2013 Gift Guide: Day One

The geniueses at Modernist Cuisine have so many cool products it's hard to know where to begin: you could please just about any cook with a gift from their product line.  They've got products to help you cure, foam, fry, sweeten, stablilize, thicken and transform. Even the pickiest food nerd would be thrilled to get one of their spherification kits. (So, for that matter, would I.)

But their latest invention sounds coolest of all. While many of these products are fairly arcane, this one has only one desire: to help you make a better pizza. The Modernist Cuisine Baking Steel turns an ordinary home oven into a blast furnace.  The baking surface has a thermal conductivity eighteen times greater than that of a ceramic pizza stone; as a result pizzas cook faster and come out crisper. You put the steel into the oven an hour ahead of time and let it get glowing hot.  It will then cook a pizza  in four minutes flat. And since it retains heat, once it's ready you can keep cooking pizzas to your heart's content. 

It costss $99 - and makes a very hot gift.