That might not look like much but that machine is stepping Clover a few years back in time (at least for the next week or so). It’s our Rational oven and the water tank leaked which destroyed the circuit board and it’s going to take a couple days to get it back up and running. That means we’re dusting off old recipes, which sadly are inferior to our current methods.
We all spend a lot of time talking about what is going wrong in the world. Clover’s entire reason for being is to try to create solutions to fix big problems (namely global warming). With these giant looming challenges it’s easy to lose sight of what is getting better.
Chris led us in some really creative uses of that oven. It is fully programmable and you can control moisture/ humidity, temperature, fan speed and some other cool stuff (like smoke).
So we’ve been using this oven to “hot steam” our soaked organic chickpeas instead of boiling them. It’s a really cool method that allows us to manage the water content in the hummus more precisely and cook the chickpeas more evenly (can you say “silky”?) This makes our hummus so yummy. We’re using the oven to cook our seitan in a high humidity controlled environment (which we used to boil in broth which is more conventional). As far as I know we’re the only ones using it for these purposes. We’ve even made this oven a critical part of the burgers we’ve been making in house that are finding a following with our Burger Friday subscription program (if you haven’t yet checked it out, subscriptions may transform your week).
For the next few days we have to go back to the older methods. And they just aren’t as good. If you’re a hard core Clover fan you might notice the changes, but they should be subtle. Take the chance to feel a bit nostalgic and thankful for progress.
Mesmerizing video of this oven cleaning itself. Sometimes you’ll find somebody at the commissary just staring at it:
