Category Archives: Events

The ChefSteps Forum Is Really Cooking!

When we started building our sous vide course, we knew how crucial our interaction and communication with you, our students, and the culinary community at large would be to the success of our online courses. We envisioned the forum as an extramural course to put you in an exchange with world class chefs, writers, inventors, artists, scientists and everyone else with a curious mind and a passion for exquisite food.

Well, guess what? The ChefSteps forum is really starting to cook thanks to the contributions of some amazing new members. We’ve added some new categories to the list above, including paramedic/firefighter, clinical psychologist, software guru, financier, etc., plus lots of other new students and we couldn’t be more pleased with the level of information and interaction that’s taking place. We thought you might like to get to know a few of these folks better, so here are some of the members of our forum you’ll get to meet when you sign up and get cooking.

After purchasing a PolyScience immersion circulator from our store, paramedic/firefighter Mason Perry took to our course and has been cooking up a sous vide storm ever since. He prepared a five course sous vide dinner and this delicious looking sous vide hamburger with sous vide asparagus and smashed potatoes. He now has his own thread on our forum to post all of his dishes.

victorwol works in tv post-production when he’s not perfecting the art of cooking sous vide eggs. BlvCook has been cooking sous vide for the past year and a half and has great questions. Trevor Teich is a chef in Chicago with a terrific blog and lots of great advice. Duda Ferreira knows a thing or two about sous vide corned ox tongue.

Computer consultant, Johan Edstrom (Seijoed on the forum), is not only cooking sous vide, but is one of your go to guys for DIY immersion circulator info. He has a great group on Google+ along with Brendan Lee, clinical psychologist, and
Patrick Ancillotti, another awesome computer guy (thanks for your help), and they will all jump in to answer your questions and ask even better questions to keep the discussion going.

We’ve added a new Pinterest board to showcase some of the dishes that our forum members have posted, so check it out and pin away! Chris Young also just added the first quiz on Module 1, so you can gauge how you’re doing on the course.

Don’t forget that the usual suspects; Chris Young, Grant Crilly, Ryan Matthew Smith, Michael Natkin, Nathan Pegram and other members of our team are also responding to your questions, so sign up, spread the word and be a part of it all.

A sincere thank you to all of our forum members from Chris, Grant, Ryan and the rest of the ChefSteps team.

A DIY Christmas Spectacular | We Built a Gaggle Roaster

So we occasionally get up to some elaborate DIY exploits that involve cooking, fire, precision laser cutting, and metal fabrication. We’ve staged some pretty large exploits in the last couple of years (we’ll be sharing some photos from those events soon), but I thought some of you might be interested in the relatively small one we threw together for a holiday celebration last Saturday night. It’s important I specify that we do our metal fabrication ourselves, but not everyone has the equipment for this. An Angle grinder is required for this project, amongst other tools, so if you don’t have one then perhaps you shouldn’t give it a try yourself. It’s best enlisting professionals in this case, and search for ‘metal fabrication near me‘ to find the best company.

The Construction Phase
We dubbed the device “The Gaggle Roaster.” It’s a rotisserie spit that can carry half a dozen geese, each one dangling by its legs. We did this so the weight of the bird would stretch the skin taut, and so that we would get radiant heat shining over the entire surface of the bird. This ensured evenly cooked birds with really crispy skin, which was a major goal. Each bird rotated at about 2 rpm. We geared it so the birds would counter-rotate, which means that each bird rotated in the opposite direction of the one next to it-there was no good reason for this other than it looked cool.

I sketched out the idea for this about a week prior to the party. Our group of makers – including several of our friends at Furlong Fortnight Bureau – gathered to rapidly build and test the device at our friend Rusty Oliver’s shop (The Hazardfactory) between the hours of 5 pm and 3 am.

Our constructors included Neal Stephenson, myself (Chris Young), Rusty Oliver, Nathan Pegram, Daniel MacDonald, and Larry Felser.

We also fabricated a giant roasting pan, complete with our own custom gas manifolds to roast some vegetables to go with our geese. On full blast, this is probably something like a 500,000 BTU/hr stove top.

Here’s a view of Rusty Oliver (left), Daniel MacDonald (center), and Nathan Pegram (right) working on final assembly:
Rusty-Oliver Kevin-MacDonald Nathan-Pegram
Here’s Nathan tensioning the very long bike chain that drives the gearing:
Our careful engineering efforts involved load testing with about a 4X geese-overloading factor:

The Party Phase
Here are some photos from the actual gaggle-roast. No sous vide was involved, we went old-school – like 16th century British old-school.

Basic Cooking Method:

  1. Build a linear chain-driven, counter-rotating rotisserie spit that will suspend half a flock of birds.
  2. Build a large hearth with high emissivity material (firebrick is ideal)
  3. Build a very large fire that is at least 25% longer than the length of the spit, so that the ends of the spit see as much glowing infrared energy as the center.
  4. Once firebrick is warmed up, suspend birds and begin roasting. Surface temperature of birds should settle around 160 °F / 71 °C until core temperature of bird reaches something like 140 °F / 60 °C.
  5. For the final sear, move the geese closer to the fire and turn up the intensity of the radiant heat by blasting large volumes of air at the fire. A leaf blower does this job perfectly. In fact, it’s probably the only tool for the job really. You need something substantial, so if you don’t have one I suggest you buy an echo backpack blower.
  6. Once the surface temperature of the birds reaches something like 270 °F / 132 °C, remove the birds and let them rest for 10 minutes.
  7. Carve and serve with a giant pan filled with choucroute and new potatoes.

Here are some photos that Ryan grabbed during the event:

Plumes of Combustion
Geese in Silhouette
A Gaggle of Roasting Geese
Turning Up The Heat!
Glowing White Hot

Forging Crispy Skin

And, yes, this was really delicious.

Hope you all had a wonderful holiday – Chris, Grant, Ryan and the rest of the ChefSteps team.

ChefSteps is Chris Young, Grant Crilly and Ryan Matthew Smith.
Sign up for our free online sous vide cooking class and join our forum.

Would You Like to Know How to Roast Your Holiday Turkey to Perfection?

If you’re going to be in the Seattle area on Monday, December 17th, come see Grant Crilly and Chris Young take the stage at Town Hall Seattle with a presentation that will unlock some kitchen mysteries and improve your cooking skills.

ChefSteps-Sous-Vide-Cooking-ClassThey will be showcasing products from the Pike Place Market to illustrate:

If you’ve got older kids who like to cook and like science, bring them along as well. They’ll see some scientific principles in action that they can use in the kitchen and share with their friends in the classroom. Not to mention, it wouldn’t be popular science without liquid nitrogen and Chris and Grant will no doubt deliver!

Pike Place Market vendors, including: Uli’s Famous Sausage, Sosio’s Fruit and Produce, Mt. Townsend Creamery, and City Fish, will be providing samples for you to enjoy before and after the lecture. If you’re in the market for some holiday gifts, Book Larder will also be on-site before and after to sell some great cookbooks by local authors.

For those of you who are too far away to attend, we will be posting some of the recipes and techniques so you will be able to share in the information as well.

Join us if you can, and please spread the word. Tickets are $10 and will be available online and at the door. $5 from each ticket will be donated to the Pike Place Market Foundation.

Thanks,
Grant Crilly, Chris Young, Ryan Matthew Smith and the rest of the ChefSteps team.

 

 

 

 

Join Chris Young and Grant Crilly at Town Hall Seattle!

We know this is a busy time of year for each of you – visiting family and friends, still busy at work, entertaining, shopping and cooking. But, we hope those of you in the Seattle area can join us in a few weeks for an evening of food and education at Town Hall Seattle.

ChefSteps-Sous-Vide-Cooking-ClassGrant Crilly and Chris Young will take the stage at Town Hall Seattle on Monday, December 17th with a talk that will feature the Pike Place Market (ChefSteps’ home base). They plan to take a unique and local look at the simple science of the ingredients you cook with and show you how a basic understanding of these ingredients can improve both your everyday and extraordinary meals.

Chris shares some insight into the decision to do a Town Hall talk and what you should expect if you attend. We hope to see you there!

Q: What makes Town Hall Seattle the best venue for this talk?

CY: Town Hall is a fantastic venue to engage a cross-section of our community to talk about something that so many Seattleites are passionate about — food. We also respect the integrity of Town Hall and their ability to keep costs low and attract a great group of educated, curious and thoughtful community members, which makes it an ideal place for us to use to talk about both cooking and science.

Q: Why feature The Pike Place Market?

CY: The Pike Place Market is a unique fixture of Seattle. It’s well known around the world, and now we’re lucky enough to call it home for our startup. We moved our team into a space in the Market in the heart of the action and we are loving every minute of it! Many people have a certain idea of what the Market is — some think of tourists, others think of it as Seattle’s original supermarket, and others might think of it as a hyper-local venue for food producers. Yet, I doubt many people think of it as a place of innovation or a place that can influence food culture around the world. It has already done this once (Starbucks started at the Market in 1971) and from our space in the Market, we’re hoping that we can once again influence food culture around the world by creating a new way to learn the art and science of cooking.

Q: What should attendees expect to learn about at the Town Hall talk?

CY: We’re going to explore two of the most basic ingredients in cooking: heat and water. We’ll explore the difference between taste, smell, and flavor. We’re also going to bust several common food myths. And, finally, we’re going to try to look at some traditional foods in a way that most people will have never seen before.

Pike Place Market purveyors will also be on hand for the talk, as well as before and after, for tastes and questions in the lobby.

$5 from every ticket sold will be donated to The Pike Place Market Foundation.

Tickets are $10 at www.townhallseattle.org or 888/377-4510 and at the door beginning at 6:30 pm. Town Hall members receive priority seating. Great Hall; enter on Eighth Avenue.

ChefSteps is Chris Young, Grant Crilly and Ryan Matthew Smith. Whether you are a professional chef, culinary student, cooking enthusiast or just curious, ChefSteps is for you. Sign up for our free online sous vide cooking class here.