Centrifuges, liquid nitrogen, and a vertical rotisserie created from a wall of 30 burning steel drums.
Those are just a few of the food preparation techniques used and tested by the team at ChefSteps, a high-tech cooking startup based in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, serving a community of 500,000 cooking enthusiasts with online videos and practical advice for everyday cooks.
Two of ChefSteps’ co-founders, chefs Chris Young and Grant Crilly, join us on the GeekWire radio show this week to talk about their business and share cooking insights and tips, including the eternal question of how to prepare the perfect steak.
Young and Crilly are known in part for their past roles collaborating with Nathan Myhrvold on the epic Modernist Cuisine cookbook. Young previously was the founding chef of Heston Blumenthal’s influential Fat Duck Experimental Kitchen. Crilly’s experience includes serving as chef de cuisine at Busaba in Mumbai and Mistral in Seattle, and head development chef at Delicious Planet.
In this extended podcast version of the show, we hear more details about their startup, including never-before-revealed information about a well-known technology executive who has invested in ChefSteps. (Nope, it’s not the tech executive you might expect given their history.)
The conversation begins in the second segment of the show, at 9:10 in the audio player below. Check out the video above to see the “Wall of Fire” that we discuss at the outset of the conversation.
In the opening news segment, we discuss another food-related topic, the headline-making changes in the Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service. And continuing the theme, our App of the Week, Kitchenbowl, makes it easy to share and find recipes.