Char-Broil Digital Electric Smoker with SmartChef™ Technology

We’ve always been big fans of eating at home. So much so we often recreate our favorite restaurant meals in our home kitchen with fairly good accuracy. The favorite is a solid, full spread, Peter Lugar’s recreation that we get super pumped about, but we digress. Equal Parts is a new cookware company aimed at helping us eat, and cook, more in our kitchens. To aid in this increasingly difficult behavior, considering the ease of food delivery these days, every purchase includes a coach. The coach is accessed through a text chat provided when you receive your products. They dub it “Your friend in the kitchen” which we love because friends who know how to cook are some of the best. Starting up is pretty easy. A simple chef knife runs you $80 with “your friend coach”. You can then work your way up to an entire 20 piece kitchen set. Interesting side note, Equal Parts was a design agency called Gin Lane just a few short months ago. They gave up their clients to focus full time on birthing their own DTC products and brands. A huge move, and that’s coming from an agency owning veteran. With that news, you’re probably wondering what a former design agency knows about making cookware. Apparently a lot. Not surprising they lead with design and decided to shroud their cookware in a sleek matte black. This covers the aluminum and ceramic core. Ceramic instead of Teflon keeps the toxicity at bay while letting the eggs slide away. The aluminum makes for a lighter, and faster to heat, base with the same cooking quality as steel. They finished off each piece with a comfort forward handle and universal lids. We LOVE universal lids. They are by far the hardest thing to store in a kitchen. Less of them means a more organized pan draw. We likey. Enamored with the service we’re anxious to try this first hand. No NYC pop-up store yet so we started with a chef’s knife. We’ll report back on the experience here and on our Insta. Needless to say, we have high hopes.

Let’s face it, we’ve all been making, or trying to make, a lot of bread. In San Francisco they are taping sourdough starter to street poles. No lie. This apocalypse looks different to us in so many ways but never did we think baking would be at the epicenter of a lockdown. Enter the Balmuda Toaster or oven or steamer. Yeah, we’re not sure either but it definitely makes you look amazing when toasting up a slice of that aforementioned sourdough. Brass tacks, this Japanese designed feat-of-engineering has possibly taken our most mundane cooking task and up-leveled it with some NASA grade innovation. A water port allows you to fill a steam reservoir inside the toaster’s Ferrari grade heater core. This steam cloud envelops your bread allowing a faster, crisp without drying out. Now that the moisture is sealed in your slice, the steam dissipates and the heat fires up a second time. This result is a pillowy soft inside with a crisp, golden, toasted bark of tasty. Need more. Gen Terao, the CEO, built in several other settings for bread baking and high heat if you want to go full oven. A simple knob with pictures of bread styles leaves little room for error, unlike your sourdough process. With a black or white option it will compliment any kitchen and frankly out shine anything else in it including you. Save up your shekels though, performance and beauty like this come at a cost. We hope you are getting great at baking because you might not be able to afford store bought bread for a while after Balmuda ownership. Don’t sweat it, we think we’re spending 2020 at home anyway.

The Mellow sous vide machine is aiming to do what the microwave did for home kitchens in 1967. Although, in 2016, there’s a whole different science and aesthetic at play. As a big fan of temperature fixed circulated water machines Mellow is the Cadillac of the recent immersion circulators boom. The upgrade, Mellow keeps your vacuum sealed dinner chilled by enabling the machine to hold the water at both cold and hot temperatures. A couple hours before your dinner time, Mellow heats up and finishes your meal. The beauty of Mellow even makes this minimalistic, bare kitchen counter kid contemplate an artistic and functional residency in my apartment. Let’s not forget, anything sous vide tastes amazing.

Grow some kale from fish waste. Some intrigue in that opener right? It never ceases to amaze us when we see something like this. Our first thought is, “Wait, why does this not exist yet?” It’s a process called aquaponics. The gist The Microfarm is this. Fish waste is extracted from giant aquariums and used to enrich seeded soil to grow plants. This Eco system feeds the plants while cleaning the fish habitat. Can you say win win? Damn, Mother Nature is awesome. The Springworks Team has been working with these systems for the last 7 years. In that time they have grown over 250,000 heads of lettuce each year. The genius is that they are bringing this technology to the home aquarium. The system fits on top of your home aquarium and the soil pulls the fish waste out of the water. The results are two fold. Grow herbs in your house and never have to change the water in your aquarium again.