See that? I saw that on Ruhlman's blog.

That's an immersion circiulator for the home. The first proper home-kitchen sous vide tool.

If you've watched any cooking show in the past three years, you've seen one of these. It holds water at a precise temperature, allowing you to put food in it and bring that food to that precise temperature. The food is usually vacuum-sealed in a bag to keep the water from getting nasty and all the flavor from leaching out of it.

Also, Alton Brown says that if you pop avocadoes in one of these babies and set it to 140 F, the avocado retains its flavor and texture, but the enzyme that makes it brown is deactivated. And I've wanted to try that ever since.

The only drawback? Five hundred fucking dollars. But this is the early adopter, food nerd model. This is the kitchen equivalent of some dude's $999 Blu-Ray player that he bought in 2007. If enough food nerds buy these, there'll be $200 Kitchenaid models by next Christmas, and plastic ones with Guy Fieri caricatures on them at Wal-Mart within two years.

And lo, we will rejoice at the second coming of the Boil In Bag, and it will be good. For about a year. And then the people who thought those coffee pods were a great idea will start selling single-serving vacuum packs of food to toss in your home water oven, and it'll all go downhill from there.