ChefLab

You weigh it. We take the guesswork.

You put a piece of meat, an egg, or a pan of liquid on the scale. ChefLab answers with how much salt, how long to wait, or how many grams of powder. The numbers come from published kitchen science and from kitchens that already ran the batch. You get there faster because you can trust the grams while the water is already on.

You do not need a food-science bookshelf on the board. Open a lab. The line under the title is the job. The numbers on the right are what to weigh, or a clock. One job at a time, like a scale.

Four short steps in the app say the same thing. Replay them from Settings if you skipped them with wet hands. Longer plain language lives there too: How the labs work.

Which bench

• Cure. Salting meat so it keeps.
• Thermal. How long until the middle is done, then a safe hold. Cheek, shank, and tail can go spoonable.
• Egg. A timer for this egg, then custard and sauces on the same bench.
• Frozen. Ice cream that still scoops from a home freezer.
• Chocolate. Melt, cool, work; ganache as a ratio. Sugar is the reading on your thermometer.
• Ferment. Salt for cabbage, pickles, or a sausage that should go sour.
• Infuse. Flavour into fruit or vegetables with a vacuum bell, or herbs in a jar of alcohol. Not a still.
• Texture. How many grams of powder for the pan you weighed. Optional one-time unlock.

Equilibrium curing, wet brine, injection pickle, and dry sausage math from the actual meat weight: salt, nitrite, and the boring percentages that keep a coppa from becoming a cautionary tale.

We show the work. Folklore “35% weight loss means it’s safe” does not get a lab coat.

Sous-vide and pasteurization holds from published charts: thickness in millimetres, core temperature, then the hold. Hardware-agnostic. On beef and pork, steak stays that hold. Cheek, shank, and tail add the hours after the core arrives, until the piece is spoonable. Your circulator’s marketing department is not invited.

Cook-chill exists. The fridge is not an ice bath, no matter how optimistic you are.

A physics timer, not a 7-minute superstition. Weight, starting temperature, and the kitchen height you set (sea level unless you live higher), then a countdown to the second. Same bench: custard to a nappé, mayonnaise and hollandaise from the yolks.

Fridge eggs lie about their childhood. Tell the lab they were cold. It already knew.

Gelato, ice cream, and sorbet from the batch you weigh: PAC, POD, then the grams of sucrose, dextrose, milk, and cream. Fior di latte to start. Dextrose if the home freezer turns it to brick.

A vitrine is not a freezer. PAC knows the difference. You still have to churn.

Melt, cool, work. Form V is the snap: seed with already-tempered chocolate, or chop solid into the melted mass. Dark, milk, or white. Ganache is a ratio: pour, truffle, or whip, cream or water. Sugar is the third job: thread, ball, crack, and caramel as the reading on the thermometer you already own, shifted by kitchen height. Temper has no meter.

Untempered chocolate sulks. The window is the job, not a personality.

Sauerkraut salt on the cabbage, pickle salt in the brine, and a meat hold toward pH 5.3. Dextrose for the flora. Nitrite stays in Cure Lab. Two clocks for salami: ferment, then dry.

Warm jars go fast. Soft cabbage is not a personality. Weigh the salt.

Chamber vacuum for fruit and vegetables: compress until watermelon, pineapple, or mushroom goes dark, or drive marinade into the pores. You set the tissue and the millibar. Botanicals in alcohol get a steep clock from grind, ABV, and bath temperature.

Chamber vacuum lives on a machine with a bell. An edge sealer pulls the bag tight and leaves the pores full of air. Spirit mode is a jar on the counter; vapor infusion needs a still we do not ship.

Hydrocolloids without the dinner-party mystique: gelatin bloom, agar hysteresis, pectin windows, alginate, gellan, kappa, iota, locust bean, methylcellulose, plus foams, a siphon, fat powder, and citrate so acidic juice still spheres. Grams of gel, not vibes of gel.

Optional Texture Lab Unlock is a one-time purchase. No subscription. Gels should set; invoices should not.

Designed for wet hands

Large targets. Dark kitchen mode that doesn’t glare off a stainless backsplash. Live Activities and StandBy so the phone can sit on the far side of the board while you pretend you will “just check it in a second.”

No Apple Watch required. We assume you took it off before the pork shoulder.

Local notebook

Calculations and batch notes stay on your device. No ChefLab account. No cloud chamber. Your nitrite math is not a growth funnel.

Cited, not guessed

Baldwin, food-code tables, Williams, and kitchen practice on the board. Tap through if you are the kind of person who reads footnotes in cookbooks. (You are.) That is why a run goes faster: you are not hunting a forum while the pickle waits.