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Episode Transcript:
Bill Lucas-Brown:
This is a big pig. This is an 80-gallon. This is the biggest one they make, so, it’s a monster. Ready? Two, three.
Chuck Nice VO:
This big pig is a six-foot-tall, 300-pound water heater.
Bill Lucas-Brown:
Let’s just go ahead and tilt the whole thing down.
Chuck Nice VO:
Now, there’s something different about this thing. It’s called a heat pump, and it replaces a gas-powered water heater. It works like a reverse refrigerator. It sucks the heat out of the air and stores it right in the water, like a battery, a battery you can use to take steamy showers. OK, it’s actually pretty cool, you know, if water heaters are your thing. But, I’m telling you about this, because when you install this thing, you get to this moment.
Bill Lucas-Brown:
So, we have to cap the gas, because we’re not using fossil fuels no more.
Chuck Nice VO:
This baby is electric. Hi, I’m Chuck Nice, and welcome to “Electric Generation,” presented by Ford. This is the show where we look at all the ways electrification is changing our country. Now, prepare yourself, because in this episode, we’re getting off the road and into your home. All that stuff in your home that uses gas or oil, you know, furnaces, water heaters and even stove top ovens and ranges, they contribute about 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, and if we’re going to get serious about electrification, nothing is off the table. Now, for a lot of cooks, the idea of electrifying a kitchen is a hard meal to keep down, so, today, we’re talking to Chef Rick Bayless about why he is welcoming electricity into his world. But, first, I want to get into what it takes to swap out all those real energy suckers — those big ol’ appliances. You know, the ones down in the basement. And this is where Bill comes in.
Bill Lucas-Brown:
My name is Bill Lucas-Brown. I grew up in, in Colorado. I’m the last of five kids, and, so, duly ignored growing up, and it wasn’t, “Hey, let me show you how to use that hammer.” It’s like, “Oh, Bill took the hammers? OK.”
Chuck Nice VO:
Bill found himself with a talent for taking things apart and putting them back together.
Bill Lucas-Brown:
I’d build forts and skateboard ramps. And I was an exchange student in Japan for a couple of years. And then I ended up studying Japanese, and I love how they build in the traditional way they build in Japan. I mean, there’s a lot of concrete in Japan. But, man, that, that architectural style of the old post and beam and clay and straw, I love that. And, so, that’s actually what I started doing.
Chuck Nice VO:
Over time, Bill became an expert in green-building techniques.
Bill Lucas-Brown:
I’ve retrofit thousands and thousands of homes in the Denver Metro area, but the whole electric and the de-carbonization, the beneficial electrification, that hit me five years ago. It was an epiphany. It was a light bulb. It’s like, ah, we got to stop burning dinosaur bones. We just have to stop. And the way we do that is through electricity, and that’s really confusing for a lot of people who grew up thinking electricity was dirty. And it was, when it was produced at a coal-fired plant that was 100-miles away and if we can add solar, if the utilities can add more utility-scale wind and solar, then we should be powering everything with electricity. And, so, I installed my last gas furnace, unfortunately at my brother’s house, like six years ago. And it’s been heat pumps ever since.
Chuck Nice VO:
And this is where we find ourselves today. Bill got the call to swap out an old gas-fired water heater for a heat pump.
Greg:
Hello, Bill!
Bill Lucas-Brown:
Hi, Greg. How are you?
Greg:
We’re being taped?
Bill Lucas-Brown:
We are, I guess. They’re doing all sorts of sound stuff for this podcast. [Laughs]
Chuck Nice VO:
The first thing that needs to happen here: Bill has got to get rid of that old water heater.
Bill Lucas-Brown:
Man, that is big, isn’t it? Let’s get this P.O.S. outta here. Guys who have pickup trucks come and they recycle all this stuff, which is fantastic. And the stuff they don’t recycle, I do. My neighbors hate me. I fill up like ten recycling bins a week.
Chuck Nice VO:
Back inside, and a few more hours of work, the house is now heating its water through pure electricity.
Bill Lucas-Brown:
We got the new heat pump water heater in and we’re rocking.
Chuck Nice VO:
And that’s it. One more house that’s gone electric.
Bill Lucas-Brown:
I wouldn’t say gas-fired houses are inefficient. We just didn’t know any better. Just like cars. Cars are incredible. They’re amazing. I mean, you think about it, you pour this fuel into this car and you can drive around. How cool is that? It’s the same with a house. Man, you can heat your house, and you can cool it, and you can do all these cool things with hot water. This is luxury, man. We all live like kings. But, that’s changed. Gas is not the, the fuel that we thought it was. And we, we’ve learned things about it, that, that it releases carbon and that’s not good for anyone. We’re not going to stop using energy. We’re not going to stop driving cars, maybe a little bit. We might stop eating as much meat. But what we need to do is when we do travel, eat, heat our homes, whatever, we need to do it with electricity. And that electricity has got to come from renewable sources.
Chuck Nice VO:
Bill, I am with you 100%. Electric heating and cooling, I’m all for it. But I’m a little less sold on converting the gas stove. There’s something, I don’t know, primal, about cooking with fire. Kitchens are a pretty small slice of the pie when it comes to carbon emissions. They only account for about 3% of a home’s energy use, but if we’re getting serious about cleaning up, this is a conversation we gotta have. You know, I think we’re all still a little traumatized by the wave of electric stoves in the ‘70s and ‘80s that were pretty lousy to cook with and definitely made me nervous about burning myself. I mean, seriously, who wants to cook on a red-hot iron? So, let’s take it to an authority, a chef who’s actively electrifying his kitchens, none other than Mexican-cuisine specialist, Top Chef Master, Rick Bayless.
Chuck Nice:
You’re kind of responsible for heightening the awareness of Mexican food here in the United States. And, why Mexican food? Why were you drawn to that?
Rick Bayless:
Well, I grew up in a, in a barbecue restaurant in Oklahoma City, and the flavors of barbecue are pretty rambunctious. But, then, when I went to Mexico, and I tasted what people were eating in Mexico, it was sort of moving in the same directions, but it was even more complex and more regionally varied.
Chuck Nice:
It is. It is. So, chef, I want to talk to you about, maybe, what kitchens might look like and, maybe, the kitchens that you have, but, first, the future is a lot of buzz about induction cooking. Can you tell us what that is?
Rick Bayless:
Well, I’m not a scientist. I am more a practitioner. So, I’m going to sound like a third-grader when I talk about this, but there is sort of this magnetic transference that goes back and forth between the induction itself and the food that is in the pan on top of it. So, you have to have the right kind of pan that will allow that sort of magnetic transference to happen. And, as that’s going back and forth, things heat up really fast, but it doesn’t look like gas at all, because you see no flames, and when you take your pan off of an induction burner, you could put your hand right on top of it.
Chuck Nice:
Super cool. I mean, well, from a scientific standpoint for me, that sounds pretty awesome. You’re a person who definitely knows how to build out a commercial kitchen. As we are moving towards an electrified society, what does it take to build out a commercial kitchen? I mean, can you tell us the difference, most of all, aside from the scale? What are the things that people don’t realize about what happens in a commercial kitchen that is different from your very lovely kitchen at home?
Rick Bayless:
I will say that it has to do with heating things up really fast and cooling them down really fast. So, we will have, um, burners that don’t resemble burners that you would have in your home kitchen. And, likewise, we will have blast chillers that will cool big quantities of food down really quickly, keeping them really safe. So, it’s that heating and cooling that is the biggest difference between a home kitchen and a commercial kitchen. Um, a lot of people think that we would have massive amounts of space to do prep work in and stuff, but that’s not the case. Most professional chefs work with one cutting board in front of them, and you learn how to be incredibly careful with the space that you’re taking up.
Chuck Nice:
So, heating things up. Cooling things down. Has to happen a lot quicker. Of course that means fire. When you talk about fire, I know a lot of chefs who would say, well, yeah, that that’s the way to cook, period. But as we move to electrification, how do you feel about moving to cooking with electricity?
Rick Bayless:
OK, so, I will tackle that from two different points of view here, because I went to an all-electric kitchen in France 30-some years ago. And I thought that the food all tasted incredibly bland, because there was no sense of rustic fire, and rustic fire, I have to say, gives a certain character to the food that we as human beings really can respond to. I like my food to have some charred edges on it. I like gutsy food. Um, it’s one of those, sort of, reaching way back in the history of the human race and cooking with fire. Maybe it’s not everything in the kitchen is electric, but I’ll give you a good example of one of our restaurants. We have, um, big induction burners and these are commercial induction burners that are, they’re just big powerful units. So, we can bring your two gallons, three gallons of water to a boil in just a few minutes. I don’t have any gas burners anywhere in any of our restaurants that could do that. So, that’s super efficient. Now, those beautiful, very powerful induction burners sit right next to a wood-burning oven.
Chuck Nice:
Oh, OK.
Rick Bayless:
So, I have this wood burning oven that we have to play with the fire in constantly, but we love the way we get up to temperatures like 800 degrees, that we can get a little char on something really fast. So, I think that electric can give us massive amounts of things in the kitchen, but not everything.
Chuck Nice:
So, are you foreseeing a future where the commercial kitchens of the future will be, maybe, there’s a wood-burning oven and next to some induction plates, next to some gas burners, and this is kind of what the kitchen of the future looks like?
Rick Bayless:
It could be. I don’t know if those gas burners will survive. I think that, I think we will have both the super rustic way of cooking, a wood-fired grill or a wood-burning oven, and then, I think that we will move as the technology gets better and better, more toward induction.
Chuck Nice:
OK, so, let’s talk about just, away from commercial, as you know, I see that there are some induction stoves out there for, like, home people. And, you’re hearing about certain cities that are capping gas lines into residentials, so that you’re not going to be able to have a gas stove, quite frankly. You’re going to live in a newer building and there won’t be any pipes or leads coming into the building. Is there going to be any real difference to me as a home cook using this induction stove and range?
Rick Bayless:
You’re going to have to learn how to cook on induction, but I don’t think that the learning curve is very steep. It is something that you can easily master, um, because it’s sort of, um, a numbers game, and you say, oh, I like to cook my scrambled eggs on three. And, so, you’re, you’re, you’re literally putting it on three and, or, maybe you like to cook them really fast and you put it on seven. And, so, you play around with it until you get the hang of exactly how to create the heat that you’re looking for. But, I will say that fairly quickly, everybody will go, “Oh my gosh, I love this stuff.” Because, as I said, it heats up really fast and then cools down really fast.
Chuck Nice:
I mean, that’s a big benefit in a kitchen for any cook to have something get up to temp as quickly as possible, and then not have to worry about it once you’re, once you’re done.
Rick Bayless:
Well, and I will also just jump in to say that one of the things that you notice about cooking on induction is that there’s just no heat. And, like, in pretty much, I will say, every single one of our kitchens, we have portable induction burners. They’re not expensive and you can plug them in anywhere. And, so, if we need to hold a sauce for a particular menu item, um, off in a corner here at exactly a certain temperature, we can put one of our little portable induction burners there, and, and it works perfectly for us. So, that’s another thing about working with induction, and anybody that’s cooked Thanksgiving dinner and fills their stove up and wants an extra burner, hey, get an induction one.
Chuck Nice:
And, you know what else you just made me think about? How many fires are started by people with these things that we used to call hot plates?
Rick Bayless:
Oh, yes, exactly right.
Chuck Nice:
So, you know what, I’m telling you right now, the best thing to come out of this conversation, chef, we have saved lives.
Rick Bayless:
[Laughs] I like that. That makes me feel really worthwhile.
Chuck Nice:
We are heroes, Chef. [Laughs] Chef Bayless, hey, man, it is really a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you for your many years of being on the telly and making cooking accessible. I appreciate it.
Rick Bayless:
Thank you so much for inviting me, Chuck. It’s been a real pleasure to be with you.
Chuck Nice VO:
I, for one, am looking forward to a kitchen where induction and fire all come together to make delicious food. And I’m not talking about in a restaurant, I’m talking about my very own kitchen. As a matter of fact, I’m looking into getting an induction stove right now. No, seriously, that’s what I’m doing right now, that’s why I gotta go. But, you know what? While I’m at it, I should probably look into getting a heat pump too. Mmm, warm and well-fed. Ah, that’s the life for me.
“Electric Generation” is presented by Ford and produced by Yahoo Creative Studios, At Will Media and me, Chuck Nice. The At Will Media producers are Mitch Bluesteen, Josh Farnham, Drew Beebe and Tina Turner. Editing and sound design by Andrew Holzberger. Check out bonus material for this episode on TechCrunch.com. A special thank you to Bill Lucas-Brown for letting us record him lifting 300-pound water heaters, and Chef Rick Bayless, for steering us away from those hot plates. And thanks to you, in advance, for giving us a great rating and subscribing to our podcast. The opinions given on this show are personal and do not represent those of the Ford Motor Company, or anybody else with an ounce of sense, for that matter. I’m Chuck Nice and make sure you plug in next time to “Electric Generation.” Thanks for listening.
From Ford:
To find out more about how Ford is leading the way toward a more sustainable, electric future, visit ford.com/built-for-america.