 Over the past couple decades, mixologists and chefs across the country have been incorporating technology into their craft, using heat, pressure, vacuums, supersonic sounds, and other methods to prepare food in new ways. The technology is as fascinating as any we've covered, but unlike a futuristic cruise ship, motorized skateboards, or home electronics, kitchen tech does its job so well that often we never even know it exists. But these devices do exist. They're real tools in popular kitchens across the globe, and they're gradually making their way into our homes. This is the Sonic Prep Ultrasonic Homogenizer by Polyscience, a machine that, in the company's words, emits ultrasonic sound waves to extract, infuse, homogenize, emulsify, suspend, degas, or even rapidly create barrel-aged flavor. Chef Bryce Schumann and General Manager and Cocktail Director Eamon Rockey use their Sonic Prep to make delicious, super-saturated saffron salt. What role does technology play in the restaurant here, and how vital is it? For me, no matter how much technology you integrate, no matter how expensive the crazy pieces of equipment that you're using are, you're still riffing on the same themes of how to make things hot and how to make things cold, how to saturate something with flavor or how to pull things out. We'll use these tools to get to a certain texture or a certain flavor or to help us to achieve the end result, but it's not what's in your face. I'm not going to bring the tool out here in the dining room and, like, buzz you in your eye with it or something, you know, so that you're like, oh wow, look what the chef is doing, you know what I mean? It's tossing me in the eye. That's what he's doing. I'm of the thought that, in the end, it just needs to taste great. It seems like a kitchen and a chemistry lab are getting closer and closer and closer to the same thing. What I think is really cool is the cross-pollination of different industries' technology. We look at other industries and we're like, what can we take from them? Like the microplane, that was a woodworking tool. It was a woodworking tool and a metalworking tool that some guy who was at home, he's like, where's the cheese grater? You know what I mean? And he's like, let's go to the shop. He, like, cleans the Bondo off of it. Polycyclic Sonic Prep is probably the newest thing that we've had to play with. This again is something that was a tool used in the medical field too. With very ultrasonic waves, it creates sort of areas of high and low pressure and it makes these tiny little vacuum bubbles that like implode on themselves. And I don't necessarily know how that's used in a lab, but I know how it applies in the kitchen. If I want to mix immiscible liquids, i.e. oil and water, this is going to allow that to happen. So, today we're going to play with the Sonic Prep. We're going to be making saffron salt. So we have a really strong saffron stock here. We're going to add salt. That's the tool for stirring, man. That's right. Almost there. I can start to feel little particles of salt not really wanting to dissolve. This liquid is trying to tell us, hey guys, I can't do this anymore. Stop, I'm full! Great. So we have three to four grams of salt bopping around in there. We're going to add a little bit of water. We're going to put this guy right in the Sonic Prep. This is the machine here. This box here is essentially just to keep this loud screeching, irritating noise from escaping. We're going to place our super saturated solution there. And the Sonic Prep is going to go right down in there. And then we're going to turn it on. What it's doing now is the ultrasonic waves are essentially creating little bubbles, vacuum bubbles. Those pieces of kosher salt are all breaking apart and integrating into the liquid. Okay, so that should do the trick. Now we need to cool it down. So what we do is we pour this directly into a dish set over ice. What will end up happening is all of the super saturated salt crystals, as the temperature falls, will actually precipitate out. Taking the flavor of the saffron out as it goes. Into the salt. So we're going to pour both of them through this. We turn it out onto the silpat and dehydrate it. When that comes out of the dehydrator, what we're left with are these wonderful little chips that are super flavorful. It's a lot of work for one component. But it's special. It is special. Yeah, but it's very special. So we've learned about technology that pushes flavor into things. But what about drawing flavor out? We visited Counter Culture's training center to check out the Beacon, a craft brewing device that uses rain technology, which stands for reverse atmospheric infusion. That's a fancy way to say the device creates a vacuum, sucking the air out of organic material, then flooding it with a liquid, infusing, say, vodka with lemon zest, creating a little thing I like to call drunk me. Lou Vestardis is the co-founder of Beacon, and he's really excited about its potential. Now, I'm what people in the food business call dumb. And like, when I think of a coffee, I put the grounded thing in the bottom and then the water and then I push down on it. Or I put it in the big thing and then the water comes through the big thing. But you have the rain process. Right. What is it? What we do is we enhance the way infusion occurs and how soluble materials are extracted into liquids by using vacuums. But we don't use vacuums in a way that we're sucking anything out of the organic materials. What we're doing is we're removing the air from the cellular structure. You take a sponge, you put it on top of water, say a basin full of water, a pot full of water, and you push that sponge down and you let it come back up. It's partially saturated. You let it sit there for a few hours, you take that sponge out, it's completely saturated. What we do is a little bit different. We take that sponge and it's like taking that sponge and when you take that sponge and you squeeze it, what you're doing is you're compressing all the pores. We're not compressing the pores, we're sucking the air out of the pores. But in essence, in both cases, there's no air in those pores. You put it under water, you let go, what happens? Absorbs everything. There you go. What we have here is chili arbol, bean cherries, cascara, which is the dried cherry of the coffee bean. You take the vodka. So what exactly is happening in there? As we're pulling the air out of the materials, the vodka is going into the cellular structure. And ultimately, once it purges, you'll see that clear Tito's vodka is now infused with the bean cherries and the cascara and the chili skin. So as we develop other devices to hold larger volumes, there will be applications for larger beverages like wine, milk, and even the culinary level like you mentioned, stocks and broths and oils. My brother and I come from a third generation coffee roasting company. Oh wow. And so this originally was conceived around coffee. But once we realized that it applied to tea and then applied to everything, we just thought to ourselves, let's go with this white space. How far away is the home version from being a thing? Have you already created kind of prototypes of that? Yeah, the primary focus is heavily on the culinary community, the chefs, the mixologists, and the baristas. So the homey is probably about two years away. So what I think when I hear this is Starbucks or even like my local bar could come up with a drink. Yeah. They could customize it, they could encode it, and then they could give me all the ingredients I need, and I could take that home, get the encoding from them, buy it from them theoretically, and then have the drink that I love at a bar or at Starbucks at my house. That is the absolute vision goal of this technology. So this one is infused with which ingredients? This is black tea, coconut, cinnamon, and vanilla bean. That's a great combo. And this is before? That's before. This is our after? After. That's like a spicy and tropical. If you had told me it was a mixed drink off of this, I would have 100% believed you. Now I've had a few drinks. Theoretically, if I lived in Colorado or in Washington or a state where marijuana is legal, if I put a pot inside of this, like I would with a coffee, would I be able to make, say, a marijuana-infused vodka? Well, it's a botanical. It would react no differently than any other botanical. Fantastic. I will buy a pot. Are you getting some ideas? Do you think that technology as it relates to coffee and drinks in general is as important as it relates to, say, food or working in a kitchen? If you look at coffee and tea, they really represent the beginning of craft. Every craft I can think of has to do with immersion and infusion. There's thousands of coffees and teas out there, but these represent one botanical and one fruit in the whole world of what this earth has to offer. We've seen how technology can manipulate liquids, but what about cooking something solid like an egg and cheese sandwich? Consider that creme brulee kitchen torch you may or may not have at home. So the Searzall won't attach to that small torch, but it will attach to a 16.4-ounce butane torch if you have one of those lying around. The Searzall is an attachment that goes over the flame spout, abolishing the smell and taste of propane and tempering the flame so you get an even more controlled heat source. It feels like, I mean, looking at your inventions, like you're creating new ways of basically cooking. I mean, or is it more like just modifying old ways? That depends. A lot of times I see a problem, and then if that problem is easy enough to address, then I'll address it. It's basically just a fire on the end of a stick. We're not selling it as some sort of revolutionary new thing. It's just a very hot disc that doesn't put bad taste into your food the way a torch does. I designed it to be extremely fast to turn on, so it takes literally 5-10 seconds for it to be at full blast. A lot of times you wish you had the ability to hit something with heat, but you're like, oh man, am I going to, am I going to, and then wait, and then you know what I mean, it's like done. This is actually an application that was brought to me by a friend of mine, Peter Kim. This is actually how he makes his egg sandwiches in the morning. The problem with making an egg sandwich is if you want the yolk to be runny, you can't really flip it over the egg because you'll probably break the yolk, but he doesn't want the white to be all kind of nasty on top. He wants the white to be cooked as well. So the question is, well, how do you do that? The bottom of the egg is starting to cook. I'm going to add some salt to it. I'm going to add some pepper. Now this is the part that would never kind of get cooked, right? So you can just hit the top here. Now right now I'm setting that top white, and I'm also going to hit like a little bit on the top of the yolk, but I'm not going to cook it all the way through. Now cheese on top. Toast that really quickly. Turn off the thing. It melts very quickly, and it gives it kind of a nice toastiness. And that's it. So you have your full egg and cheese sandwich in under three minutes. And so, like, you know, is that going to change the world? No, but, you know, it is a very fast way to do it, and it achieves a better result for this than you could get any other way because, look, you're still saucy here, but there's absolutely no uncooked white. It's just the yolk. It's perfect. So there you have it. That's great. We're not supposed to see any of this technology when we go out, unless, of course, you're dining at a restaurant with an open kitchen. But as many of the chefs said, the tech serves to enhance the food, not the other way around. So perhaps down the line, you'll see wedding registries of the future listing fine china, a nice set of knives, and a reverse atmospheric infusion device. You know, for great coffee.