Most of us who have taken cooking beyond Stouffer's frozen entrées have learned how marinating the basic ingredients can add flavor to our creations. The trouble is that most foods soak up the marinade about as well as Lindsay Lohan absorbs philosophy textbooks, with most of the flavorful sauce getting left behind in the dish.

If you really take your cooking seriously, there's a high-tech solution. The Gastrovac is a vacuum chamber that you put your marinade into, with the main ingredients sitting above in a basket. Seal the unit up, and it sucks out all the air with a vacuum pump as your food shrivels up. After the ingredients are cooked under suction, you hit a button that lowers the food into the marinade, and releases the vacuum. This causes the food to expand back to normal size, sucking in all of those precious juices. That sounds wonderful, with the only catch being that the Gastrovac is clearly priced for the professional chef at a cool $3,800. Let's hope the good folks at Ronco can come up with a $200 version to sell on late-night TV.— Michael Trei

Le Sanctuaire, via Popular Science