Sous-vide cooking, once the domain of high-end chefs is coming to households very soon with the launch of Joule, a small sous-vide machine that can be used with the pots and pans you have in your homes.
Sous-vide cooking means cooking in a water bath to a set time and temperature. It is only now starting to gain popularity among home cooks but has been used by professional chefs in restaurants for decades. It is relatively simple to cook and removes unnecessary stress from cooking by ensuring that what you are cooking is perfect all the time.
The launch of Joule, a sous-vide machine that is less than half the weight of even the smallest consumer sous vide device available at the moment is set to launch in September in the United States. Created by ChefSteps, a Seattle-based startup, the machine will not immediately ship outside the United States though the company hopes to make this machine available elsewhere in the world as soon as possible.
Joule is housed in a sleek cylinder that’s less than the size of a 30 centimetre ruler and weights less than a kilogramme is small enough to fit in a top kitchen drawer and be used with almost any standard pot and pan that you already have. Joule’s design features forged 316L stainless steel and impact-resistant, seamless food grade plastic housing for a lifetime of durability. Unlike all other immersion circulators, Joule is entirely waterproof.
The machine delivers 1100 watts of heating power from a unique, compact heater invented by ChefSteps using thick film technology that operates at 99.8 percent energy efficiency for the fastest preheating times on the market. A powerful rare-earth magnetic base easily mounts Joule to any magnetic steel pot or induction-ready cookware, while the optional clip system can be used to mount Joule to just about any cooking vessel.
Chefsteps was co-founded by Chris Young, its current CEO and former chef and principle coauthor of the highly acclaimed six-volume work Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. He also was the founding chef of Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck Experimental Kitchen, the secret culinary laboratory behind the innovative dishes served at one of the best restaurants in the World. Prior to becoming a chef, he completed degrees in theoretical mathematics and biochemistry.
“From day one, our goal at ChefSteps has been to help passionate cooks be creative and confident in the kitchen,” said Chris Young, CEO and co-founder of ChefSteps. “Sous vide is a big part of what we do in our kitchen, but we were frustrated by the existing sous vide gadgets, which are confusing and awkward for the home cook to use. So we decided to take the lead on creating a better sous vide experience for our community of cooks. Joule is a culinary tool that was designed and built to help cooks of every skill level and to make sous vide a real part of today’s kitchen—a tool that can help you make amazing meals on busy days or wow guests with special-occasion feasts.”
Joule works with your smartphone. ChefSteps have designed a cooking app aimed at giving you control over the cooking experience. The app is designed for iOS and Android and which connect to the device via Bluetooth and WiFI.At the heart of Joule is its companion cooking app, so you can control your experience with the device
The Joule app reimagines recipes as a sensory experience, incorporating vibrant full-screen images and videos from the James Beard Award–winning ChefSteps kitchen team, all integrated seamlessly with your circulator. And intelligent, patent-pending features like Visual Doneness help take the guesswork out of cooking: Select from beautiful images and videos of finished dishes, and Joule will automatically adjust time and temperature settings based on how you want your food to turn out.
“For the last three years, ChefSteps videos have inspired our community and showed them the hows and whys of cooking, from traditional to more modern cooking techniques,” said Grant Crilly, co-founder and chief content officer at ChefSteps. “Sous vide is one of the techniques we find a lot of value in, and with Joule we wanted to create a tool that continued that mission of guiding and educating, this time through hardware and the app that powers it, so that anyone can have a great sous vide experience. That means more than just making the best sous vide hardware; it means offering a catalog of original, easy-to-understand, integrated content for Joule that will grow based on what our community wants to learn.”
Founded in 2012, ChefSteps is a Seattle-based food and technology company on a mission to help people cook smarter.
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