If you’re not a fan of hotdogs, don’t want to buy hamburger buns AND hotdog buns, or you want to confuse your guests at your next cookout, you need to check out these burger dog gadgets. What are burger dogs you ask? They are hamburgers shaped like hotdogs…duh!
For less than $9 you can start out with the Kitchen Art 18550 Ham Dogger which is a single plastic mold that lets you mold raw ground beef into a hotdog shape.
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My mouth is watering just thinking about a perfectly roasted hotdog in a soft bun with just the right amount of ketchup but no mustard because mustard is disgusting I can’t remember the last time I had a hotdog cooked on an outdoor grill, let alone over a campfire. If I had a fire pit, I would seriously consider buying a Crank-Eez from Firebuggz.
The Crank-Eez is a specially designed hotdog skewer that has a 36-inch long food grade stainless steel rod and a fun wooden handle that you can crank to turn the hotdog over the fire for just the right level of burnt goodness.
The fork at the end of the Crank-Eez secures the wiener so it won’t fall into the fire. And if you’re not a fan of hotdogs, you can roast two marshmallows at a time.
You can read more about the Crank-Eez at firebuggz.com and you can order one for $19.39 from Amazon.
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We can all use a little extra iron(y) in our diet and Gracula is here to help with that. Gracula from Animi Causa is a cute little kitchen helper that makes the task of garlic crushing way less scary.
Put a few cloves in the mini vampire’s cloak. Put the head on top and give it a few twists.
You’re left with crushed garlic and stink free fingers.
If you would like to get your own Gracula, head over to www.animicausa.com. You can order one for $16.99 but be aware that they are on back order until the middle of September.
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How often have you tried to spread butter on toast, a baked potato, bread, etc, only to find out that it’s just too cold and hard to spread? Yeah, I know, first world problems. But it is a real problem that could use a solution. One company invented the biēm butter sprayer to solve this issue. Let’s see if it works and if it’s worth it’s $129 price tag.
What is it?
The biēm butter sprayer (pronounced as “beam”) is battery powered butter heating and spraying device that uses no chemicals or propellants.
How does it work?
As butter is loaded into the biēm, it travels down from the product’s middle carriage into a reservoir. There, the biēm has layers of ultra-thin heaters that melt the butter. Once melted, butter moves up from the reservoir to spray.
At first glance, you might mistake the biēm butter sprayer for a stainless steel water bottle or a fancy electric pepper mill. The biēm butter sprayer stands about 10.75 inches tall and has a stainless steel
The biēm butter sprayer stands about 10.75 inches tall and the back side has a brushed stainless steel cover with a diamond shaped power button and an LED above it.
The sprayer side has a soft touch plastic covering with a hand grip and a knurled trigger in the center of the sprayer. At the top is the nozzle with an LED light above it.
The bottom of the biēm butter sprayer slides off to reveal the battery compartment where the V shaped rechargeable battery is stored.
The top of the sprayer twists off to access the butter reservoir.
Before you use the biēm butter sprayer for the first time, you need to load a charged battery and clean the butter reservoir. To clean the sprayer, you remove the top of the sprayer, fill it with warm water and a drop of dishwashing liquid. Then you put the cap back on, press the diamond shaped power button to turn it on. Then you hold down the button for 5 seconds to enter cleaning mode. You can then press the trigger to spray out the warm water for 10 seconds. Then you remove the lid, dump out the remaining water and repeat the sequence without adding soap this time.
Let’s melt some butter!
After you’ve cleaned the sprayer, it’s time to load a stick of butter. The biēm butter sprayer holds US sized sticks of butter like the one shown above.
Loading the stick into the sprayer is as easy as removing the wrapper and dropping it in the chamber.
There’s the butter, all cozy and ready to be melted.
The next step is to press the power button which has an LED around it that pulses in blue. When the light stops pulsing and is solid blue, you know that the butter is ready to spray.
To spray the butter, you grab the biēm butter sprayer in either hand and press the trigger above the curved grip.
Finding the trigger isn’t easy and I think a more obvious button would be a welcome change.
Once you figure where the trigger is, you aim and spray.
See it in action
What isn’t shown in the quick video demo is that a little bit of butter continues spray from the nozzle after you let go of the button. So if you let go and lift the sprayer to set it back down on the counter, the butter will spray on whatever is near by. You kind of have to train yourself not to move the sprayer until it stops spraying.
As you saw in the video, it took awhile to melt the butter that first time I put a brand new stick of cold butter in the chamber. I hoped that this was just a one time wait and that subsequent wait times would be significantly less. Unfortunately, even after leaving the biēm on the counter in a 73-74 degree house, each time I would use the sprayer, I’d have to wait 30-50 seconds before it was ready to spray.
I also didn’t like that I had no idea how much butter I was putting on my foods. According to the info on the biēm website, each second of spray time = .4g of butter. Yeah, that doesn’t mean anything to me either…
Final thoughts
When it’s all said and done, the biēm butter sprayer is a cool idea, but in my opinion, it’s just not worth the $129 price tag. If it instantly sprayed melted butter with no wait time and was priced around $50, I’d be more likely to want to buy one. But as it is, I think I’ll stick to sitting the cold dish of butter out on the cabinet an hour or so before I plan to use it and save the cash for another gadget.
I also read a lot of negative comments on the biēm butter sprayer Kickstarter campaign page, which also makes me leery of buying one.
Source: The sample for this review was provided by Brevda inc. Please visit their site for more info.
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Have you ever left the house and forgotten to turn a burner off on your stove? That’s not a trivial problem as every year many house fires originate with the stove. Wallflower is a smart device that will send an alert to your phone and will sound an audible alert when you’ve left the stove on for an extended period of time.
Currently only available for electric stoves, Wallflower is an easy to install module that plugs in between the stove and the wall outlet where the stove is currently connected.
An iOS or Android app on your mobile device pairs the adapter and has remote monitoring options as well as a geofencing feature that will alert you if you leave the house with the stove still turned on.
Be aware that the Wallflower module is designed only to let you know when a burner on your stove top has been left on. It will NOT turn the burner off for you and it does not monitor the oven.
Wallflower is priced at $169.00 and is available now. You can read more about it at wallflower.com
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I can’t remember the last time I had a hotdog cooked on an outdoor grill, let alone over a campfire. If I had a fire pit, I would seriously consider buying a Crank-Eez from Firebuggz. 
Loading the stick into the sprayer is as easy as removing the wrapper and dropping it in the chamber.
