Valve CEO Gabe Newell's latest project is an investment in a strange implement designed to facilitate a little-known cooking method.

Designed by Seattle startup ChefSteps, the Joule cooks food using the "sous-vide" method, which involves slowly circulating gently heated water around food in airtight plastic bags.

Newell's relationship with the Joule began when ChefSteps offered to cook for him and his son.

Calling it "easily the best food I'd ever had," Newell offered to personally fund the company — an idea supported, it seems, by his son.

"[Joule's cookbooks were] his bedside reading for six months," says Newell.

"Even though, up until then, he'd never been interested in cooking at all, he suddenly decided he wanted to be a chef. And when I talked to him, he was talking about it like an engineer talks about it, he was talking about trade offs and fundamental principles and thermodynamics."

ChefSteps describes the Joule as "the sous-vide tool that changes everything," which is hard to argue with when you know nothing about sous-vide like we do.

Newell can be seen briefly in the Joule commercial embedded below, stuck in traffic and not announcing Half-Life 3.