who are cooking with these ingredients, and you could have a social interaction with them as you're cooking and say, hey, I see you're cooking with such and such. What are you making,

Here's what I'm making, Here's how I make it. How do you make what you are making? Dinner roulette? Yeah, yeah, exactly, dinner roulette. It's it's supposed to be a way of making cooking a social event against saying that more and more people are having kind of a solo experience, particularly you know, younger people of college age or whatever, and that cooking can be a very rewarding social experience, but for a lot of people it just doesn't work in

their lifestyles. So this would help facilitate that, which is kind of an interesting experience an idea. Don't know how practical it is. Don't know that this is ever going to actually become a real product. I never really thought of getting a smart bowl. Uh, but I've thought of play of other smart appliances, and I've seen I've seen them at c E S and maybe one day I'll

see this at CES. Maybe it wouldn't surprise me really, uh but anyway, Yeah, so that's kind of a rundown on some of the gadgets and gimmicks of the kitchen. Did you have any others who wanted to mention before we wrape up? No? No, I did not. Um no, I mean, I mean, of course, there are many, many, many other gadgets out there, and um and and like we said, cooking itself is is science and so um so there are countless processes and all kinds of innovators

in the field doing really fun interesting stuff. We could have done a full episode just on Roun Popel, and maybe one day we will. I know that Chris and I mentioned pop Peel in a previous episode. I cannot remember what it was for. I do remember talking about the pocket Fisherman, but um but yeah right in jog memory. Yeah, there's some there's some crazy gadgets out there. Maybe one day we'll just talk about wacky kitchen, just like some of the some of the stuff that is wildly impractical

and yet kind of awesome. But until then, if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, you should write us and let us know our addresses tex Stuff at Discovery dot com, or find us on our social media. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, and you can find us there with the handled text stuff. Hs W and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics because it hastaff works dot com