Coogles

On the Paragon the battery/transmitter unit for the probe and mat is far enough away from the pot that it doesn't get particularly hot during cooking.

FirstBuild has lowered the price of the Paragon Smart Cooking system to $199 (from $299) "for a limited time". https://firstbuild.com/products/paragon/ I prefer a circulator for sous vide but I do use my Paragon for deep frying, poaching directly in fat or broth and with the new mat I can use it in place of a griddle.

Modernist Pantry has them listed for pre-order, not sure what the wait time will be. https://www.modernistpantry.com/spinzall.html

Yes, they sent out an email on Monday. They did the same thing in May so it could be something they plan on doing periodically.

ChefSteps sent out referral codes for Joule circulators good for $30 off 9/25-26/17 only, code giver also gets a $30 gift card the first time their discount code is used. "Give your friends $30 off Joule and get $30 back! If your neighbor, your brother, or your barber buys Joule today or tomorrow using your code, you’ll get a $30 Amazon gift card.*" My code is sharejoule-0sfzhb if anyone is looking to purchase a Joule. Anova is selling off their 1st gen Precision Cookers at a pretty good discount while supplies last... http://anovaculinary.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=72f115d810b617d748ce4cf45&id=c862724c7f&e=d0300f4d27

Anova is selling first generation Precision Cookers at a large discount while they last... https://us.anovaculinary.com/products/1st-gen-anova-precision-cooker?utm_source=Anova+Food+Nerd+Family&utm_campaign=aa6268f30b-promo_us_first_gen_2&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0315742ebc-aa6268f30b-105778773&ct=t(promo_us_first_gen_2)&goal=0_0315742ebc-aa6268f30b-105778773&mc_cid=aa6268f30b&mc_eid=d0300f4d27

I received an email from Dave Arnold a few hours ago, apparently he saw that video I posted on Youtube and thought my Spinzall was vibrating a little too much at speed and offered to help resolve any problems. Pretty good customer service when they contact you before you know if you have a problem or not.

It was a little loud, but I didn't have the feeder cap on which according to the instruction videos I've since watched will reduce the noise quite a bit. It was also the first use mostly out of the box (I did clean the food contact surfaces) after just skimming through the instructions so I need to make sure everything is put together properly.

Mine was delivered this evening while I was at the grocery store, picked up some basil and oil to make a basil/garlic oil. Pretty good, could have used more basil...and cowbell.

Mine was stuck in "Label Created" purgatory for several days before it finally started moving. Should finally make it here tomorrow.

Received my tracking as well, should be delivered on Monday!

No tracking for me yet, I should have been in the first 500 but there was a hiccup with my payment (flagged by fraud prevention) so I may have been pushed to the back of the queue.

According to an email I received a few hours ago they've shipped the first 500 units.

The previous one is called the Paragon Induction Cooktop and is still available, but at double the price. They recently made a temperature mat that goes under the pan available for pre-order that's supposed to let you precisely control the surface temperature of the pan, that appears to be built in to this new unit.

The last official update I received was on May 9th, but they did post a picture on Instagram yesterday of some pre-production units being worked on by a coder.

Received an email from Spinzall last night, even though they only made it to 70% of their funding goal they were able to negotiate a smaller production run from the factory and will proceed with manufacturing. I guess I bought me a centrifuge!

They picked the worst possible time to launch a crowdfunding campaign, I'm sure a lot of potential customers are short of cash about now due to spending it on gifts and travel for the holidays. Probably would have been better to delay the launch until New Years Day when people have had a chance to recover a bit and may have year end bonuses burning a hole in their pockets. That being said, I'm in for 1. Just going to try and keep the price a secret when it shows up at the door.

I received the Paragon last Wednesday and have been playing around with it for a bit. First impressions are pretty positive. The wireless probe is powered with a lithium ion battery and is charged via USB. They claim the battery has a useful life of about 300 charge/discharge cycles and a single charge can last several days if the probe is left on (or up to 3 months if off). I don't see any obvious way for an end user to remove and replace the battery once it starts to fail but I haven't really tried to crack the case open so it may be possible. The cooktop can be run in direct mode with 10 power levels, when synced to the wireless probe there are 2 precision modes (rapid and gentle) available as well. The rapid precision mode allows for a maximum power level of 10 while gentle mode restricts the maximum power level to 5. Syncing the probe to the cooktop is simple, just push the button on the side of the probe case until the Bluetooth symbol flashes three times and it wirelessly connects to the cooktop. My understanding is that the probe is pre-paired to the cooktop at the factory but if the pairing is lost for any reason there is a procedure to re-pair the devices. My main purpose for buying this was for homebrewing, so I went out and picked up a 22 quart induction ready stockpot to use as a mash tun. I filled the stockpot with 14 1/2 liters of cold tap water, synced up the probe and set the target temperature to 150°f. It took 70 minutes to warm up the water in the uncovered pot from 50°f to 150° in rapid precision mode. There was a little bit of overshoot, if I were using it for sous vide I'd switch to gentle precision once the bath had warmed up to minimize that. I also noticed that if I measure the temperature of the water using a thermapen the temperature is consistently 2°f higher than what's displayed on the cooktop via the wireless probe. I'm not sure if there's a way to program in an offset but I'll look in to that later. The only other thing I've done so far is to use it for deep frying. I heated up about 6 cups of oil in a 3 quart saucepan and set the target temp to 370°. With such a small volume of oil the temperature overshot about 8°f, a cheaper pan with a thinner base would probably reduce that considerably. When I added the hush puppy batter and the oil temperature fell the cooktop immediately kicked in and kept the temp from falling much below 350°f so it does work well as a deep fryer and I can use a small amount of oil instead of having to fill up my 5 liter fryer.

Received an email this morning saying that most of the units have been shipped. My backerkit confirmation page says mine has shipped but I haven't received an email with tracking yet.

Just search for "smoking sawdust" on Amazon and several products will show up, this is the one I use with my smoking gun.

There were changes made to Canada's Safety Code 6 in June 2015 titled " Limits of Human Exposure to Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Energy in the Frequency Range from 3 KHZ to 300 GHZ", I'm pretty sure those are the regulatory changes they're talking about in regards to being unable to ship to Canada.

Looks like a small autoclave to me. The pods seem to be filled with pre-cooked, freeze-dried ingredients. My guess is that super-heated water under pressure is injected in to the pods to rehydrate the freeze-dried foods quickly, and then pressure is slowly released and possibly a vacuum piulled to reduce the temperature to a safe level.

The USA Costco switch from AmEx to Visa will happen in April 2016. Citibank, who will issue the Costco branded Visa cards, will be required to purchase the branded accounts from AmEx. They will then issue Costco Visa cards to replace all the current Costco branded AmEx cards, all balances and rewards will just transfer to the new cards. The details for the new rewards program have not been released yet.

In for one. I doubt It'll replace my circulators for sous vide but this looks like it will be perfect for maintaining correct mash temperature when homebrewing.

The shorter length of the circulator wouldn't stop you from using "big-ish" pots, you would just need to fill the pot so the water level is above the minimum level of the circulator. Besides, there is a side-by-side photo of the new version and the original on Engadget.com and the new one isn't much shorter than the original. The minimum water level on the new Nomiku is only 1.5" above the bottom of the circulator which will allow it to be used on a lot of "small-ish" pots that the original version can't be used with. There have been several occasions where I just wanted to cook a few 63 degree eggs and having the option of using a smaller pot would have been nice. Looking at the Engadget photo it also appears that the new version doesn't have the external power brick that some disliked on the original. I actually think that having the LCD screen facing away from the bath like they are doing here is a far better solution than having it suspended over a steamy water bath, I tend to get condensation on the screen when cooking in a really hot bath and this should eliminate that problem. Probably better for the electronics as well. There are definite possibilities with the WiFi connectivity. From the message board on their kickstarter page it looks like the WiFi connection is via the internet rather than just a peer-to-peer connection. I can see applications like commanding the circulator turn on as you're leaving work so the bath is up to temp by the time you get home or being able to turn down the bath to a holding temp if you get delayed somewhere while your food is cooking. Not sure if the ability to set the bath temp directly from a recipe would ever come in handy, it's easy enough to set manually. When I get my Anova Precision Cooker I'll have a chance to play with that to see if it is of any value to me.