"anti-griddle" news and stories

Watch out Geroge Foreman - this anti-griddle will knock you out.

In the spirit of Grant Achatz's uber-technological cuisine, PolyScience has what they call the Anti-griddle, a cooktop that, instead of heating foods to cook, freezes them. The "cooking" surface can reach down to creativity-chilling -30F, freezing foods on contact. According to PolyScience, it allows imaginations create "tantalizing dual-textures [that] help satisfy increasing consumer demands for new dining experiences."

Not sure if this is something you'd want in your home kitchen, but if you're innovative enough, and you have $845, you just might.

[via BoingBoing]

The Chicago Sun-Times has a cool article on the increasingly strange gadgets that some of today's most innovative chefs are using. Forget mixers and mini blowtorches, think printers, tanks of carbon dioxide, centrifuges and something called the Brymill Cry-Ac, a device dermatologists use to freeze off skin lesions on patients that Homaro Cantu uses to weld foods together. Grant Achatz of Chicago's palace of strange food, Alinea uses a "anti-griddle" to make his sour cream balls with salmon and frozen fruit foam rolled in cheese (sort of reminds me of an haute version of that Dippin Dots ice cream I've seen in the mall). The "anti-griddle" which was custom-made for Achatz by Polyscience is now being marketed to other chefs. Other strange tools in the Achatz kitchen arsenal include a heat gun for stripping paint, a homogenizer used in the cosmetics industry to make lipstick and an aromatherapy vaporizer to create his unique meals. And as Nick mentioned sous vide is also becoming more and more popular. The Paco Jet, shown here, makes sorbets and mousses at turbo speed and is another hot item in professional kitchens.  Do more strange gadgets make better food? I've always considered myself relatively immune to the kitchen gadget virus but the idea of having a Paco Jet to make fresh sorbets at the drop of a hat is deeply tempting.

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