24 August 2012

Third Smoke PS: The Charcuterie

I have this really cool High-Powered Italian Meat Thrower. It spins up a stainless steel disc, and uses that to launch pieces of meat at high speed the length of my kitchen. Imagine a baseball pitching machine, but with meat. Anyway, a really neat side effect is that to propel the meat, it first cuts a thin slice of it. So as long as I take the necessary precautions, I can set it up and use it [in a clearly unintended way] as a slicer. It's easily powerful enough to handle things which normal consumer-grade slicers can have trouble with, such as bacon.


So I fired it up and did some slicing today. The bacon and duck breast "ham" I had in the smoker the other day. The bacon was really nice. Fried up crispy and very tasty. The duck breast exceeded expectations, and expectations were high. Intend to make both again.


3 comments:

JustJoeP said...

"use it [in a clearly unintended way] as a slicer" - LOL!

Looks delicious.

zim said...

need pics of the boys at the other end of the kitchen, waiting to catch and eat the thrown food.

is this a model you recommend? we still want to get one, but short of spending several thousand on a used (and massively heavy) Hobart, seem unable to find the sweet spot with price, ease-of-cleaning and performance.

pyker said...

It's like the slicer design needed one more pass from an engineer who actually used it.

What's great about it is that it actually slices things. The danger of consumer-grade slicers is getting an underpowered machine that doesn't actually slice anything. This is powerful enough to slice raw, not-frozen pork belly. So ensuring it's powerful enough is key.

So it meets the fundamental criteria.

Design-wise, the slices go straight into the housing covering the drive mechanism for the blade. Like where the slices would come out and how you would marshal them was not considered. It works ok if you have a hand to spare, waiting to catch each slice (that does not get launched across the room first) and move it. But while you can use the sliding mechanism one-handed, I often use two hands to hold the meat in place and slide the carriage, eschewing the machine's holder in favor of my fingers.

Cleanup is a bit tedious. As a result, casual use, for me, is out. I have a deliberate slicing mission before it comes out. But when it does, overall, it certainly gets the job done.