Would you choose to spend your time cooking a huge slab of Brisket while outside in the freezing snow?
Probably not, but according to a recent report, this was the challenge faced by Desora co-founder and CTO, Yinka Ogunbiyi and CEO, Michel Maalouly.
They both spent hours in the cold every weekend attempting to perfect a grill design as part of an engineering course at Harvard in 2015. The aim was to improve on what many claim to be the ultimage backyard grilling and smoking tool: The Big Green Egg.
allegedly this is a major challenge because:
“There are several factors to overcome when trying to cook a 14-pound slab of brisket during the winter. Not only do you have to contend with freezing temperatures but you also have to keep your grill or smoker from getting too wet with moisture from the snow. On top of that, you have to keep the fire going for several hours, or you’ve just wasted a pricey cut of beef.”
and
According to Ogunbiyi “We were amateurs, smoking a brisket every week in the cold Boston snow”.
But not only that, they had the added pressure that their proffessor had found a client ready to invest in making their design into a real product if they could perfect a grill better than any existing one.
Indeed not only did they need to make a more efficient grill, that would maximize heat coverage, accelerate the grilling process and improve on the meats flavor , but they were also seeking to include a premium feature at a cheap rate: the ability to add WiFi connectivity so that they could watch their long smoke sessions from indoors i.e. remote control and monitoring.
To do that, the ingenious pair created a mobile app that allowed them to monitor temperatures from the classroom.
But not only that, the innovative partners went much further once they realized they had another tool that would make their lives easier: computer models.
How did they go about developing the perfect grill?
A piece of software called ComFLOW helped them to simulate cooks without firing up a grill, buying pricey meat or, perhaps most importantly, venturing out into the deep freeze. Ogunbiyi explained that while ComFLOW is typically used for things like rockets, cars and chemical plants, you can also use it to analyze a grill.
“It’s just basically figuring out where the heat is in your barbecue and where the smoke’s going,” she said. “You ended up studying all the physics and chemistry with barbecue and putting in these computer models.”
The other benefit was speed. To cook a brisket on a grill or smoker, you typically need around 12 to 16 hours. When you employ computer models, Ogunbiyi explained, you can get a result in about an hour.The team eventually discovered that a hyperbolic or hour-glass shaped chamber, or an insert that altered a grill’s shape, not only makes the Green Egg-style grills’ heat distribution more efficient but it made the food taste better, too.
But you can find out the whole story by clicking the link below:
