This Fiery Tool Finishes Your Meat With a Blast of Heat

This Fiery Tool Finishes Your Meat With a Blast of Heat

This Fiery Tool Finishes Your Meat With a Blast of Heat

A few years back, on a walk among the spice shops and bodegas of Manhattan's Chinatown, I spied a storefront that looked like it was owned by a hard-drinking chemist. Fernet and Aperol commingled with beakers, pipettes, and books—stacks and stacks of books. I knocked on the door to ask what they did.

I received a polite but vague answer about doing research for a bar. A more appropriate answer might have been, "We're scheming"—especially when you consider that what eventually emerged from the man's mind is the Searzall, a baffle that fits over the business end of a blowtorch to spread out the heat, turning your BernzOmatic into a handheld broiler.

The guy behind that Chinatown door was Dave Arnold, and if you're looking for someone to come up with some interesting food gadgets, he's got the chops. The son of an electrical engineer, Arnold served as the French Culinary Institute's director of culinary technology and founded the Museum of Food and Drink. He has been an unofficial adviser to WD-50 chef Wylie Dufresne, and he's a pal of Momofuku's David Chang. To wit, Arnold and Chang opened the Booker + Dax bar right next to Momofuku, where that research yielded stuff like using agar to clarify lime juice for perfectly clear G&Ts, and employing a 1500°F-degree red hot poker to caramelize the sugars in a cocktail, radically changing its profile.

More recently, Arnold has been readying the Searzall for market. More than just a better handheld torch, it's also a visually striking object, something that's sure to add a bit of Mad Max pizazz to your kitchen routine.

While the Searzall gang likes to tout its capabilities for cooking a burger or reheating leftover pizza, it really comes into play searing food after cooking it sous vide. The beautiful rib eye that just spent an hour and a half cooking to a perfect medium rare next to your Anova or Sansaire? The brisket that's been cooking for a day or more to achieve melting-tender perfection? When they come out of the bag, they may be tender as all get-out, but they're big gray blobs. This is the part where you blast them.

Up to now, this meant using one of those wimpy kitchen blowtorches often associated with crème brûlées or blasting them with the BernzOmatic's pencil-thin beam of heat. Problem is, those are slow, uneven, and their super-concentrated heat can impart an "off" flavor to the food. The Searzall eliminates these problems by forcing the flame through two layers of temperature-resistant wire mesh. It's a handheld version of the gas broiler chefs call a salamander, distributing plenty of even heat across a bigger space. That brisket gets a beautiful, tasty char, painted on with a thick brush. Sous-vide salmon skin goes from flabby to crispy in a heartbeat. It also has wider applications with foods that like a blast of heat in a short amount of time—scallops, foie gras, hamachi, cheese on a burger—keeping what's underneath from sailing into well done-dom.

The Searzall crew is now fulfilling orders for backers of its Kickstarter campaign, and the device will be made available to the rest of us soon via Amazon for $75. That price is just for the baffle—you hook it up to your own BernzOmatic TS4000 or TS8000 torch head. You can also check for updates on availability by visiting the product website at, which will be expanded with more information soon.