nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Palate Home - Bagless SV?

mike.minasian

http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/09/palate-is-a-smart-grill-that-takes-the-work-out-of-cooking/?ncid=rss

Interesting new concept. As far as I can tell they are doing bagless SV by using radiant heat instead of water as the conductor. It seems like it's a lot more effort to maintain the ambient temperature than it would be the water bath as there is more thermal mass of water versus air?

Also, they claim to be able to use their sensors to detect interior temperature at all points of the meat by looking at heat signatures around the meat and inferring the temp.

Lastly, they will have a 600 degree searing mechanism built in.

Find more posts tagged with

Equipment

Comments

Brandon_Byrd_40557

I raised some of these concerns (as did a few others) in a thread over at eGullet. Eric Norman, CEO and co-founder of Palate, provided an in-depth response that helped me understand the product better. It does seem like an interesting product... having two grill surfaces with that kind of precise temperature control will probably have some interesting applications that haven't been thought of yet.

mike.minasian

Love the responses and I completely agree. My first instinct was a lot of those things, was interested to hear some informed opinions.

Chris_Young_80640

They can't really be relying on radiant heat, because below about 600 °F, convection will be the dominant form of heat transfer. It appears to me that they are mostly doing this through direct conduction between the plates, but having enough of a sealed environment that the surrounding air and steam are pretty uniform with the temperature of the metal plates.

There are a bunch of other things I wonder about:

(1) To achieve temperature precision and stability, they will need a good deal of mass in the plates (it'll be heavy), but that added mass also means that response time for ramping up to searing temperatures will be slowed down. Keep in mind that your standard outlet is only 15 amps.

(2) How does it handle two steaks, or two chicken breasts that are mismatched in terms of thickness? I would expect them to cook at pretty different rates if one piece is firmly in contact with both the upper and lower plate, but the other piece is not.

(3) I think they have some nice ideas with their software, but as we know all too well at ChefSteps, doing software well is a team sport that requires a lot of effort. How are they going to do a good job with that and master the challenges of manufacturing hardware?

Brandon_Byrd_40557

Meh. It looks like a solution in search of a problem to me. The price point seems too high for what it is; they're shooting for $499, which will get you a couple of circulators and a set of cast iron to sear go with them. The Palate machine doesn't really know what the temperature on the inside of your meat is. Rather than measuring the internal temp, it uses "inference technology" to guess what the temperature is based on models of different types of protein. Their software looks like a gussied up version of the Polyscience app or SV Dash, but that can communicate with the hardware and use a sensor or two to automatically measure things like thickness for you. Capacity is a big worry. I don't know how you'd be able to cook more than two steaks at a time. And you'd never be able to cook something like a pork shoulder, whole tenderloin, or a chicken roulade in it. And no SV poached eggs. And no extended cooks of tough cuts to transform the texture. And it seems like it might be a bitch to clean.

So.... I'll pass.