This Designer Wants You to Cook Food in Your Washing Machine
Multitaskers have a new way to increase their efficiency by washing a load of laundry while also cooking dinner. Thanks to Iftach Gazit, from Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, you may soon be able to repurpose your washing machine into your very own sous-vide machine. The new line of meals, although not ready for market, includes salmon with teriyaki sauce, mixed veggies in olive oil and garlic salt, and garlic-herb steak.
Gazit’s inspiration came from a trip to New York. He witnessed the city’s homeless population turning to laundromats for an array of functions like filling up water bottles, charging their cell phones, and napping. And that’s when it hit him: Laundromats could be a makeshift kitchen too.
After experimenting with Tupperware containers of pasta and green beans and using a dryer, Gazit settled on the sous-vide cooking technique.
“I was inspired by the craze of sous-vide cooking, where food is vacuum-sealed and immersed in hot water for long periods of time,” the 31-year-old tells the Guardian. “But rather than cooking a piece of meat at 58°C for two-and-a-half hours, you could just set your washing machine to ‘synthetics’ for a long cycle. For vegetables, you could set it to a short hot ‘cotton’ program.”
His idea is simple: Use waterproof Tyvek paper bags to create a vacuum seal around food that can be cooked by tossing it into the washing machine for a cycle set at a given temperature.
The special Tyvek sous-vide bags are not technically available yet, and Gazit notes that this new product is more of a vehicle to get people to talk versus something purely practical.