Just like you, we are passionate home cooks who love making challenging food, and don't like being told what we can and can't do. When we got tired of overpaying for charcuterie, and tried to make it ourselves, we got frustrated by the need for large, expensive equipment.

We started Tablesmith to make cooking tools accessible to everyone, so all the mavericks out there like you can do what you do best, make great food.

The capabilities the CELR-12 unlocks are ancient, and the pool of knowledge on them is very deep, but we are still dealing with food and need to respect the safety practices involved. To learn these processes, take advantage of some of the resources out there: the internet is full of free guides, there are great cookbooks dedicated to the subject, and you should check out our blog!

It depends, most of your new capabilities do take time for their magic to happen!

For example, when making charcuterie, what we are looking for is a reduction in weight by 30%. If you hang a coppa that weighs 1000 grams, it's ready to eat when it weighs 700 grams. How quickly this happens depends on the size of the piece of meat, large cuts can take months to finish, but some smaller cuts take as little as six weeks.

Nope! If you have a cooler with a 7/8" diameter drain hole or larger, the CELR-12 interfaces with it without any modification.

If your cooler doesn't have a drain, you can drill a hole in it, or even better, just grab a cheap styrofoam cooler and use that. Grocery stores sell these, but your butcher will probably give you one for free.

The CELR-12 is designed to replace the traditional functions of a root cellar.

Dry aging, charcuterie, fromagerie, and fermentation all require the same four environmental conditions: low temperature, high humidity, constant airflow, and a dedicated environment. The CELR-12 was built to create these conditions in a cooler, while being detachable and storable when not in use.

All coolers are different, and because of this, it is impossible to predict the performance of a certain pairing exactly. Depending on variables regarding cooler choice (size, insulation, etc…) the lowest and highest reachable temperatures will vary.

Your choice of cooler will also affect the speed at which you can reach temperature setpoints, and the stability of the temperature inside your cooler. In addition to cooler choice, ambient air temperature will affect performance in the same ways.

For best performance, it is best to use the CELR-12 with the smallest and most well insulated cooler you can find, and in the lowest possible ambient air temperature.