Joule

February 3, 2017

Hestan Cue Available For Preorder As New Generation of Guided Cooking Systems Come To Market

Last March at the Housewares show in Chicago, I had scheduled a meeting to swing by housewares giant Meyer’s booth to check out a demo of a new product they were calling the Hestan Cue.

All I knew about the product was it had morphed out of work done by Meld, a startup founded in 2014 to create a retrofit smart knob to add some aftermarket automation and control to existing stove tops. After a successful Kickstarter, Meld was stealthily acquired by Meyer and for the next six months no one heard from the connected cooking startup.

So when I got invited to see what had become of Meld, I was naturally intrigued. I had no idea what I was going to see at the Meyer booth, but I suspected it might be something similar to the retrofit knob Meld had built.

I quickly realized after I had arrived was they had scrapped that idea entirely and created something much cooler: a guided cooking system.

The next hour was eye opening, as chef Philip Tessier, Hestan’s in-house culinary director (and soon-to-be gold medal winner at what is essentially the culinary Olympics), asked me to cook salmon for him. Naturally, I was a bit nervous cooking for an award winning chef, but ultimately had no problem making some tasty fish using the guidance provided by the Hestan Cue app.

As I wrote at the time:

“It was this combination of the pan, burner and app and the guidance system they had built that led me to see the possibilities around this new category. I am not a great cook by any stretch of the imagination, but I cooked one of the tastiest pieces of salmon I’ve ever had in about 20 minutes. The experience was enabled by technology, but the technology didn’t take me out of the experience of cooking. Further, I can see as I gain more confidence using a system like this, I can choose to “dial down” the guidance needed from the system to the point I am largely doing most of the cooking by myself (though I don’t know if I’d ever get rid of the automated temperature control, mostly because I’m lazy and it gives me instant “chef intuition).”

It’s been almost a year since I first used the Hestan Cue, and in that time new products have started to emerge on the guided cooking front. ChefSteps has created a cool cooking guidance system for their sous vide circulator, the Joule, while new features in Pantelligent‘s software has made this smart pan into a guided cooking system. Danish startup Ztove is creating a system similar to the Hestan Cue, while Cuciniale is selling what it calls ‘intelligent cooking systems’ that feature an induction heating surface and a variety of cookwares with a sensor probe. Lastly, multicooker leader Thermomix continues to evolve their fifth generation product into what is essentially a guided cooking system powered by a 12-in-1 cooking tool.

And now, the Hestan Cue is available for preorder on the Williams-Sonoma website and will begin shipping in March.

The product’s price carries an MSRP of $699 but is available for $499 online. The price is a bit higher than other products like the Joule, so the choice of high-end retailer Williams-Sonoma makes sense. I expect Williams-Sonoma will have in-store demos for the Hestan Cue, something needed to convey the concept of guided cooking.

No matter which way you slice it, it looks like we can expect more guided cooking systems on the menu in 2017.

December 26, 2016

Mellow’s Zé Pinto Ferreira On Flex Partnership, Smart Kitchen & Sous Vide

Last week, Mellow, the maker of an innovative sous vide system that includes features such as built-in refrigeration and a scale, announced a partnership with contract manufacturer Flextronics to help push the product into production. That’s good news for Mellow’s early backers, since the $400 (presale price) product was expected to ship in early 2015.

But the announcement hinted at more than just a typical contract manufacturing relationship. The two companies execs not only talked about bringing Mellow’s machine to market, but also said they would collaborate on future products. Adding to the intrigue is Flex, which had moved into the smart home when it acquired the business of distressed smart home company Wink from Quirky last year, sees the smart kitchen fitting nicely into the broader connected home.

From Flex’s president of Global Operations, Mechanical Technology Solutions, Gerhard Zebe: “We believe Mellow’s connected appliance could be an integral part of the smart home kitchen, and something consumers will want and enjoy.”

The Mellow smart sous vide machine

With news of this partnership for a company we’ve been tracking for the last two years, we decided to catch up via email with Mellow’s founder and CEO, Zé Pinto Ferreira, to ask him a few questions.

Below is our email interview. Answers have been edited slightly for brevity.

What is the nature of the partnership with Flextronics?

Ferreira: Flextronics has invested in Mellow in non-traditional ways (no equity or capital have been exchanged) that really come down to a much closer and more trusting working relationship than any customer I’ve ever seen have with a manufacturer. The best I can tell you is that Flex’s upper management is heavily involved in Mellow, and they’ve put a disproportionate amount of care in shipping the best possible product.

Mellow originally was intended to ship in early 2015. What was the reason for the delay in shipment?

Ferreira: The technology was harder to scale than we thought. That’s the hard part of building such a unique product, you never know what problems will show up when you scale from prototypes to mass production, especially when you have the standard for that quality we have. We’re on the cusp of shipping now, and we’re so proud of the product people will get.

The product is unique with its refrigeration and sous vide in one unit. Was trying to do both in one device a challenge?

Ferreira: It was insanely hard, but it was the only way to build the product we wanted to ship: a fully automated sous-chef that cooks while you’re away from home. Back when we started, lot of clever people thought what we were trying to do was impossible. We knew it wasn’t, and we’re about to prove it at scale.

Given how close Mellow is to production, how will things change with the partnership?

Ferreira: The most exciting thing about a software-driven product like Mellow is that you’re not finished with it by the time it goes into a box. We’re shipping a simple proposition: An app and a device that make a great product together. But we’re extending that product to more platforms and integrations soon.

How do you see a sous vide maker benefitting from a partnership with a company that owns a smart home platform player like Wink?

Ferreira: We don’t see Mellow as a sous-vide device. Bear with me: It cooks food sous-vide, but it’s so different from everything else out there. Most sous-vide devices end up only being used for special occasions, and there’s a limited amount of work connectivity can do for you when you’re cooking a whole hog for 20 people. Mellow is made to be left at home cooking while you’re at work, so working together with the rest of the home to anticipate your needs/changes in your day makes a lot of sense to us.

Will your role change at all now with this partnership?

Ferreira: Not at all. Flex has been great at leaving us to do what we do best – designing a killer product for busy home cooks. Their interest is in taking our designs and making them at a level of quality where it can proudly be in any kitchen from day 1. Usually, when a hardware startup plays Apple, there’s a lot of compromise down the line. We haven’t had to compromise at all working with Flex, they understand our obsession with quality.

It’s been a few years since Mellow was announced. How has the market for consumer sous vide changed in this time?

Ferreira: We’ve seen a few new products come out since we announced, but nothing that really excites me. I have a Joule, Anova and Nomiku at home, and I get a lot of mileage out of them on special occasions, but I still haven’t’ seen anything that really screams mainstream. All (especially Chefsteps) are doing a great job with education and it shows in the category’s growth, but we’re still very far away from sous-vide being in every kitchen. In my opinion, that’s because circulators aren’t the tool for the job. But I’m pretty biased on that 😉

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.

November 18, 2016

June Gets A Brutal Review. Here’s What The Author Got Right And Wrong

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, whenever a company wanted to get early buzz for a product, they’d send it over to Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal to give it a test run.

Of course, doing so always came with a certain amount of risk since Walt always tells it as it is, and if your product didn’t meet with his stringent requirements for useability and utility, Walt’s review could be the death knell for a product. Conversely, if he liked it, more often than not it would catapult a product into the must have category and holiday buy lists.

Nowadays with the proliferation of blogs and technology journalists, there are a thousand Walt Mossbergs (including Walt Mossberg), and while the technology reviewer may not have quite as much sway in the era of crowdsourced reviews on sites like Amazon, a critical review of a new product can still be painful for a company trying to convince consumers to buy its product.

Which brings us to the recent review of the June Intelligent Oven over at FastCo Design, a popular site which often has thoughtful reviews on new products. The review’s headline is the cringe-inducing (if you’re June, at least) “This $1,500 Toaster Oven Is Everything That’s Wrong With Silicon Valley Design”.

Ouch.

Of course, there were more positive reviews, but the review by Mark Wilson hits the June on a number of fronts, including some apparent bugs – “the June was texting messages like “NOTIFCATION_ETA_PESSIMISTIC” – as well as not performing as promised when it came to things like cook time.

But there are also bigger critiques in the piece, including Wilson’s belief that the June has overpromised on the simplicity of cooking with the device:

“‘[The] salmon’s incredible,” Van Horn had bragged earlier. Which seemed a stretch to me: “The salmon’s incredible” is what a waiter tells you when somebody at your table can’t eat gluten. Objectively, the fish was cooked to temperature and still moist enough—which you could have done in any oven, really.’

This salmon had become more distracting to babysit than if I’d just cooked it on my own. This salmon had become a metaphor for Silicon Valley itself. Automated yet distracting. Boastful yet mediocre. Confident yet wrong. Most of all, the June is a product built less for you, the user, and more for its own ever-impending perfection as a platform. When you cook salmon wrong, you learn about cooking it right.”

And perhaps the biggest problem Wilson had with the June was the very fact it was trying to automate the process of cooking itself.

“June is taking something important away from the cooking process: the home cook’s ability to observe and learn. The sizzle of a steak on a pan will tell you if it’s hot enough. The smell will tell you when it starts to brown. These are soft skills that we gain through practice over time. June eliminates this self-education. Instead of teaching ourselves to cook, we’re teaching a machine to cook. And while that might make a product more valuable in the long term for a greater number of users, it’s inherently less valuable to us as individuals, if for no other reason than that even in the best-case scenarios of machine learning, we all have individual tastes. And what averages out across millions of people may end up tasting pretty . . . average.”

So what are we to take from all of this? Are Wilson’s points that technology can get in the way of cooking and make things more complicated, and that by using the June a home cook is essentially foregoing the process of learning and the multisensory experience of cooking valid?

Yes, to a point. While we should note this is just one review, the reality is that the June Oven is an early attempt at using advanced technology to improve the experience cooking by making the process easier.

But what the reviewer misses in his despair about how automation will sacrifice the craft and experience of cooking is that there are many different types of consumers and cooks, including some who would gladly forego the complexity and effort required to get a tasty meal on the table.

And while June’s first attempt at using advanced image recognition and automated cooking may not yet be perfect, it’s an interesting first try that will improve over time. As Nikhil Bhogal, the CTO of June, said at the Smart Kitchen Summit, “Part of the approach (of building a new product) should be building with headroom to grow.”

In other words, one advantage a product like June has is an ability to improve in the field. Other less technologically advanced products are what they are; once they land in a consumer’s home, their problems likely won’t go away.

Of course, Wilson is not reviewing a future product, he’s reviewing the current June Oven, a $1,500 countertop oven with some useability issues and one that comes with lots of promises. He’s completely right to review the product as it performs today, warts and all.

But I would also suggest before he dismisses the idea of advanced technology like automation in the kitchen, he try products like the Joule from ChefSteps or the Hestan Cue. These products are simpler than the June (and also much lower priced, which helps), but they also do what good tools should do: add simplicity while also elevating a person’s skills. Both use light guidance mechanisms in the form of helpful videos and sensory awareness to make cooking easier, but also only take partial control of the process and allow the home chef to not only experience the act of cooking, but also learn while they are doing it.

And he might also try a Thermomix, the closest thing I’ve used to a really useful “cooking robot” (even though they wouldn’t describe it that way), in that it can almost fully automate a meal like risotto or pasta for you. There’s a reason why the Thermomix has sold millions of its generation 5 multicooker in Europe and that’s because some of us, on some nights, just want someone – or some thing – to make us a tasty meal.

And I imagine a good meal is something even cantankerous product reviewers like Walt Mossberg may even enjoy from time to time.

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.

Joule

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