Development Chef, Grant Crilly, talks about how basic and easy Sous Vide cooking really is. You are able to multi-task and you won’t have to worry about over cooking your meal. Listen to what Chef Crilly has to say.
Grant, Chris, Ryan, and the rest of the ChefSteps team.
We’d like to introduce you to Nima Mojgani. A longtime friend of two of the ChefSteps’ founders, Nima is best described as a typical 20-something city-dweller. Eating out most nights on Capitol Hill in Seattle, and cooking only sporadically for his girlfriend, Nima never showed any interest in trying any of the ChefSteps techniques for himself – thinking it would be out his rudimentary culinary reach.
So last week, we gave him instructions to make his favorite meal – steak – but rather than cooking the dish his normal way, we gave him a five minute starter course on how to do it sous vide style and this is what he had to say:
“I’m not a bad cook, per se – but not a good one, either. What surprised me most about sous vide was really how simple it was. I didn’t need to watch the steak as it cooked – which is huge because normally I stress about when to flip it over or cover the pan or when take it off the stove so that it’s medium rare. I could have literally sat back and hammered out two games of Call of Duty on the Xbox while it was cooking. Worst case scenario, the steak might have changed a shade of reddish pink while I was cooking.
I thought I’d need expensive equipment and was expecting I’d need vacuum seal bags like the ones on those infomercials – but a regular zip-lock did the job. My small apartment normally didn’t smell like steak afterwards and I didn’t have to marinate anything before. Normally I’m a bit fearful of spending any more than $10-15 on a good cut of meat when I’m cooking it myself out of fear that I’ll mess something up – but with sous vide I could go for something a little better the next time I’m out. Oh, and clean up – that was a cinch.”
ChefSteps is Chris Young, Grant Crilly and Ryan Matthew Smith.
Sign up for our free online sous vide cooking course.
Here’s a few more images from last year’s Loudness Fest; this time a little bit of cool down was in order after a day spent cooking in the meat forge on the hottest day of the year here in Seattle. The ChefSteps team likes to cool down with a bit of LN2.
note to the viewer…don’t try this at home…
Last summer Delve Kitchen had the pleasure of employing some exotic cooking techniques for the 4th annual Loudness Fest. As you can see from our photo of the day; things started out innocent enough. However, we decided to throw 600 liters of LN2 and an 8 foot tall/15,000,000 BTU per hour searing device dubbed the ‘meat forge’ into the mix. Stay tuned in the coming weeks as we share a bit more about what went down.
Thanksgiving is just days away and if you’re like us, you’ll have some last minute shopping to do. We love supporting our local vendors, especially those at Pike Place Market, who happen to be within walking distance from Delve Kitchen. Loyalty and personal relationships go a long way when you’re looking for the best produce, seafood, meat, bread, cheese and spices out there. The Pike Place Market offers all of those and lots more.
We have created a Pinterest board of our most frequented, favorite local food vendors as a local shopping guide for your key ingredients. While you’re on our Pinterest site, please follow us and be sure to check out our other boards featuring more of our favorite things.
ChefSteps is Chris Young, Grant Crilly and Ryan Matthew Smith. Sign up for our free online sous vide class here.
Let me introduce our newest team member at ChefSteps. Michael Natkin has come on board to lead our software development. Michael has three decades of software experience on projects ranging from wiggling dinosaur bellies for Jurassic Park to a long career working on Adobe After Effects. He’s also created his own very successful blog (and cookbook), Herbivoracious. We like to tease him a bit about the vegetarian thing, but it is cool to bring on a software guy that can also hold his own in the kitchen and the blogosphere. Michael is going to be building out a software team, so I thought I’d ask him to say a few words about his experience so far at ChefSteps and what he’s looking for in a new hire. Take it away, Michael…
A few weeks ago, I climbed a few flights of stairs and found myself in a utopia at the nexus of cooking and technology. From the minute I met Chris, Grant, Ryan and the rest of the ChefSteps team I knew I had to create a place for myself here. I left my (fantastic) job at Adobe because I wanted to focus on food, aiming to open a small restaurant. Little did I know I’d find a place where I can put my passions for both food and technology into play.
Let me describe what you see when you walk in here. ChefSteps is located in 4000 square feet of industrial space underneath Pike Place Market. Just about any food product we might want is within a few hundred yards. When you walk in the front door, you are in a kitchen, but not like any you have ever seen before. Sure, there is a stove, but there are also centrifuges, rotor-stator homogenizers, immersion circulators by the case lot, and cabinets full of every imaginable hydrocolloid.
A typical day around here is amazing. At any given time, Ben may be working on a novel vegan egg replacer while Grant is preparing an 18 course tasting menu for six and advising Nick on a packaged food project. Ryan and Kristina are shooting and editing incredible video and photos for the site. Chris is leading a session for future blender products with a team from Waring; oh and Neal Stephenson happens to be part of the group doing the brainstorming. On day 2, blenders are disassembled, Nathan Pegram quickly fabricates dangerous new prototype accessories in the machine shop, and then everything is welded back together and quickly torture tested in the kitchen.
We are definitely in startup mode. The business ideas are flowing almost faster than we can write them down – and they are driven by a passion to share the knowledge and talents of the team here with anyone that wants to know how to cook more delicious food. That’s a mission I can get on board with. For certain, the cooking courses that are in beta now are a key part of the picture, and there is a metric ton of development to be done to make the site great.
I’ve signed on as the lead developer, and I couldn’t be more excited. And I need to hire at least one more person whose skills are complementary to mine. I know how to lead large software projects, keep them customer focused, write a ton of code, and flow with ever-changing priorities. Because I come from a shrinkwrap software world, I don’t know a modern web stack in great detail. So the person I need to hire next knows Rails and JQuery like the backs of their hands. Bonus points for Heroku. They are a monster programmer that when pointed in the general direction of a target will seek and destroy it, clearing out any obstacles in the way. For now at least, the team is on-site so I’m only looking for someone in the Seattle area.
If that sounds like you, please send well-thought out answers to the following two questions to michael@chefsteps.com.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to watch our new video and complete the survey questions that followed it. Your input is invaluable and will help us make the necessary adjustments to our online sous vide classes. As we complete production of the first course modules in the upcoming weeks, we look forward to even more of your input as you go through the coursework.
Cheers,
Chris, Grant, and Ryan
A couple of months ago, the ChefSteps team had the pleasure of receiving a few lessons on espresso, pour over, grinders, espresso history, and all other things coffee during a visit with Scott Gugglielmino at the La Marzocco USA headquarters.
While hanging out with Scott, you kind of get the impression that he obsesses about great coffee even while sleeping. The ChefSteps team is known for being coffee obsessed, but Scott takes it to an entirely new level. Lucky for us, he also has zero inhibition about sharing his expansive wealth of knowledge.
After nerding out on coffee knowledge for a few hours, ChefSteps was able to see the factory. The building front is very unassuming; then you walk through one door and……BAM, you’re in espresso machine heaven. Racks completely filled with espresso machines floor to ceiling cover the walls. They even have racks filled top to bottom with historic espresso machines that illustrate important changes in technology.
A third of the shop is a dedicated work area. This is where the machines are assembled, tweaked, repaired, and customized. Lucky for us a La Marzocco Strada was disassembled, giving us an inside look at their signature machine
We capped the day with a lesson from another local master of espresso; Andrew Milstead of Milstead & Co. Andrew gave us some tips ranging from dialing in our grind size to getting ideally textured milk foam.
Thanks for the great coffee and more importantly; dropping some knowledge!
At ChefSteps and Delve Kitchen, we feel that mastering the control of heat is the key ingredient to success in your cooking.
We also like fire.
