Friday, January 18, 2013
Cooking How come you don't have a sous vide circulating bath system?
Posted by Cliff Bostock @cliffbostock on Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 9:30 AM
- cuisinetechnology.com
- Sous vide circulating bath system
I ran into a friend who is an interior designer last week and the conversation turned to kitchens. He said that he was working with a client who wants a super-modern one with every new gadget built-in and so sleek "you'd hardly know it was a kitchen."
My friend said he prefers designs with free-standing appliances - "kitchens that look like kitchens."
I don't really have a preference. If you spent two years editing a large design magazine, as I did, you might not care, either. When friends spend $100,000 on a kitchen redo, I always blurt, "Why? Wouldn't you rather take a cruise around the world?"
The subject of kitchens came up recently in an interesting debate between Ryan Avent of The Economist and Matthew Iglesias of Slate. Both essays are followed by spirited commentary by readers.
Avent's essay is about the slowdown of American technology. He spends a paragraph illustrating his argument with kitchen development:
The recent rate of progress seems slow compared with that of the early and mid-20th century. Take kitchens. In 1900 kitchens in even the poshest of households were primitive things. Perishables were kept cool in ice boxes, fed by blocks of ice delivered on horse-drawn wagons. Most households lacked electric lighting and running water. Fast forward to 1970 and middle-class kitchens in America and Europe feature gas and electric hobs and ovens, fridges, food processors, microwaves and dishwashers. Move forward another 40 years, though, and things scarcely change. The gizmos are more numerous and digital displays ubiquitous, but cooking is done much as it was by grandma.
Iglesias responds (and the mention of pressure cookers is very wrong):
I think people making this argument ought to watch a few episodes of Iron Chef America. They'll see cooks working with immersion circulators, commercial grade vacuum sealers, blow torches, French tops, pressure cookers, convection ovens, and blast chillers. Most people don't cook with that stuff. A huge share of Americans has an old-fashioned electric stove rather than an induction stove that heats much more rapidly and efficiently. Even things like high-quality enameled cast iron and multi-clad metal cookware aren't that common. In all those cases it's not because the technology doesn't exist but because that stuff is expensive. If we'd had a more equitable distribution of income over the past 35 years, more people would own the most advanced kitchenware.
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