Friday Food Math: Mad Kitchen Scientist
Enter purveyor of gourmet equipment L'Epicerie, who want to make the whole eyedropper process a whopping 96 times faster, with their helpful 96-in-one dropper — $47.50 for the shebang, which comes to a minuscule $0.494 per drop, less than half a buck per precious ball of alcoholic caviar!
But we are savvy consumers of odd cooking equipment, and wonder if perhaps this gastronomical pipette can't be found for a bit cheaper than L'Epicerie's price. A quick bit of googling revealed the Bel-Art Vaccu-Pette/96, which looks more or less identical to L'Epicerie's model, and can be ordered through such badass-sounding outlets as ScienceLab.com and OpticsPlanet.com, for just a scant $0.45 more than L'Ep: $47.95, or $0.499 per drop &mdash enough, in our book, to round that up to a sold fifty cents per pearl.
But wait! What's this on ScienceLab.com?
Requires a 35ml disposable sterile syringe (not included).And L'Epicerie notes that their 96-dropper comes with its own syringe — a whopping 60ml one, no less! Even if we factor in the additional cost of a syringe, it looks like they're more or less only available in lots of 100, and the annoyance factor of having to explain to our dinner guests what we are doing with a bulk-pack of disposable syringes actually tips the scales, proving (for perhaps the first time) that it is more cost-efficient to buy your fancy home-cooking tool from a fancy home-cooking store.
[Photo 1: Cointreau "caviar," via newyorkinsider's Flickr]
[Photo 2: L'Epicerie's 96-dropper (with included syringe!)]
