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DailyDirt: Now You're Cooking With Gas... Or Something Better Maybe?

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Fri, Jul 19th 2013 5:00pm — Michael Ho

There are all kinds of kitchen gadgets that promise to save time while cooking meals. The microwave oven is probably the best example of technology making our meals significantly faster to prepare, but there are plenty of other cooking methods that are catching on in more and more kitchens (induction cooking, slow cookers, etc). Here are just a few more examples that might clutter your countertops.

The next ubiquitous cooking gadget could be a thermal immersion circulator for "set it and forget it" sous vide cooking. Cooking food in plastic bags is not quite as convenient as microwaving stuff, but it's not that hard -- and your kitchen never smells like burnt popcorn after you use one of these. [url]
You might remember: Ron Popeil presented his Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ in an infomercial that aired for the first time on August 8, 1998. Total sales for the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie exceed a billion dollars -- far surpassing similar cooking devices like the Roto-Broil 400 from the 1950s. [url]
The Wonderbag is a twist on a slow cooker -- and it uses no electricity. Okay, you might need to use some electricity (or gas or something) in order to heat up the food, but once your food has been heated to boiling -- put it in this somewhat unwieldy beanbag and just wait for a few hours while your food slowly cooks. [url]

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Filed Under: cooking, food, gadgets, kitchen, microwave, ron popeil, ronco, rotisserie, slow cooker, sous vide, thermal immersion circulator, wonderbag
Companies: ronco

6 Comments

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McCrea (profile), 19 Jul 2013 @ 5:05pm

You can make popcorn in an immersion circulator?
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Anonymous Coward, 19 Jul 2013 @ 5:19pm

Re: popcorn!
"The best popping temperature is between 400 and 460 degrees Fahrenheit."

maybe if you used your immersion circulator with hot oil.... not so sure about using a vacuum-sealed bag, tho.
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Pixelation, 19 Jul 2013 @ 8:54pm

I had a friend give me a copy of Manifold Destiny years ago. now there's a great way to cook!
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Paul Renault (profile), 20 Jul 2013 @ 4:02am

Let's see...
...7 billion people using two boil-bags per day, giving, say, 10 grams of polyethylene per person = 140 million kilos of plastic bags per day = 25.55 million tonnes of plastic per year.

Or an increase of roughly one tenth of ALL plastics production world wide. An increase of 10% of waste product.

The sooner this sous-vide trend can die, the better.
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Lord Binky, 22 Jul 2013 @ 7:15am

Re: Let's see...
You need to subtract the amount of plastic that is currently used for the same amount of food. 10% isn't a bad worst case scenario, so if the 'boil-bags' were the same packaging the food is stored and purchased in the total waste increase goes down from there. That's not even including the plastic, foils, foam, etc. that are used at present that could be reduced.
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Lord Binky, 22 Jul 2013 @ 7:19am

I had a friend buy a solar oven for camping. It was impressive how fast that thing heated up, faster than my gas oven (although the gas oven is larger...). That combined together with some sous-vide cooking for makes for some really low effort and inexpensive meals.
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