Gabe Newell is man who is known to eat. As reported by Eater Gabe it seems has now become interested in the world of cooking. Chef Steps is a well known gastronimic cooking channel on Youtube, they feature sous vide cooking, cooking with liquid nitrogen, and other hi tech tools. Chef steps produces a product line, the top of which is a sous vide machine called the “joule“.
Gabes intrest was piqued after he won a dinner prepared by Fat Duck founding chef and now ChefSteps CEO Chris Young, and ChefSteps’ Grant Crilly. The two are often features in the Youtubes channels videos, and the sous vide method of cooking is prominently used in the videos. Evidently the science based approach to cooking impressed the Valve CEO, as he is now investing in the company’s first product, going so far as to appear in their media to endorse it.
Says Newell: “They talked to me like a scientist, like an engineer, and this isn’t how I thought people in the cooking world talked. These guys are cooking nerds. And the science is super interesting. Their understanding of what’s going on in the experience of cooking resonated with my experiences in the world of creating entertainment. In the end, your target is the subjective experience of the consumer. You have to know all this hard stuff, but at the end of the day you have to have a really good connection with the inside of someone’s head to be good at it.”
Perhaps we can look forward to seeing a Chef simulator soon on steam, or perhaps the previously digital only platform will expand to sell physical items? Perhaps not, either way take a gander at the video below to get an idea of what Chef Steps is all about