ChefSteps

November 30, 2016

The Spoon Smart Kitchen 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

It’s time for The Spoon’s first annual holiday gift guide! Since Black Friday and Cyber Monday madness have passed and it’s really the first year we’ve seen many anticipated smart kitchen devices hit the market, it seemed like the perfect time to roll out our guide. Picking this year’s selections was not easy – the food tech and smart kitchen spaces are packed with great stuff. But we wanted to limit the guide to stuff you could actually purchase (not pre-order or back on Kickstarter, with a few exceptions) and hand to your loved one around or shortly after the holidays.

Now you might be thinking – I’m the one who loves food and tech in our house! The beauty of this guide is that it’s easily forwardable – perhaps send to your spouse or loved ones with a wink emoji and some subtle hints, and you’ll find that smart kitchen gear you’ve always wanted under the tree.

High-Tech Kitchen Help

If you’ve got an amateur chef on your list this year, you can’t go wrong with sous vide. Sous vide is an older cooking technique using warm water to slowly and evenly cook foods like meat, fish and vegetables. Recent devices like the Joule from ChefSteps have increased the popularity of sous vide and made it easy to incorporate into any kitchen.

The Joule itself is a long, cylindrical water circulator and can be easily dropped into a pot of water to prepare food. It looks kind of like a high-tech rolling pin crossed with an Amazon Echo – but the noticeable difference between Joule and other sous vide cookers out there is the lack of a screen. The smartphone app does all the work – including preheating the device to the right temperature. The only thing left for the chef to do is season, seal and place the food in the water. The lack of a screen makes it more lightweight and smaller than other sous vide cookers, an appeal for some who want to minimize space in the kitchen.

Once cooking is complete, the dish can be removed and seared or finished on the stove for a perfect crust. Reviews of the Joule sous vide cooker promise some of the juiciest, most tender (insert food here) you’ve ever had.

Price: $199 on ChefSteps.com
(ChefSteps say they guarantee shipping by the holidays!)

Turn A Beer Fan Into A Brewmaster

Craft beer, spirits and cocktail related gifts are popular for those who like to imbibe around the holidays (…that’s everyone, right?) You could go a step up and get the beer fan on your list their own at home brew system. The folks at PicoBrew created the Pico, a simple pod-based brewing device that allows amateur brewers to customize their favorite IPA, pilsner, stout or pale ale in a week’s time. The PicoBrew PicoPaks and unique system take the mess out of home brewing and fermentation and each contains a different combo of grains, hops and yeast for each craft beer.

The PicoPaks are sold separately but come in over a hundred varieties so it’s easy to pair a few favorites with the system for a killer gift. And unlike older homebrew systems, the Pico’s compact design is ready for prime time – it’s cute enough to sit on the kitchen countertop and has a built-in steam cleaning mechanism. The digital display screen allows the user to adjust alcohol and bitterness levels for any brew and it makes up to five liters of beer at one time.

The Pico is one of those smart kitchen gadgets that will probably win you coolest family member award instantly; you might even get to sample the new brewmaster’s first brew attempt. Check out our complete review of The Pico before you buy.

Price: $799 at Williams-Sonoma

Infuse The Holidays With Perfect Tea

Tea and coffee are common holiday gifts for hot beverage drinkers, but for those who have a special affinity for tea, the smart tea infuser Teforia can create a custom cup of tea brewed to the exact right temperature and strength. The infuser looks like a cross between a traditional coffee maker and a high-tech chemistry set and comes equipped with a propriety technology called the Teforia Selective Infusion Profile System (“Teforia SIPS” ™). Sounds complicated, right? Basically, Teforia has created a device that knows the best way to brew tea, taking into account things like steep time, infusion temperature and the varietal of tea you’re using.

But who really needs a tea infuser? Tea is actually considered most widely consumed beverage in the world next to water and can be found in almost 80% of all U.S. households. Most of us, even avid tea fans (raises hand) use a kettle to boil water and a simple tea bag stuck in a mug. But Teforia claims not all teas are created equal, and consuming tea the typical way actually does the ancient beverage a huge disservice.

So bypass the specialty tea box in the gift shop this year as you’re picking out gifts – chances are, if someone is a fan of tea, the Teforia Infuser, maybe with some of their hand-picked varietals thrown in, will blow their mind.

Price: $1499, starts shipping December 1 if you order on Teforia’s website.

Coffee – Right From Your Phone

Onto the coffee lovers – if you’re a true java fan, you know that there’s not one temp fits all for coffee brewing. What makes a good cup of coffee, well, good, often has to do with extraction, or the process of hot water drawing the flavor from the grounds. It’s a delicate process and water that’s too hot will leave coffee tasting bitter. With the Behmor Connected Coffee Maker, that problem is solved through customizable brew profiles that all coffee drinkers to adjust the brewing temperature and pre-soak time before crafting that perfect cup.

And, as the name suggests, Behmor’s coffee maker comes with a connected smartphone app that allows you to program, adjust and monitor your coffee from the comfort of your bed. The app will even text you when your coffee’s done, thus finally giving you a reason to get out of bed on a cold winter morning. In addition to the custom brew control, Behmor’s actually build in some unique technology to optimize coffee extraction with a pulsed water flow and a grounds basket designed to saturate every single coffee ground.

Pair this with a local coffee blend and you’ve got every java lover’s dream come true.

Price: $234 on Amazon

Give The Gift Of An Oven That Knows Exactly What You’re Cooking

An oven might seem like an odd gift to give someone – unless it’s your spouse and you’re in the middle of a kitchen renovation, I suppose. But what if that oven was packed with enough technology to recognize the food you place in it and know exactly how to cook it? That’s exactly what the June Oven is designed to do.

Early reviews on the June are mixed – and some are even downright harsh – but we still think the June could be an interesting gift for those with money to spare who want the most cutting edge oven tech on the market.

Price: $1495 for pre-order on Juneoven.com

For The Person Who Actually Loves to Cook

So maybe you don’t want to spend over $1k on a magical oven, but you do have someone on your list who likes cooking and is always on the hunt for new recipes. The Drop Kitchen Scale with companion smart app is a good way to dip your toe into the world of connected kitchen gear without breaking the bank. The Drop Scale looks like a basic kitchen scale, but when paired with the app, provides a basic guided cooking system that walks the user through a chosen recipe and helps them weigh out ingredients along the way.

One of the best features of the Drop Kitchen ecosystem is its adaptability. Within the app, you can find and customize a recipe for the exact quantity or taste preference you’d like and the recipe will adjust portions and ingredients for you. So no more guesstimating how much flour you should use for a cupcake recipe you’re trying to half, Drop will give you precise measurements for the amount you need. With so many people using their smartphones and tablets in the kitchen to read recipes, the Drop Kitchen Scale and app will make cooking that much more enjoyable.

Price: $78.98 on Amazon (product is being end-of-lifed as Drop transitions into platform based technology)

Alexa, Finish My Holiday Shopping

Ok, this might not technically be a kitchen-specific gift, but the vast majority of Amazon Echo users I’ve encountered (myself included) keep the device in the kitchen – and for good reason. Alexa isn’t just a helpful virtual assistant, she can also be a pretty handy sous chef. From the very advanced – enable the Allrecipes skill and get step-by-step walk-through of any recipe available on Allrecipes – to the basic – ask Alexa how many teaspoons is in a tablespoon (1 tbl = 3 tsp, handy when your tablespoon constantly goes missing), Alexa is a hands-free help during meal prep.

The other helpful kitchen-specific feature, aside from listening to a news flash, a podcast or Spotify with a simple request, is the shopping list feature. Ask Alexa to add things to your shopping list as you run out of it, ensuring the next trip to the grocery store will result in a full pantry restock.

The Amazon Echo is usually $179.99, but is often on sale (and out of stock) around the holidays.

Connect To Your Tea

Maybe you have a tea lover on your list, but the idea of 800 bucks for the Teforia Infuser isn’t realistic. Before Teforia, there was a device called AppKettle, a connected tea kettle with less bells and whistles, but an easier price to swallow.

AppKettle is a connected tea kettle with a companion app that allows users to heat water on demand, from anywhere. With a nice stainless steel finish and both app and native device controls, this is a nice little upgrade to your traditional tea kettle. With the ability to control the temp of the water, AppKettle might be a perfect gift for new parents on your list who are bottle feeding. There’s nothing worse than waiting for water to heat up while your new baby cries for milk.

Price: AppKettle sadly is only shipping in the UK for around $160, but the CEO told The Spoon they have plans to ship in the US in 2017 with added Alexa integration.

Celebrate The New Year With A Perfect Drink

The season of gift-giving will soon be over which means it’s not too early to be making New Year’s Eve plans. And generally speaking, the most vital part of a good New Year’s Eve at home, whether you’re parenting a toddler and stuck home playing Cards Against Humanity or single and hosting a fancy dinner party with a DJ and a large crowd, are the beverages. And if you’re going to be at home, you want cocktails that taste like they were made by a professional mixologist at a swanky bar, no?

That’s why the Perfect Drink 2.0 Smart Scale and Interactive App make such a great gift – it’s the smart kitchen substitute for an expensive bartending course. The Perfect Drink scale has over 400 drink recipes and walks you through ingredients, letting you know when you’ve poured the perfect amount of each. And if you pour too much, let’s say, gin, Perfect Drink Scale will help you adjust the rest of the ingredients so you don’t ruin the drink. The Cabinet feature lets you keep track of what you have on hand and there are recipes for every season, along with tried and true favorites.

Price: $39.99 on Amazon

Make Spaghetti Out Of….Everything

Tech lover or not, everyone loves a good kitchen gadget that’s useful and helpful without many bells and whistles. I once asked a well-known chef what he couldn’t live without in the kitchen and he said – basically – a good pan and some heat. But the extras can be fun too, which is why we’re putting the spiralizer into our first-ever gift guide.

The spiralizer is one of those low-tech gadgets that has amazing utility and, as a result, has a huge following. It’s basically a handheld device that turns average vegetables into pasta, creating a healthy (and delicious) meal. The spiralizer is best known for its ability to make zucchini spaghetti, but pictures (and testimonials) indicate it can be used to create garnishes and turn other vegetables into a pasta shape, too.

For anyone on your list looking to eat healthier, add this to their stocking and tell them to look forward to a spiralized 2017.

Price: Depends on the model, this basic one is $12.99 on Amazon while this slightly fancier (maybe less labor-intensive version) is $39.95 at Williams-Sonoma.

Read Up On The Future Of Food + The Kitchen

One of my favorite gifts to give and receive are books – you can’t go wrong. And there are a few books in the food tech and food science space that would make excellent presents under the tree.

The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt – The Food Lab is a tour de force – the food bible for anyone looking to infuse science through simple techniques to enhance everyday cooking. The 1000+ page plus recipe book is quite a departure from ordinary cookbooks; authored by Serious Eats managing culinary directorJ. Kenji López-Alt, also a James Beard Award winner, The Food Lab focuses squarely on food science. Looking at the interactions between heat, energy & molecules and how they all work together to create truly delicious food. The techniques to achieving better food aren’t necessarily complicated, and for anyone interested in nerding out over the science behind your favorite recipes, this book is a perfect (and heavy!) gift.

Modernist Bread: The Art and Science by Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya – The first Modernist Cuisine book series spawned a cult-like following of the brand and its founder, former Microsoft CTO and technologist turned food connoisseur, Nathan Myhrvold. These books – hundreds of dollars worth – are truly for the hardcore food science nerd, someone who wants to dive deep into the art, science, design, techniques and research on human diet staple: bread. Housed in a stainless steel case, the five-volume series delivers over 1500 recipes, a wire-bound kitchen manual and over 2300 pages of knowledge on bread. While it’s not available until 2017, the right person will swoon over the gift of a Modernist Bread pre-order receipt.

sousvide Sous Vide at Home: The Modern Technique for Perfectly Cooked Meals – From Lisa Fetterman, the founder of Nomiku, one of the first mainstream sous vide machines, Sous Vide at Home just hit the shelves in early November. Sous vide is becoming increasingly popular as a technique using the slow heat of a water bath (described above in our Joule write-up) and this cookbook is a guide to creating chef-quality food using any sous vide device at home. It would pair well with a brand new sous vide machine as a perfect foodie gift.

So there you have it – our first annual holiday gift guide! We hope you find something for every food and tech lover on your list.

Happy Holidays!

November 22, 2016

Libation Liberation: Applying App Distribution & Marketplace Dynamics To Craft Food

One of the most exciting – but undercovered – aspects of food and kitchen tech is how it offers new monetization models for creators. I’m not talking about e-books or other more conventional formats for beer makers, chefs, and mixologists, but instead how creators can harness the power of connected hardware and software to begin to create digital distribution and content license opportunities.

What do I mean by this? As I wrote over at Forbes in a piece focused on craft alcohol, we are beginning to see examples of startups creating licensing models that leverage creative work in the worlds of craft beer and cocktails. While these businesses have been, by necessity, hyperlocal because they produce artisanal food crafts in a specific location at small scale, connected products with associated marketplaces and publishing platforms could change that. By bringing the combination of precision automation and digital distribution to the market through connected hardware, these startups are creating new ways for a bartender or master brewer to get their work out into the world – and around – the world.

As I wrote in Forbes:

PicoBrew’s Mitchell talked about this in the abstract a year ago when they launched the Kickstarter for their new beer brewing appliance, but with their beer brewing appliance now shipping, they’re doing it. They have licensed recipes from over 130 craft brewers across the world and are now pushing out PicoPaks, which are essentially pods with all the grains and hops tailored to the specific recipes of each of these brewers. The owner of a PicoBrew in Boca Raton, Florida can buy a PicoPak with a recipe from a beer brewer in Oregon and have the beer in 5-7 days (how long it takes to make beer with the PicoBrew).

Bartesian is doing something similar with craft cocktails by licensing the recipes and putting into pods.

But it’s not just liquor. ChefSteps, makers of the Joule sous vide cooker, is looking to create a community and influencer recipe platform that would enable a chef to create his or her own branded cooking education, guidance, and community experience. So instead of just writing a blog post for how to make sous vide steak, for example, J. Kenji López-Alt could also have an associated “guided cooking recipe” that offers video and some specific automated instructions for the Joule itself.

Of course, all of this is early, and we have yet to see how any of this can work at scale. However, I do believe applying digital distribution and marketplace dynamics to craft food creation could result in a massive shift and provide new lifelines to creators who have been limited both in geographic reach and scale.

October 13, 2016

NY Times Talks Sous Vide (Again)

In 2009, the New York Times published an article about something called sous vide, a cooking technique that had food tinkerers and culinary explorers using lab equipment and other hacks to bring – what up to that point been a pro trick – into the consumer kitchen. Those were early days for the precision cooking method, in part because it was well over a year before Nathan Myhrvold and Chris Young would publish their seminal work, Modernist Cuisine, a five-volume, 50-pound heap of books that helped to kickstart the sous vide revolution.

Flash forward almost seven years and sous vide is back in The Grey Lady, only now the cooking method is on the precipice of becoming mainstream.

One expert cited in the 2009 piece was the same Chris Young, who at the time was the culinary research manager for Intellectual Ventures. In this week’s piece by Times columnist Brian X. Chen, Young doesn’t appear, but his new company, ChefSteps, is featured prominently. That’s because Young and other early evangelists of sous vide have been able to ride the wave of the growing popularity of the cooking method while also helping to fuel its rise through consumer education and consumer friendly sous vide circulators (ChefSteps just released its sous vide circulator called the Joule).

Another cooking wizard at the forefront of the sous vide movement is J. Kenji López-Alt, who went from being an architecture major who started working in restaurants during summer breaks from college to become one of the Internet’s go-to authorities on sous vide. López-Alt writes the popular The Food Lab column for food site Serious Eats, and last year published a NY Times best-selling book by the same name.

In Chen’s article, López-Alt and ChefSteps’ Grant Crilly (who, like Young, is also an Intellectual Ventures/Modernist Cuisine expat) talk about sous vide’s growing popularity, and address what has become the main hurdle to wider adoption of sous vide: long cooking times.

According to López-Alt, using sous vide may take more time, but consumers can adjust if they just spend a little time planning what they want to eat on any given night.

“Most people, when they think about dinner, say, ‘What can I get at the grocery store now and get going tonight?’” he said. “It requires a lot more forethought.”

Crilly makes a similar argument and says the results will be worth it.

“Cook it slow, unlock all that really beautiful flavor, and you’ve got a really nice piece of meat,” he said.

Comparing the two posts shows how far sous vide has come and how far it still has to go. To be sure, sous vide is becoming much more commonplace in the consumer kitchen, but will require a little patience from consumers if it’s ever to go truly mainstream.

October 13, 2016

ChefSteps Adds “Conversational Cooking” To Sous Vide With Echo Skill

We’ve talked a lot on The Spoon about the power of the Amazon Echo in the kitchen – as a virtual sous chef, a custom bartender, a unique component of guided cooking and just a helpful assistant (Alexa, set a timer for 5 minutes!) And the power of the Echo as a frictionless controller in the smart home is evident in the myriad of skills announced from virtually every top smart home manufacturer – lights, thermostats, even locks now have limited voice control functionality with Alexa.

So it’s no surprise when one of the big players in the smart kitchen space announces plans to deepen its Echo integration, beefing up Alexa’s power as an AI assistant. ChefSteps, the Seattle-based culinary startup discussed its Amazon Echo skill for Joule, a sous vide cooker and the company’s inaugural hardware device last week at the GeekWire conference.

We covered Joule’s launch extensively, detailing ChefSteps move to give back money to backers when initial demand far exceeded their expectations and production costs were lower than expected. As the emerging sous vide trend quickly grew thanks in no small part to Joule competitors like Anova and Sansaire, Joules began shipping to eager backers and the company began talking about voice control. In an initial post about Amazon Echo, ChefSteps explained,

“ask any chef who’s ever barked “Fire!” at her line while a packed house awaited their entrees: sometimes, a cook’s best tool is her voice. That’s where Alexa comes in.”

Initially, the ChefSteps Joule skill for Echo is limited to basic, albeit helpful, functionality. Users could ask Alexa to check the status of the temperature, or set the temperature in preparation for a particular recipe, or stop the device. But ChefSteps’ co-founder Chef Chris Young discussed plans to go much further with Echo, using a deeper well of knowledge to create a true AI helper for your sous vide cooking.

Dubbed “conversational cooking,” the new Echo skill will enable home chefs to get even more help, asking Alexa to “start cooking my steak medium rare.” Joule users can give Alexa basic information, like the size of the meat and the level of doneness they’d like and Alexa will set Joule to the correct temp and cook it for the amount of time needed to accommodate. Perhaps most interestingly, Alexa will act as a customized cookbook of sorts, remembering the instructions from past recipes and storing them for future use.

In the future, Young and his team expect even cooler Alexa features like contextual recipe and cooking instructions based on time constraints and in-app food purchasing. In other words – they are just getting started.

August 8, 2016

Interview: Chef Chris Young, Co-Founder of ChefSteps

Ashley recently chatted with Chef Chris Young, famed chef-scientist, co-author of Modernist Cuisine and co-founder of ChefSteps, a technology company working to help people cook better.

Ashley Daigneault: How has cooking evolved over the last few decades and what role do you think technology is playing in those changes?

Chef Chris Young: Well that really depends on how you define cooking – in the commercial kitchen, technology drove the modernist movement in the late 90s and 2000s, where chefs were leveraging technology and a scientific understanding of cooking to create novel dishes, things that people never ate before. Technology drove innovation in the kitchen.

Some of that has trickled down to the consumer level, but a small amount. Sous vide is a good example of this – a device really borrowed from the laboratory from professional chefs. The other way technology has changed is not in cooking but in eating is the rise of mobile devices and apps – the ones that help you find a restaurant, choose the food you want to eat – technology has made it easier than ever to NOT cook. Between meal delivery service, Uber delivering food, Yelp-type apps, in the last decade, technology has done more to disconnect us from cooking.

Ashley Daigneault: What innovations happening around the kitchen have the best chance of becoming mainstream?

Chef Chris Young: The microwave is the last big technology that became a mainstream consumer product. It came out around 1968 and then in the 90s they were finally in every kitchen; mainstream has a long lead time. You’re talking two or three decades. Now we’re seeing the rise of gadget cooking, like sous vide cooking – but the interesting thing there isn’t the water bath or the immersion circulator, but the way mobile phones, content and community are making it easier for people to connect and cook.

The devices that succeed are ones that are more responsive to humans; we’re still going to eat hot food – what will change is how we interact with the devices doing the heating. You should be able to say – I want to cook this certain thing, this certain way and I’d like to eat it at this time – and that would trigger a whole series of actions behind the scenes in your appliances. Human interaction will be more in charge.

Ashley Daigneault: ChefSteps introduced its first hardware product – the Joule sous vide cooker. Why did you decide to create a physical product, a cooking device?

Chef Chris Young: We’ve always been focused on listening to our community. When ChefSteps was founded in 2012, we took the spirit from Modernist Cuisine and demonstrated that people were hungry for info on how cooking works. We initially started with YouTube videos and interacting with viewers and built a website to aggregate the content. And we continued to listen – what did the community want from us?

We found that our community was passionate about cooking. Even for people who were really good at cooking, the tools in the kitchen were pretty painful. The typically didn’t help them be creative or help them innovate. We could solve problems by giving people tools that were better, helping them be more successful and creative in the kitchen. And this has always been our mission: to help them to choose to cook better food at home instead of eating out.

Ashley Daigneault: What were the challenges in bringing a device to market?

Chef Chris Young: It’s expensive to do hardware right – but we wanted to do it right. We looked at the tools out there but we saw that sous vide cooking hasn’t changed much since 2003 other than price. Since ChefSteps creates the content, we can show people how to cook the foods they want, the way they want and connect it to a device that heats and stirs the water and makes that happen.

Good direction will get more people cooking – people feel more in control, and more importantly, by leveraging mobile apps, we can learn. Our community gives us feedback about what they like about our tools vs what they don’t so we can make changes in software and not make folks buy new devices every time we learn new things. Ultimately, the drive is about getting people to cook and at some point you have to move beyond the phone to cook the food.

Ashley Daigneault: As a chef, do you think technology can make people better cooks?

Chef Chris Young: Absolutely. There’s this viewpoint that things were better the way our grandmother did things, but that’s not really true. For one, food poisoning was rampant as there were no safety standards. Technology has definitely made that better. We have access to better ingredients than ever before, food is healthier now than ever before. Actually, it’s pretty damn amazing what’s possible.

Ashley Daigneault: What’s your go-to gadget or product in the kitchen that you can’t live without?

Chef Chris Young: The thing that has done more to make me a better cook – a digital thermometer. It’s really allowed us to have consistency and control and make sure we were giving people the best possible food. Humans are really good at certain activities – but measurement is NOT one of them. Give me a simple digital thermometer, a scale, a good knife and a decent pan – I can pretty much cook everything.

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