Joe Ray

Wired—September 15, 2017

NOT LONG AGO, I poured a bottle of fancy whipping cream into the gadget I was reviewing, started it up and watched in awe as the machine’s rotor began spinning rapidly, creating a vertical wall of solidified dairy that stayed in place after the machine wound down.

“Behold,” I exclaimed as my wife Elisabeth passed through the kitchen. “I made butter in a centrifuge!”

“Wow,” she said with a tone that foretold bubble bursting. “Did they run out of butter at the store?”

The centrifuge, called the Spinzall, was created by culinary wizard and bartender extraordinaire Dave Arnold, the same man who brought the Searzall to life. Dave’s newest contraption is an $800 hulking black appliance that, with a pair of tubes jutting up out of the back, looks like the progeny of a top-of-the-line food processor crossed with a beer hat.

Clearly Elisabeth was just missing the machine’s potential. Along with butter, centrifuges can be used to clarify juices, create transparent herb oils, and make nut milks and even ultra-smooth baby foods.

I spun it up again, this time to whir up bartender Jamie Boudreau’s recipe for clarified Clamato juice, then combined it with a Pacifico and lime juice to make an elegant, clarified michlelada.

“Mmm,” said Elisabeth, “almost as good as the one we had in Guadalajara.”

Was she doing this on purpose?

“You were upstairs for a couple hours. Was all that time just to make the one ingredient?”

I pretended not to hear her and, undeterred, I went to the store and bought 40 limes.

Read the full review here on WIRED.