ChefLab

ChefLab is a pocket atelier for people who weigh salt in grams. ChefLab takes the guesswork out of the chef’s hands. You weigh the meat, the egg, the pan. The bench answers with grams or a clock. The math comes from published kitchen science and from what already works on a board. You get there faster because you can trust the numbers while the water boils. Eight benches. One coaching line, then the grams. Kitchen guidance. Calibrate the thermometer you actually own. CURE LAB Dry cure, equilibrium brine, or a wet-gradient pull from the actual meat weight. Injection pickle and dry sausage too. Salt, nitrite, and the percentages that keep a coppa from becoming a story. EU nitrite salt (0.4-0.6%) or Prague #1/#2. THERMAL LAB Sous-vide and pasteurization holds from published charts: thickness in millimetres, core temperature, then the hold. Start from the fridge or a home freezer (−18 °C). Hardware-agnostic. On beef and pork, steak stays that hold. Cheek, shank, and tail add a spoonable clock after the core arrives. Poultry and fish do not. EGG LAB A physics timer, not a 7-minute superstition. Weight, starting temperature, and kitchen height, then a countdown to the second. Live Activity so the phone can sit on the far side of the board. Same bench, more bowls: custard and crème anglaise from yolk and sugar; mayonnaise, vinaigrette, hollandaise, and beurre blanc from oil or butter. CHOCOLATE LAB Melt, cool, work. Form V is the snap: seed or chopped chocolate, dark, milk, or white. Ganache as a ratio: pour, truffle, or whip, cream or water. Sugar is the third job: thread, ball, crack, and caramel as the reading on the thermometer you already own, shifted by kitchen height. No temper meter. FROZEN LAB Gelato, ice cream, and sorbet. PAC and POD from the batch you weigh, then sucrose, dextrose, milk, and cream. Kitchen mix math, not a vitrine spec sheet. FERMENT LAB Sauerkraut salt on the cabbage, pickle salt in the brine, and a meat hold toward pH 5.3. Dextrose for the flora. Nitrite and drying salt stay in Cure Lab. Two clocks for salami: ferment, then dry. After kraut or pickle is ready, a fridge sentence: salt keeping the jar, not a use-by stamp. INFUSE LAB Chamber vacuum for fruit and vegetables: compress until watermelon, pineapple, or mushroom goes dark, or drive marinade into the pores. You set the tissue and the millibar; the lab gives fill, collapse, and the two holds. Dense roots barely take liquid. An edge sealer is not a chamber. Botanicals in alcohol get a steep clock from grind, ABV, and bath temperature. A jar, not a still. TEXTURE LAB Hydrocolloids without the dinner-party mystique: gelatin bloom, agar hysteresis, pectin windows, alginate, gellan, kappa, iota, lambda, locust bean, guar, konjac, methylcellulose, xanthan. Mixes too: kappa or xanthan with locust bean, xanthan with guar, agar with LBG, konjac with kappa, LM pectin with calcium. Fluid gel on agar and gellan. Foams from gelatin, methylcellulose, or lecithin. A siphon’s chargers against the bottle. Fat into powder. Alginate spaghetti, skin, and citrate so acidic juice still spheres. A saved run can open at half or double. Grams of gel, not vibes of gel. Texture Lab Unlock is a one-time purchase; later extras on this bench come with it. It also lifts the three-note notebook cap. ON THE DEVICE Calculations and batch notes stay on your phone. No account. No cloud. Metric first. Dutch and English. Educational, not HACCP. Calibrate the thermometer you actually own.