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

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

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]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

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

DailyDirt: Preserving Food For Posterity

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Modern civilization wouldn't be where it is today without the means to store food for long periods of time. Before refrigerators, food spoilage was a daily concern for just about everyone. Now, we can keep leftovers in a fridge for far too long -- and forget about it until some really furry mold is obviously thriving. Here are just a few links on keeping food from going bad.

• Food dehydration is an ancient technique that isn't just for Ronco infomercials. It's not all about beef jerky, but there is a lot of waiting around and chewy goodness. [url]
• Preserving foods can alter taste dramatically, especially when intense heat is used to sterilize delicate (and volatile) flavors. Adding artificial flavorings as masking agents doesn't sound very appetizing, but there are some alternative preservation methods that involve zapping foods with electrical current that might help retain fresher flavors. [url]
• A deep-sea submersible vessel accidentally sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic off the coast of Massachusetts, and the crew escaped... but their lunches didn't. When the ship was re-surfaced months later, the crew's lunches were almost perfectly preserved by the hyperbaric storage.[url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: dehydration, flavor, food, hyperbaric storage, pasteurization, preservation
Companies: ronco