Lifestyle
Gadgets 024
In this episode of Boing Boing Gadgets, hosts Sheney Jardin, Mark Frauenfelder, and Jason Weisberger dive into the world of kitchen gadgets, focusing on the art of making fried chicken and waffles. Ja...
Gadgets 024
Lifestyle •
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Interactive Transcript
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Welcome to Boing Boing Gadgets.
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Hey everyone, I'm Sheney Jardin.
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This is our weekly podcast introducing gadgets as reviewed by our editors and sometimes
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our guests.
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But this week it's just me.
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I'm a co-editor of Boing Boing.net and I'm joined by Mark Frauenfelder, our co-founder
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and co-editor.
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Hey there Mark.
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Hi Sheney.
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And by Jason Weisberger, our publisher and frequent personal electronics and book reviewer.
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How are you Jason?
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I'm good, thanks.
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So each week on this podcast for those of you who are new, we review gadgets, video,
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photography, equipment, tools for arts, crafts and DIY making, fun in the outdoors and
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cooking and kitchen gadgets.
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And I got to tell you, I think that's going to be the theme of today's podcast.
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You can learn about, must have new technology and toys from us, we play with everything,
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we try everything, we never recommend anything that we're not super psyched and obsessed
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with.
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That is really the case this week.
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We at Boing Boing like to visit our colleague Jason's house.
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He has a beautiful house in Marin County and he's a wonderful man with cute dogs.
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But the most wonderful thing about visiting Jason is that he makes fried chicken and
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waffles.
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And Jason, I don't know how you manage to work fried chicken and waffles into this podcast.
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But you have, there's a gadget connection to your fried chicken and waffles and they are
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delicious.
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Well, I've spent a ton of time this weekend messing around with cast iron.
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And what I consider to be key to my, my chicken and waffles experience, which my daughter,
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it's her favorite breakfast.
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She has a favorite breakfast, a favorite lunch and the favorite dinner.
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Breakfast is chicken and waffles, lunch is pizza and dinner is evidently lasagna.
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Her mother makes the lasagna, I don't make lasagna.
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So your child is more skilled?
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Evidently.
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But chicken and waffles, she just absolutely loves.
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We had a good friend of hers over yesterday for breakfast because Hannah wanted to share
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the chicken and waffles with a friend.
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And my large cast iron chicken fryer is absolutely core to my being able to make fried chicken.
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When I was trying to fry chicken in an all-clad stainless steel pot, I just felt that the
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results were nowhere near as good and nowhere near as consistent.
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So it is the gadget, that is the gadget approach to fried chicken and waffles.
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And as we were discussing last week amongst the three of us about the podcast or what we
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now determined to call an audio experience, we said that rather than putting up posts
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for the podcast, what we wanted to do was simply review the things that we were talking
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about and then refer to the audio experience in those posts.
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And so I thought this would inspire me to finally sit down and write the fried chicken
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recipe that I've been working on and with for so many years.
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Wow.
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So how did you find the ultimate cast iron pan?
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Well, I'm not quite sure that this is the ultimate cast iron pan.
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And to read the comments just from a cast iron kitchen scrubber that I reviewed last week
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on the blog, people seem to think that the cast iron ion is horrible and junk.
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But I really, really like it.
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This is just simply a large cast iron chicken fryer.
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I have found it on Amazon a couple years ago for about $35 and you can still buy it there
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today.
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It comes with the kind of the deep pan chicken fryer, which is a wonderful skillet as well.
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And the more that you fry chicken in it, the more that you're basically heating up a lot
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of oil in it.
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And it just seasons the living hell out of this pan.
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And it comes with a shallow size eight skillet that fits on top of it as a lid.
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So now you've got both a deep, a deep fryer and a and a lid that you can also just use
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as a frying pan for about $35.
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And I thought that it would say wonderful combination of stuff.
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I find that it works really, really well.
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And as everyone talks about cast iron, it just works better the more that you use it.
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But our readers kind of went crazy about antique cast iron in the comments.
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And I got a bunch of private communications from them as well that have naturally gotten
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me very, very interested in the antique cast iron.
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So I have acquired a few pieces and I'm busy reseasening them and playing with them.
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Is that are you playing with them now in the podcast?
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Can I hear it?
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No, this is me just swinging around the lodge, the lodge chicken fire.
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And I'll tell you, like, this makes a distinctive sound, you know, just like you can
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thwack a watermelon to find out if it's right.
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I feel like you can thwack a cast iron pan.
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I was going to say this is like perfect for whacking a zombie in the head.
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I mean, this just gives it a skull crushing pan.
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I was going to say it's the, you know, for me, it might be the cheating boyfriend
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brainer.
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So Jason just to give listeners an image of this, to me, it looks like a deep frying
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pan and a shallow frying pan that fit together to form what looks like a Dutch oven.
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Yes, absolutely.
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That is exactly it.
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And I found that between the two pieces that come in this, and I've got a lot of other
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cast iron pots and pans in the kitchen.
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The two that I use most are this chicken fryer and that frying pan that works as a lid.
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I will use both as frying pans and any time that I'm, you know, frying chicken, which
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seems to be about every other week for my daughter.
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She wants a big weekend breakfast of chicken and waffles.
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This is the go-to pan.
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It is really, really wonderful.
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Now, I'm going to be trying an antique one in a week or so and we'll see how that works
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out.
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I've definitely found that the antique cast iron is lighter and thinner, walled and much
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smoother on the inside than this lodge stuff.
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But for the price that I'm paying for the lodge gear that I have and how much I love it
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and rely on it in the kitchen, I don't think it can be beat.
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So it would be really interesting to see if that antique cast iron is noticeably better.
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And Jason, I also don't want to skip over the beauty of the waffles that you make.
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I remember one time, tell me if I'm remembering this incorrectly, perhaps in the chicken induced
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psychedelic euphoria that I was experiencing.
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Did you make yeasted waffles?
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They were like yeast dough?
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Yeah, I make sourdough waffles and the recipe is straight off the King Arthur Flower website.
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Their sourdough recipes are really, really great and they've got a sourdough waffle batter
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recipe.
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That was it.
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I absolutely love.
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And you make wonderful sourdough bread in the oven as well, but people, I cannot tell you,
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if you can find a way to suck up to our friend and colleague Jason and have him invite you
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over for sourdough waffles and his incredible fried chicken, you should do it.
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You should do it.
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Jason, I just want you to share if you would three tips for making killer fried chicken
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once you get that large cast iron skillet.
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I would say the most important is consistency of size of the pieces of chicken.
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That was kind of the trick that I learned from good friend of the website, Sarah Roxons
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husband, as a chef.
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I had been lucky enough to have his fried chicken in New York years ago.
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And I'd been pastored Sarah and her husband for the recipe for ages.
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He sat me down one day several years ago and told me the one thing that I was missing
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was consistency of size of the piece of chicken.
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And so if you're doing legs, just do legs that day.
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And if you're doing chicken breasts, try and get them all to be cut to about the same
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size.
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I actually will take the chicken pieces.
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I usually will just take bone with chicken breasts and cut them down into kind of the
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same size chicken tender pieces for my daughter.
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And it makes it super easy to cook consistently because everything's about the same size,
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same thickness going into a cast iron fryer that retains the heat and stays at the same
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temperature very, very well.
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And it makes cooking the chicken, makes it much, much easier.
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That was the missing piece that I needed.
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The other thing I would say is buttermilk.
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Leave the chicken in the buttermilk as long as you think is safe for you to still eat
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the chicken and add a little bit of Tabasco or something with vinegar to the buttermilk.
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So you might basically dunk your chicken meat into buttermilk with a little bit of Tabasco
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and leave it there for what a day, two days?
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Two days.
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Anywhere from eight hours to kind of 36 hours, I think, is the sweet spot.
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And it gets much better the longer it is in there.
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Okay.
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Any last tip?
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What about this flower that you use?
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I've been through both all-purpose bread and a couple of different.
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I've tried pizza flower for breading the chicken.
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I think that all-purpose tends to be the best.
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Wow.
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I don't really know why.
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I don't really know why, but as you get kind of more protein dense with the other flowers,
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I don't think it particularly helps.
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Well, I could talk about fried chicken and waffles all day, but you know, something that
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would be really fun to do while you're eating Jason's fried chicken and waffles would
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be to listen to Mark's Electro Home Retro High-Fy Stereo System.
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I know you have a great vinyl collection, Mark, and I understand that your kids are kind
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of getting into vinyl.
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Tell us about the stereo system that you're into these days.
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Yeah, this is a really cool stereo system, especially for the price.
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It's like 200 bucks, and you get this really nicely kind of retro-curvy wooden cabinet
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that contains the LP player.
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It's also got AMFM radio.
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It's got a USB connection and an auxiliary connection, so an MP3 CD's.
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So you can really play almost every kind of media that you have through it.
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It's got a nice look, it's very heavy and solid.
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A lot of times I don't really like that kind of retro-fake retro look because they do
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it wrong, but I think in this case they got it right.
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It's got that nice kind of fabric across the built-in speaker.
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The sound quality is really good, and it's got cool features.
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I haven't tried this yet, but you can actually play an MP3 and then just stick a USB flash drive
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into the USB port and rip the vinyl to MP3 just by pressing the record button on the front
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of the cabinet.
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So if you're looking for like kind of an all-in-one solution to play music in a room,
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like we have it in our living room, and be able to pull out your old vinyl and play them,
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this is like, you know, as good as it gets, I imagine, for the price and everything that
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it does.
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Oh, and it also has a remote control so that you can do stuff from across the room because
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it's such a hassle to get up off your button walk five feet.
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That's incredible.
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I'm shocked that it's only $200.
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Yeah, it looks amazing.
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Yeah, it is nice, and I'm sure audio files are going to say that the turntable is no
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good, and what do they say direct drive versus bell drive and everything, but my ears have
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been damaged from a lot of punk rock concerts.
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So, this sounds fun to me.
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This is great.
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Yeah, I can't even hear anything you're saying right now.
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That's how many punk rocks.
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Yeah, that's cool.
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So I understand that, you know, if you wanted a fancier sound experience, you could hook
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them up to fancier speakers.
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Mm-hmm.
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Yeah, sure.
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You could do that.
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And, you know, but for our purposes, in our family, this is fine.
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The one thing that I wish they could have added to it, and it probably wouldn't have
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cost a lot, is to just put a Bluetooth radio in there so that you could, you know, just
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set your iPhone down in the room and start playing your, you know, play Spotify.
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What I have been doing is though, I really like Spotify playlist from different people,
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and there's this guy Spike Prigg and a musician that I'm kind of emailing web buddies with,
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and he's got this great playlist of like, Freakbeat, Early Psychedelia, Garage Punk music.
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Wow.
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And it's so good.
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He's got, like, I think close to a thousand songs on there.
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So I just put my iPhone, plug it into the audio input, and then hide the iPhone inside
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the lid and close it, and I'm playing, you know, these great, you know, great garage
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music stuff.
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It's really, it's really cool.
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And for Bluetooth, it'd be a little bit easier, but you know, it works.
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You know, my younger brother, Carl Hamm, back in Richmond, Virginia, is a vinyl aficionado.
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He's a vinyl collector.
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He's a famous club and party and radio DJ in Richmond, Virginia, my hometown, when I was
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visiting for Christmas, we were sitting around the table in our mom's kitchen, and he had
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this little portable, it was like an old thrift store find.
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It was a portable record player that we hooked up to a Bluetooth speaker, and we were jamming
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there.
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Carl is the amateur ethnomusicologist behind a series of Malaysian psychedelic pop from
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the 60s called Papier, we'll have to bring him on the podcast sometime in the future.
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But I'm pretty great.
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I can't wait to tell him about this.
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I think this might be something he would enjoy.
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And there's, I feel too like, you know, you can, in all of the gadgets and the experiences
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that we talk about on this podcast, you can, you could be a snob and you could go for
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the absolute, absolute, absolute best.
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But sometimes you're depriving yourself of experiences that you might not be able to
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afford or might not, just might not work.
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And sometimes good enough is great.
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I feel like what you're talking about here is a good example of that.
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Yeah, I think, you know, you pick a solution based on your desires, your needs, your
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budget, your life.
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And this is, this is what works for us.
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I have no complaints about it.
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Hey, will you include a link to that awesome Spotify playlist in the blog post?
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Absolutely.
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And listeners, every week when we do this podcast or, excuse me, audio experience, we
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have a blog post that corresponds with it where you can see each of the gadgets that
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we've talked about.
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And in this case, you can get a link to that killer playlist that Mark likes rocking
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out to.
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I just want to mention to everybody that I am recording my end of this audio experience,
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from the home of Brian Lamb, founder of Wirecutter.com.
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He's the CEO wire cutter.
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He used to be an editor with Gizmodo and has been with Wired Magazine before that.
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Brian has a sweet little bachelor pad on the island of Oahu in Hawaii.
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And I've been here on Hawaii, mostly crashing with Brian for about a month.
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It didn't bring my super great mics with me, which is why audio files will be irritated
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at my portion of this podcast.
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Hey, but I just wanted to mention that I'm going to try to do an interview with Brian about
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his wonderful gadget review site.
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It's just one of the best sites out there for really painstaking analysis of different
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categories of common electronics.
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So stay tuned for that.
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But for this week, Mark and Jason, vinyl and fried chicken, I think we just won the internet.
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Thanks, Jenny.