For the First Time Ever, You Can Buy a New Big Green Egg Online

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Why The Hell Does Your Chemex Have A Nipple? We Found Out

Welcome to Further Details, a series dedicated to ubiquitous but overlooked elements hidden on your favorite products. This week: the mysterious knob on a Chemex.

Since 1941, coffee nerds have used Chemex coffeemakers to make clean, delicious cups of pour-over coffee. The brewers are made of a single piece of borosilicate glass finished with a wooden collar and tie, serving as an insulated handle. The smooth glass is accented by a “button” with no discernible use that juts out on the bottom of the carafe below the pouring spout. Some have questioned the purpose of the button, and its usage is buried deep within Chemex’s brewing guide.

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Peter Schlumbohm, Ph.D., designed the Chemex to look good, be easy to use and, most importantly, brew a delicious cup of coffee. Schlumbohm was so obsessed with refining everyday tools that he developed over 300 patents during his career, the Chemex being his most famous. His invention was a success: the Chemex is a fixture at the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian, and remains a favorite among coffee enthusiasts and professionals. From the hourglass shape to the heat-resilient material, everything about the design is meant to produce a high-quality cup of coffee. So what’s the weird nipple-looking thing on the bottom of the brewer?

Per the manual: it marks where half the carafe’s volume is, with full volume falling at the bottom of the spout.

In Chemex vernacular, a “cup” of coffee is a humble 5 ounces, and not the standard 8 ounces. Therefore a six-cup Chemex holds 40 ounces of coffee and the button marks 20 ounces. (This is applicable to all Chemex sizes except the three-cup brewer, where the button denotes full volume.) The company’s brewing guide recommends one rounded tablespoon of coffee for every five ounces of coffee, so the button makes it easy to eyeball how much water you need to pour to achieve Chemex’s water-to-coffee ratio. So if you want a 20-ounce brew (in a six-cup Chemex), use four tablespoons of ground coffee, wait for the carafe to fill up to the button and toss the filter once it hits the mark.

For the coffee-obsessed, the button is a fruitless feature. Chemex’s maker likely didn’t expect at-home coffee geekery to escalate to a point where $150 kettles and scales were the norm. Modern coffee people will rarely eyeball their coffee measurements, instead brewing by weight rather than volume. Volume is a fickle measurement that is subject to irregularities in coffee beans, like varying densities and ragged shapes. This Reddit post shows how the same coffee bean at three roast levels can vary in volume but have the same weight. Weighing out coffee makes a final product that can be replicated and adjusted accordingly over multiple brews.

The Chemex button is a relic of its time, long before the third wave coffee movement, when coffee drinkers were less equipped at home, and most serious consideration pertained to the speed with which caffeine would transfer from bean to bloodstream. But hey, if you don’t have a scale, at least you can rely on a weird bump to guide your brews.

Note: Purchasing products through our links may earn us a portion of the sale, which supports our editorial team’s mission. Learn more here.

Heads Up: ‘Gaming’ Chairs Suck. Here’s Why

The quickest way to tell if a person is a gamer isn’t their rig or the presence of LED light strips in their room; it is, and has been for more than a decade, the chair. With all due respect, that is just stupid.

You know the ones — the fire engine red accents, the embroidered logos, the polyurethane leather, the deepest of reclines. Holdovers from a time when gaming was only for the young, these features are not the primary target of my ire. Not when nearly every gaming chair is still, in the year 2020, emulating those found in race cars — complete with bucket seats, winged backrests and lifted seat edges.

Bested only by working and sleeping, there isn’t a more stationary activity than gaming. Whether you’re getting in a quick game of Warzone before bed or it’s 3 a.m. and you’re still playing the same game of Civilization VI, your body needs support. The vast majority of racer-style chairs do not provide support, or at least not support of the right kind.

A selection of classic driving-inspired gaming chairs, complete with absurd recline range, polyurethane leather, lumbar and headrest pillows and more.

The winged back and bucket seat were introduced to keep drivers firmly planted during high-speed turns. Playing Dota 2 shouldn’t dislodge you from your seat. The elevated front lip of a racing seat serves to lift a driver’s legs so they can more comfortably reach pedals. This serves no purpose in a CS:GO match. These more obvious problems are foundational, but the ubiquity of the aesthetic presents other issues. Take the faux leather used to upholster the chairs; this material does not breathe well, which makes the tired cliché of the sweaty gamer a reality.

The solution is as boring as it is obvious: the same desk chairs that are good for working are good for gaming. These ergonomics-focused chairs prioritize support, circulation and body health over looks. Instead of winged backs, the shapes mimic the body and allow for freer movement. In place of sweaty pleather, good desk chairs utilize airy mesh and more breathable foam. Instead of seats that lift your legs up and cause circulation breaks, most employ “waterfall” edge seats that cut back on the pressure that builds up in your thighs. Hours of stationary gaming demands an ergonomics focus, not an aesthetics one.

The gaming community hasn’t always been aligned with car seats — previous to the colorful seats of today, people played games in anything from plastic lawn chairs to Marcel Breuer’s famed Cesca chairs, as chronicled by the website ChairsFX. By most accounts, the racer-style gaming chair movement was born in 2006, when a racing seat company called DXRacer shifted its focus to gaming chairs and, after a series of major sponsorships with eSports events, erupted in popularity.

There are signs the tyranny of the videogame race car chair’s is coming to an end. The task chair masters at Herman Miller recently announced a partnership with the gaming wing at Logitech that promises to “create the world’s most advanced gaming chair.” For all the destruction it’s wrought, the coronavirus has forced millions to reevaluate the chairs they spend the most time in.

Consider buying a chair not because your favorite streamer on Twitch was paid to sit in it, but for the love of your joints.

Note: Purchasing products through our links may earn us a portion of the sale, which supports our editorial team’s mission. Learn more here.

For a New Cook, This $145 Pan Feels Like a Steal

I didn’t find the Always Pan; the Always Pan found me, but not in a cute way; it was more of “I-won’t-leave-you-alone-until-you-give-me-attention” sort of way. The pan flooded my Instagram feed with ads of highly staged dining tables and kitchen counters. I was annoyed, but intrigued.

In 2019, Shiza Shahid founded Our Place, the direct-to-consumer cookware company behind the Always Pan. Shahid, who is also a founder of the Malala Project, started the company to make cooking and dining essentials that celebrate the international backgrounds of the foods we cook and eat with them. Previous releases include separate limited-edition collections revolving around Lunar New Year and Mexican heritage. Our Place’s stalwart product, however, remains the Always Pan, a 10-inch, 2.6-quart, non-stick cast aluminum sauté pan with a detachable wooden spatula, domed lid and nesting steamer tray. I was curious whether or not the eight-in-one cooking tool could truly “do the work of eight pieces of traditional cookware” like the website said, so I tested it.

What’s Good

The Always Pan is photogenic as hell, which it probably owes to the pastel colors — spice, steam, char, sage — it’s available in. But we’re not judging based on looks (maybe just a little). I was impressed by the pan’s even heat distribution, which I tested using the flour test. I sifted a layer of flour across the surface of the pan and toasted it on the stove, where the flour browned steadily and evenly.

The pan features a ceramic non-stick coating that passed two egg tests. The first test, cooking an over-easy egg, was a success thanks to a slick layer of oil, a flick of the wrist and the pan’s curved sides. (There was a day when I got burnt egg residue stuck in the pan. The non-stick coating made it easy to rinse off and start anew.) The second test, preparing a French omelette, was also a success. I was able to make a fluffy and vibrant yellow omelette with a gooey, eggy center. I was again impressed when, in the process of rolling the omelette, I tilted the pan and the egg rolled into itself and slipped off onto a plate.

I initially thought the built-in spatula was gimmicky, but I found it to be a thoughtful inclusion. The edge is thin enough to get under foods, and the holder made my spoon rest unnecessary.

What’s Not so Good

You’ll always reach for the Always Pan, Our Place implies. Unless you need to bake something, that is. The Always Pan is not oven-safe, so the pan is left to its exclusively stovetop devices. While not a deal-breaker, a lot of non-stick pans out there — like Made In’s non-stick frying pans — are oven safe. Of the eight cookware pieces the Always Pan can replace, bakeware is not one of them.

The lid was designed to catch condensation and prevent it from dripping back into food, and the handle is silicone-coated to be heat resistant. The lid’s handle is slightly rounded, which means it wobbles when placed upside down on the counter. As someone who does this often to prevent the counter from getting wet, I was annoyed by this detail. Then again, I could buy a pot lid holder, but that defeats the purpose of having an all-in-one tool.

Alternatives

No piece of cookware is truly a one-trick pony. Almost all pots and pans are multifunctional to a degree. I can fry a chicken, make a sauce and sauté vegetables in a cast-iron skillet, and I can use this $30 Calphalon non-stick pan to make omelettes and, if I add a $4 steel cooling rack, steam food, too. The $145 price tag isn’t low and you could spend less money on a few more products to do all the jobs the Always Pan can. In essence, you’re paying for convenience and good looks.

Verdict

The Always Pan won’t replace all the pots and pans you already have. The brand’s website states it can “do the work of eight pieces of traditional cookware,” and that’s true. But obviously it can’t do all eight functions simultaneously, and you’ll still need other cookware to make meals.

Despite being a workhorse of a pan, it’s made for someone who’s building a kitchen arsenal from scratch. I still find myself reaching for my All-Clad non-stick pan to make my fried egg breakfasts, but it’s not because it’s a superior pan. I can pull my All-Clad out of the drawer in one fluid motion versus taking out the Always Pan, removing the lid and setting aside the steamer basket. Although the pan is targeted to all, it’s more apt for beginner chefs (especially those who have minimal storage space). If either of those apply to you, the Always Pan should be at the top of your shopping list.

Our Place provided this product for review.

Note: Purchasing products through our links may earn us a portion of the sale, which supports our editorial team’s mission. Learn more here.

Finex Just Dropped the Grail Breakfast-Making Cast-Iron Cookware

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There’s a Totally Useless Ring on the Bottom of Your Cast-Iron Skillet. Why?

Welcome to Further Details, a series dedicated to ubiquitous but overlooked elements hidden on your favorite products. This week: the ring on the bottom of a cast-iron skillet.

Not much has changed about the humble cast-iron skillet from its late 1800s, early 1900s golden era to now. When the cookware returned to popularity about a decade ago, it did so with similarly weighty builds, stellar heat insulation, pour spouts, a handgrip opposite the handle and a ring around the base of the pan. Unlike other, flashier cookware, cast iron remained a utility-first venture — except that ring.

Before stainless steel, non-stick, aluminum and carbon steel pots and pans rose to power, cast iron was king of the kitchen. The raw material needed was mined during the Colonial era and through the 19th century, when prospectors discovered enormous deposits along the edges of Lake Superior, in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Legends and collectibles today, wares from makers like Griswold, Wagner, Vollrath and Wapak dominated the stovetop for nearly a century before steel and aluminum’s availability skyrocketed in post-World War II America. But what we cooked on changed as well.

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Before underground grids provided cities and towns plentiful natural gas, woodstoves reigned. These stoves operated by lighting wood logs in different compartments, each with a corresponding “eye,” or what we’d call a burner today. South American celebrity chef Francis Mallman briefly demonstrates this making a pot of coffee on a wood stove on Neflix’s Chef’s Table. The ring on the base of the cast-iron skillets — which is sometimes called a “heat ring” or “smoke ring” — allowed the skillet to slot into the eye and lift it slightly out of the flame. Except that isn’t quite true either.

According to Dennis Powell, founder of cast-iron cookware maker Butter Pat Industries, the “heat ring” is really a “machining ring.”

“Machining rings are used to remove material and make a surface flat without machining a wider surface,” Powell explains. “Flatness has always been a casting issue for large, thin surfaces. Machining rings solve them easily, now as then.”

A Smithey Ironware’s No. 10 Cast-Iron Skillet, with a heat ring and a little rust.

Powell, who spent two years studying cast iron design and manufacturing documents in the Library of Congress, says the earliest records show it was called a machining ring before companies began advertising its supposed functionality. The ring does hold the pan a touch higher over the flames in the woodstove, but not enough to make a difference. A bug disguised as a feature.

Eric Steckling, head of product development at Marquette Castings, corroborates Powell’s claim.

“With any casting method it can be difficult to keep the bottom perfectly flat. Even the slightest variation will cause some wobble on a glass top. To fix this issue we just built in a ring on the bottom that we could grind on a flat surface after casting. This allows us to make sure the skillets sit perfectly flat,” Steckling says.

Thus, the heat rings you see on modern skillets are very subtle nods to cast iron’s origins and help make sure your skillet doesn’t tremble when heated on a cooktop. Rings can be found on modern brands like Smithey Ironware, Field Company, Marquette Castings and more.

Editor’s Note: A version of this story published on May 15, 2020 without the full history of the ring on the base of the cast-iron skillet. This version has been updated with more facts and insight from cast-iron skillet manufacturers.

Note: Purchasing products through our links may earn us a portion of the sale, which supports our editorial team’s mission. Learn more here.

Can’t Remember What Day It Is? These Satisfying Calendars Will Save You

Last week, I freaked out after waking up two hours into my workday. I was shocked that I didn’t have any messages looking for me. It was Saturday.

With days blending into weeks and weeks into months, no one can fault you for losing track of time. I have a calendar on my phone and my laptop, and I even wear my watch, which has a date window, and even that hasn’t stopped me from waking up in the morning wondering what day it is. These calendars may help you stay grounded and add some panache to an admittedly dull work-life situation.

Black & White Wood Calendar Block

You’ll have to remember to adjust the blocks to correct date, but over time it’ll become habit. The daily routine will keep you cognizant of the day of the month, and it’ll help you avoid missing any work deadlines.

Three by Three Acrylic Desktop Organizer & Perpetual Calendar

A calendar and desk organizer all in one. The sliding mechanism makes it so the calendar works year after year, and you won’t need to buy those tacky disposable calendars ever again.

Bubble Wrap Calendar

This bubble wrap calendar is a satisfying way to keep track of the days. Each date is covered by a bubble that you can pop at the end of the day, and the designers clearly knew popping bubble wrap is addicting so they included some bonus bubbles to pop, too.

Block Design Perpetual Calendar

This minimal perpetual calendar is an aesthetic way to pass the days. The calendar is based on retro graphic design, and the day and date are highlighted by manually adjusted magnets.

Gideon Dagan Perpetual Calendar

Gideon Dagan’s calendar is one of the artsier options for a calendar (it was made for the Museum of Modern Art). To adjust the date, move the magnetic round balls to sit atop the correct day and to point at the correct month.

Stendig Calendar

Massimo Vignell designed the Stendig Calendar in 1966, and it’s been the top pick for the design-conscious ever since. The letters and numbers are easy to read, and the contrasting white and black ink makes for a truly standout piece. Perforated sheets make for easy tearaway, and the brand recommends using exhausted sheets as wrapping paper.

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Tait Design Co. Perpetual Calendar

Tait Design Co. wanted to make a calendar that would last forever. The brand sourced high quality materials from across the US, and made a perpetual calendar that would work whether it’s 2020 or 3020.

Note: Purchasing products through our links may earn us a portion of the sale, which supports our editorial team’s mission. Learn more here.