Thinking back to the old Kitchen Computer idea of yore, one of the important aspects of it is being able to monitor, in depth, the temperature of, well, everything in the chain of the food. So, obviously the food itself should be monitored, the cooking environment, the cooling environment, and the resting environment. This will not only let us know whether the food is done, but how quickly, what path it takes, whether it should be safe to eat or not, and if cooling it down made everything in the fridge go bad.

I've explored the topic of temperature control in the past, but I had never found quite the right sensors to use. I've been playing around with the other aspects of the computer interface, such as the microprocessor and the communications, but the temperature sensors were never quite right for me.

Fortunately, I am not the only geek in the world, and someone else has done much of the legwork (and, really, all of the work) for tracking these temperatures. Enter the Turkey Tracker, which was live-casting temperature updates for a turkey, the smoker, and the outside environment. There was even a video stream, photos, and everything. This is a project by, according to the list of authors on the blog, Robin Parker, Michael Weinberg, and Chris Chen.

The Turkey Tracker Blog has plenty of words describing what's went into the process. What Went Into the Turkey Tracker describes some of the hardware and software, including the ideal, high-temperature thermometers that I'll need to use for my setup (though I may have to have separate probes for low-temperature sensing). There's even a FAQ, that gives answers on cooking and temperature sensing techniques. To see what it all looks like, you can check out this Flickr set about Project Wirebird.*

Obviously, I'll be learning much from this example, so that I can build a strong and powerful kitchen computer. There is talk of open-sourcing the code as well as having multiple turkey-trackers next year, so perhaps I'll get in on the fun then.

via Make.

*- The image I used for the preview of this article was taken from that Flickr Set, and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution, Share-Alike License. So, as with my stuff, feel free to use that image or its source, but be sure to give attribution. Also, if you use that image, be sure to license whatever you use it in similarly.

I have not been able to turn on the Web for the past week without seeing something about the new The Big Easy Oil-less Turkey Fryer from Char-Broil. What I hear is "it won't catch your house on fire like a turkey fryer will" and "infrared heat."

I will start by saying that in no way am I suggesting that this device will not make a delicious turkey. I don't own one and am not going to pay for one, so unless someone wants to pony up a Big Easy Oil-less Turkey Fryer, I will not make that determination. I'm sure there'll be plenty of reviews in a few days from all over the place.

However, I will tell you that this device, despite its form factor, is not going to fry your turkey. What it's going to do is broil your turkey. You know how I know? No oil. It's one of the secrets of frying, you see: you need oil.

So what's happening is that the Big Easy uses some propane to feed some enclosed burners. These burners get warm, and radiant heat (a.k.a. infrared heat) cooks the turkey. The nice thing is that this happens around the whole turkey at the same time, thus providing a reasonably easy setup. Of course, a turkey is a bulky, fiddly hunk of meat and bone, and it just doesn't cook evenly, which is why pain is taken to keep the white meat from drying out while the dark meat becomes safe to eat.

If you have an oven that has a rotisserie attachment, then stick your turkey on that and turn the broiler on. That's the same basic setup as this "fryer". But don't go thinking that you're going to get the same sort of flavor that you would from a fryer. You may or may not even get as good of a turkey as you would from the oven, and I might even suggest just going out to the grill and using a rotisserie there, especially if you have coal. Coal rotisseried turkey would probably be a good way to impress the relatives.

You know how, in a convection oven, you don't cook the food at as high of a temperature? That's because radiant heat is a relatively inefficient way to cook something. It'll get there in the end, and is great for the right kinds of foods, but it is not efficient as these things go.

Oil, being a lot thicker than air, conducts heat very, very efficiently. This is why you might stick your arm into a 500°F oven for a couple of seconds to pull out a roast, but you would never stick your arm into a 350°F pot of oil. Not even for a couple of seconds. Oil is very efficient.

So when Char-Broil calls their round, only use at Thanksgiving broiler a "fryer", I scoff. Again: could be a wonderful device, but it transfers heat in a completely different way from what a fryer uses, and knowing how heat transfers is an important part of cooking. I don't appreciate the spreading of misinformation.

Still, if you don't mind having a good chunk of your garage cluttered for 365.242199* days of the year with a device that is not going to fry your turkey, then feel free. Personally, I'll stick with the oven. Unless, as I said, someone wants to give me one. Then I will give it a fair shot. I might not keep it, but I'd certainly cook something with it.


*- Give or take

There are two new items for the World's Most Popular Stand Mixer In The World*. I'm writing of the KitchenAid Stand Mixer, not some other mixer.

The first is the BeaterBlade. Available from Amazon, this handly little device is just like the paddle attachment on your stand mixer, except that it has some silicone bits around the edges which scrape the sides of the mixer for you. Simple, effective, and a no-thought upgrade. If you know someone with an appropriate model stand mixer, you have your holiday or birthday present for the year.

The second, for the bread enthusiasts, is the Spiral Dough Hook. This one is an official KitchenAid attachment that will work for the Professional 5 Plus and the Professional 600 models (sorry, Artisan folk). As seen in the embedded video, the new dough hook actually kneads the dough along the bottom of the bowl, thus picking up the various bits of flour at the bottom. Also, it prevents the dough from slapping the side of the bowl like a one-armed midwife at a birthing competition**, so it keeps the mixer from trying to walk across the counter to its eventual doom.



*–I have no data to back that up. I completely made up the title. It's a pretty popular mixer, though, you'll agree.

**–It sounded okay in my head.

For those of us who watched the fourth episode of Alton Brown's Feasting on Asphalt, there were plenty of items of note. There was the unfortunate accident, the nice police officer who managed to get his own TV show, and the revelation that Alton Brown pretty much makes coffee the same way I do (and, unlike most of my cooking, my coffee making technique was mine before I ran across Good Eats, so it was a nice case of parallel development). However, probably the most notable part of the show was the introduction of a new gadget, the Portable 12V Stove in the shape of a lunch box.

I've been accused, at least once, of being awfully influenced by Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently novels. Still, as with the coffee, I'd learned about myself, that I can go from just learning of something's existence to owning it in the space of about 45 seconds, happened well before The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul was written. Though perhaps not before the Dr. Who episode which it eerily resembles was written.

In any case, I do not own the 12V Portable Stove shaped like a lunchbox, but that's mainly because I'm saving up for a honeymoon, and it would be frowned upon if I bought something that I have absolutely no use for when that money could go towards espresso in Rome, right?

This portable stove can heat to 300 degrees, which means I wouldn't be baking any bread in it, but it sounds great for a stew, or the meatloaf that Alton Brown made, or some manner of cobbler, perhaps. You know, when I go on a road trip to...somewhere. Okay, I really have no use for it. Tailgating, perhaps. Not that I go to sporting events. Really small chili cookoffs. Ummmm...bah.

It's $30, and sold out 'til mid-November (Possibly because of Feasting on Asphalt, but still, a great little gift for someone who would not have any reason to get it for him- or herself.

There are times when you might not want to pick things up with your hands. In the kitchen, you'll use your hands for many many tasks, but sometimes they're not appropriate. Aside from items which are too liquid, the most obvious class of things to avoid using your hands on are things which are burning hot. After all, many of you will cook meat, and your hands are made of meat, so it stands to reason that you will not want to touch things that are at meat-cooking-temperature with your hands of meat.

Depending on the item you're touching, you might want to use a towel, a dry towel, to insulate your cookable hands. You could also consider a pot holder or similar. However for some, shall we say "juicy" or at least wet items, you should consider using tongs. They're inexpensive, and they are useful in hundreds of day-to-day situations in the normal home cook's life. It's a rare day that goes by when I don't dirty some tongs, so consider keeping a couplefew pairs around, and save your hands some unintended cooking.

At my day job, we have a Bodum Santos electric vacuum coffee maker. It's a lovely device, and given the choice between an automatic drip pot and this, I would always choose this. It's more automatic than a press, but more work than an automatic drip. The only thing that would stop me from recommending it wholeheartedly is that, out of the box, it does not make that great of a pot of coffee. Still better than drip, but not in the same league as a press.

The problem is that the brewing time on the pot is too short. It's completely automatic, so you put the coffee in one chamber, the water in another, assemble, and hit a button. A little while later, and you have a pot of coffee. (for those who haven't read Coffee Time 2, here's a quick overview: coffee goes in the top chamber, water in the bottom, connected by a filtered tube. Heat the water until pressure from expanded vapor pushes the water into the top chamber where it mingles with the coffee, let it cool, and the water drops through the filter to reveal proper coffee). It knows when to stop brewing because it can sense how much water is in the bottom chamber, and as soon as it runs out, it cuts the heat on the element. It needs more time. The ability to modify the time between running out of water and cutting the heat would let me use far less coffee and get better results, but that's not something they let you do, unless it's in a double-secret control mode (which seems unlikely).

There is something you can do, though. If you don't fully seat the top chamber, it raises the tube just a bit, and that allows a small pool of water to stay in the bottom chamber longer than it would have had the tube been as far down as it could have been. This lets it brew longer, thus making better coffee. I'm considering gluing some spacers onto the top of the bottom chamber once I have an ideal spacing down, but it would have been such a nice addition to allow a "plus 1 minute" option to the brewing cycle.

Of course, all of this would be unnecessary with a manual unit, but that would remove some of the nice features like unattended operation and being able to set a timer for use overnight. More importantly, though, I have no way of using a manual unit at work, what with needing either a stovetop or an open flame. So, if you're using the Bodum Santos and want some stronger coffee, try not pushing the top chamber down all the way. Don't rest it loosely, otherwise you'll make a mess, but leave around a 1/8 inch gap.