Willamette Geek: Gifts for the Foodie Geek Part 3

By BRIAN PANGANIBAN

The Geek’s series of holiday gift-inating concludes by breaking the virtual bank to spotlight a pair of items that are actually the smaller siblings of some top-shelf kitchen kit.

These two items are slightly less expensive then their full-sized brethren but still pack a potent techno-lust punch.

1) Technivorm Moccamaster KBTS Coffee Brewer with Thermo Carafe

$279 at Boyd’s Coffee Store

The little brother of Cooks Illustrated’s top-ranked coffee maker, this Dutch bad boy is ten times the cost of your typical Mr. Coffee but worth every over-caffinated penny. Its brewing prowess relies on the high-precision heating element that raises the water’s brewing temp to the ideal 200+ degree range. With decent beans in the hands of a competent roaster, the coffee maker produces a cup of joe that banishes bitterness and sports all of the flavor notes you may have previously written off as pretense-driven self-delusion. The only downside besides the cost? The realization how crappy  your normal cup of coffee at home is.

2) SousVide Supreme Demi Water Oven

$299.95 on Amazon

Five hundred bucks is an expensive itch to scratch if you’re a budding Heston Blumenthal with a vacuum sealer and a bad attitude. But that was the price of entry for a SousVide Supreme Water Oven, the least expensive self-contained consumer temperature-controlled water bath on the market. For true believers of the sous vide method of slow-cooking vacuum sealed food at an exact temperature, it was a small (yet still painful) price to pay to produce perfectly edge-to-edge medium rare steaks, poached-in-the-shell eggs and boneless, skinless chicken breasts actually worth eating. I say “was” since the SousVide Supreme folks just rolled out their smaller, less expensive version, the Demi. Sporting a much smaller footprint but with 60-80 percent of the food capacity of the full-sized oven, the Demi is a great way to finally perfect your home version of a Chipotle™ carnitas burrito. What, you didn’t know they sous vide their meat?

WWeek 2015

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