Tired of making bread yet?
If you own a Hestan Cue, now you can up your sauce game. That’s because the smart cooking group within the housewares giant has released a new Bluetooth-connected sauce pot.
Why a sauce pan? Because, according to Hestan’s chef and culinary director Owen Wyatt, sauces are particularly difficult for new cooks to get right and a recurring subject of help requests.
“For one reason or another, sauce making has somewhat remained a mystery for most home cooks,” wrote Wyatt. “This is for good reason. Making a delicious and velvety Hollandaise requires a balance of technique and temperature.”
If making sauces is hard for home cooks, apparently making a smart sauce pot is the equally difficult cookware product developer’s equivalent. One of the challenges in making the pot was the standard algorithms Hestan had developed for temperature control didn’t cut it, especially when it came to challenging sauces like Hollandaise or emulsifying butter. For that, the company had to go back to the drawing board.
From the Hestan Cue blog:
What if we didn’t just set temperature but slowly increased temperature as the sauce thickened? This would stop the egg yolks from scrambling and the butter from separating. We put theory into practice and couldn’t believe the results. We no longer needed a double boiler to make a Sabayon or worry about how we would hold our sauces.
The pan also doubles as a rice cooker. According to the Hestan team, it can cook a number of varieties and can do so in shorter time that many standard rice cookers.
Adding rice cooking to the menu wasn’t without its challenges:
We spent months experimenting and tuning the way we cooked rice. When we thought we were close we ran into the issue of the starchy water slightly boiling over on to the burner.
The new sauce pot is the third piece of cookware for the Cue system and the first addition since 2017 when they added the chef’s pot. The sauce pot will work with both the Cue burner and Cue-compatible GE cooking systems (GE compatibility will be available this summer).
Normally a pandemic wouldn’t be the best time to launch a new product, but with more people at home cooking, quarantine might actually play to their favor.
“Launching a new product during a pandemic was not a decision that we took lightly,” Wyatt told me via email. “We actually let our users guide our decision making. We have been sitting on the release of the saucepot since the end of 2019. After launching our online cooking school, we received quite a bit of feedback asking for a class on sauces.”
The downside to the launch timing is more people are watching their spending with increased uncertainty, and the pot’s $199 price tag isn’t cheap. However, at least for now, Hestan is offering a 25% discount with the code SAUCEPOT.
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