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November 2, 2013 12:32 am GMT

A Love Story That Spawned A Hardware Revolution In The Kitchen

nomiku-teamNeither of them had any entrepreneurial history before they met. Abe Fetterman was a plasma physics Ph.D at Princeton and Lisa Qiu had worked in hospitality at Jean-Georges and Mario Batali before entering the magazine world. But while watching Top Chef episodes during their first week of dating, they clicked. Lisa, who was working around some of the most elite chefs in the world, saw an immersion circulator on a Top Chef episode. These devices are used to cook with the “sous vide” method, where food is vacuum sealed and slow-cooked in a water bath to a precise and even temperature. High-end chefs have raved that “sous vide” helps them create perfectly cooked food, like steaks where the core is evenly rare without having burnt exteriors. She confessed that she would’ve loved to have one. But at the time, sous vide machines cost well over $1,000, which was far out of reach for an admittedly money-poor grad student and associate magazine editor in Manhattan. So Abe gallantly offered to make one with off-the-shelf parts for about $50 or so. It was the beginning of a partnership that would spawn a company, a family and an adventure through the factories of Shenzhen, DIY workshops in the Lower East Side and then Silicon Valley. Ultimately, the now married couple wants to start a home-cooking revolution where once avant-garde technique of sous vide becomes cheap and easy for everyone. They just released the Nomiku, which is the product of well over a year’s work and has a pre-order price of $299.95. It’s a home sous vide machine that you can plop into a bucket of water, and then turn a knob to an exact temperature. It then circulates water around whatever it is that you’re working — be it eggs or salmon in a bag. “Nomiku is all about modernizing your whole kitchen,” Lisa said. “We see the kitchen as a home manufacturing center. It should be both clean and beautiful.” She went on, “When we started, the cheapest immersion circulator was $1,000. We completely disrupted the whole market and we’re making a whole, completely new one.” Not long after Abe made a DIY sous vide machine, they started running workshops in Lower Manhattan for other hobbyists and chefs that wanted to hack their kitchen appliances. Eventually, they came up with an idea to create an affordable sous vide machine — something that

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