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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

sous vide

The Year In Smart Bar

Ah, 2016, the year we all needed to take a big ol’ drink. Fortunately a flurry of innovation in gadgets, apps, and platforms has helped make that easier in more ways than one. Here are the most notable happenings and advancements in the past 12 months.

Make It From Scratch

People have been home-brewing for decades, but in the past few years it’s reached a fever pitch, with every wannabe hipster (sorry, Mike) fermenting in their basement. The Pico simplifies this process with a plug-and-play model, including ready-to-brew PicoPak ingredient kits and the ability to brew five liters of craft beer in about two hours. Meanwhile Hopsy premiered its HomeTap so you can enjoy the mouthfeel of a freshly poured pint out of a tap, even if you didn’t brew the beer yourself. And just in case there’s not enough foam, get yourself the Sonic beer foamer device to add the perfect amount.

Even big players like Whirlpool entered this space in 2016: In July its crowdfunding project reached over 220 percent of its goal, and soon you’ll be able to buy the Vessi beer fermentor and dispenser for $1,800. (In other words, crowdfunding is finally legit, with Wired even profiling one of the first companies to run a successful crowdfunding campaign — for 3D-printed cocktail ice.) And foodie inventor Dave Arnold launched a crowdfunding campaign for his Spinzall, a small centrifuge designed for restaurant and home use for under $1,000.

Robotic Bartenders

The ready-to-drink (RTD) market is somewhere around $3 billion, and the hottest thing in the smart bar this year was clearly robotic bartenders. There are a spate of different companies vying for space: Bartesian raised an undisclosed sum, reportedly in the “millions”; Somabar raised $1.5 million; and Monsieur raised $1.2 million. In less professional news, the Open Bar robot was submitted to the 2016 Hackaday Prize contest and is actually open source, so all you eager coders can help perfect it.

Expect the playing field to become even more crowded in the next year with lookalike companies proving our eternal interest in robots.

Pour Yourself the Perfect Drink

Apps for the perfect cocktail, beer, and so on abounded this year. Competing with the Perfect Drink smart bartending platform, the Bernooli device and app make it easy to make a balanced drink, and even Alexa can help you figure out how to make a cocktail or give you wine recommendations. And Spanish chemists have created an app that will tell you if your beer is, for lack of a better word, skunked.

Meanwhile Hooch doesn’t want you to drink at home, alone: The company raised $1.5 million to expand its subscription platform that gives you one drink for free at bars all over New York and Los Angeles.

Totally Unnecessary Technology

What kind of year would it be without some totally ridiculous, over-the-top technology that we don’t need? A boring one, that’s what.

Enter the data cocktail machine that makes cocktails from tweets. Yes, the Arduino-powered robot pulls the latest five tweets from around the world that mention ingredients and then mashes them into a cocktail. Surprisingly, there aren’t any plans to commercialize the machine.

But who knows: 2017 is a whole new year.

Gourmia Launches Wi-Fi Air Fryer And New Sous Vide Machine

Sometimes the coolest part about IoT devices has little to do with the internet connectivity. Such is the case with Gourmia’s newest product launch – an air fryer that uses air instead of oil to create a crispy and tasty food experience.

Gourmia actually launched two new connected products – a sous vide “immersion pod” – aka a sous vide machine with Wi-Fi built in and a companion iOS / Android app. The sous vide machine features a large clip on the side to affix it to the pot of water as well as a small touchscreen for at-device control of temperature and power. Gourmia is working with home chef turned author Jason Logsdon, known for using techniques such as sous vide, blow torches and whipping siphons to prepare recipes in the mobile apps to use with the device. Gourmia already has a sous vide machine with a sub $100 price, but with added Wi-Fi, the introductory price for this one is around $120. It is still cheaper than current leading competitors like the ChefSteps Joule and Anova’s sous vide machine.

But the more interesting new product from Gourmia is the Cook Center & Air Fryer, which uses a combination of convection and radiant cooking to circulate hot air via halogen heating and deliver food prepped in different styles. The Gourmia Air Fryer claims to reduce cooking time by 60% and produces “perfectly crisp exteriors with moist tender interiors.” The appliance offers 20 different cooking styles, including frying and sauteing using air heat, as well as regular stir fry, steam, roast, grill, broil, bake, rotisserie, and kebabs. You can also use it to make pizza and to defrost food – making you wonder why you even need that microwave anymore.

The introductory price for the Gourmia Cook Center & Air Fryer is $150 – a decent buy considering the functionality and versatility.

Is Solar-Powered Cooking the Next Big Thing?

In his new book The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, J. Kenji López-Alt wants you to use a beer cooler, water, an instant-read thermometer, some Ziploc bags, and a few towels to make a super DIY sous vide. Put it in a sunny spot in your kitchen, he advises, and cook everything from brats and beer to olive oil–poached salmon and rib-eyes with shallots, garlic and thyme. That sure beats spending a couple hundred bucks on a fancy sous vide machine.

It’s clear that Kenji has laboriously tested every recipe and idea in the book, with positive results, so this isn’t a cockamamie hypothesis from a novice but a practiced prescription from a professional. But I still can’t quite get behind the idea of putting raw meat in a cooler with some lukewarm water, setting the whole thing in a warm spot on the kitchen floor, and letting nature take its course.

But it turns out he’s not the only one. While some companies are making super high-tech kitchen devices, others are turning to the lowest-tech possibilities around. For example, GoSun’s line of solar ovens use compound parabolic reflectors and a tubular design to convert almost 80 percent of sunlight that enters the device into useable heat. There’s also a vacuum tube oven involved, and it doesn’t require electricity, gas, or any other man-made fuel to work.

Meanwhile BjornQorn makes solar-popped popcorn using a device they invented themselves: massive mirrored reflectors that collect and focus the sun’s rays, similar to how little kids fry ants with a magnifying glass. The $6 bags are available at hipster-centric specialty stores in the Northeast, and the popcorn has become so popular that Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams even made an ice cream flavor out of it.

And just recently, KinoSol’s solar-powered food dehydrators were fully funded on Kickstarter. The devices use a convection system and zero electricity. The company wants to make domestic dehydrators that will help individual households decrease their food waste by finding another use for those brown bananas or slightly mealy apples: The thought is that once they’re dehydrated, they’ll make a tasty snack.

The idea of an environmentally responsible, low-power way to cook is intriguing and on-trend, as people want to be connected to making their food in every way possible. Also, both KinoSol and BjornQorn have used their devices in third-world countries to bring an easy way of cooking to places that do not have electricity or access to other fuels, and for that reason, they’re invaluable. We believe that over time more and more companies will move into this space. But to be successful with the mainstream tech user, the products themselves need to feel more expensive and offer more than just a low-energy way to cook — they need to prove that cooking this way makes better-tasting or more nutritious food.

 

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.

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.

Connected Home Chefs: Sous Vide King of Alabama

This series explores how connected devices are used in real-life people’s home kitchens. It’s one thing to watch a demo of connected cooking appliances on a company website or at Pirch in Manhattan, but it’s quite another to use them in your own house. These are stories of people who use technology to make delicious food for themselves, their families, and their friends.

Name: Cole Wagoner

Title: Sous Vide King of Alabama (he’s originally from Portland, y’all)

Preferred Technology: Anova Precision Cooker

ColeWaggonerWhy: Cole moved from Portland, Oregon, to rural Alabama “to chase a girl” (whom he’s now married to) and suddenly found himself without access to the high-quality restaurants he loved. “I drive by the Chili’s and the parking lot is full, and I get sad,” he said. His solution? Make fancy restaurant-style food himself. He considers himself an early adopter of all sorts of technology, and so the Anova made sense for him. Sous vide has given him access to a new level of cooking and transformed his attitudes about the kitchen. “It broke down the barrier for me to cook things I’ve never had before in my life that I want to try,” he said, noting that he’s “going to plate it like you’re paying $60 for it.”

ColeWaggonerSalmonHow He Discovered It: While watching Top Chef, Cole kept hearing a phrase he didn’t understand. He googled “sous vide” and realized that home units were quite affordable. He bought his Anova a year and a half ago and started using Reddit’s sous vide thread along with YouTube videos and messaging people on Instagram to teach himself how to use it. Now he cooks with it three to seven times per week

Favorite Dish to Make: “I like to buy a duck for $20 at Publix and then get five meals out of it,” he said. Think Asian duck breast and handmade duck-confit tortellini cooked in a duck broth. Or rack of lamb with tomato confit risotto (the recipe for the tomato confit came from Thomas Keller, natch). “I stay away from chicken and pork,” he explained.

ColeWaggonerDuck Confit Tortellini in Duck Consomme

Other Kitchen Technology: He uses a digital thermometer for his charcoal smoker and recently bought an Apple Watch. “I spent $350 to basically have a kitchen timer,” he said.

What’s Next: He considers himself a “sous vide evangelist” and has convinced eight people in the past three months to buy a sous vide after seeing him work his magic. Cole also wants to start catering small private events, like 6-person dinner parties and such. He said, “I want to come in and show you all the things you’re missing.”

 

 

Sansaire Launches Delta, A WiFi Connected Sous Vide Device

Today Sansaire launched a Kickstarter campaign for their second generation sous vide machine, the Delta. Just hours into the launch of the campaign, the Delta -a Wi-Fi connected device that pairs with a newly cooking app – hit $70 thousand of its $100 thousand goal and has attracted 450 backers.

It’s an impressive start, but for Sansaire, a well known player in the nascent but fast growing sous vide category, it shouldn’t be all that surprising.  After all, the company’s first device raised over $800 thousand in 2013 and has since become one of the top selling sous vide circulators on Amazon.

This early success came on the heels of cofounder Scott Heimendinger’s viral success with his DIY sous vide project in 2012, which got picked up by Make magazine and helped make Heimendinger one of the cooking method’s earliest and most well known evangelists.  While Heimendinger has since left to go to work full time at Modernist Cuisine as their technical director, in the last few years Sansaire has cemented a reputation as one of the go-to makers of affordable consumer sous vide circulators.

But despite the company’s early success on today’s Kickstarter, the reality is their new product will ship in a much different – and more competitive – market than when their first product shipped in 2014. Anova Culinary, who beat Sansaire to market with its first circulator, has since launched both Bluetooth and WiFi models and expects to ship 400 thousand units this year. Low cost sous vide hardware makers like Gourmia have entered the market, while new entrant ChefSteps is tapping into the large community it has built as one of the go-to destinations online for sous vide recipes and education to build demand for its Joule sous vide circulator.

Despite a more competitive market, Sansaire has built a loyal following in the sous vide market (as evidenced by the fast success of its Kickstarter campaign), and by shipping a connected sous vide machine, the company can now begin to explore the potential the comes from the fusion of precision cooking devices and cooking apps.  The company is touting monitoring and notifications with the newly launched Sansaire app, and over time it’s possible they’ll add more guided cooking elements that could really make a hardware device like the Delta shine.

The real challenge for Sansaire lies beyond the Kickstarter campaign, where they will need to attract new converts to sous vide at a slightly higher price point than the Anova and ChefSteps circulators(the Delta’s retail price will be $249), while also facing competition from bigger players in small appliances who are eyeing entry into the sous vide market in 2017.

Podcast: From Cars to Precision Cooking: The Story of Cinder

A decade ago, Eric Norman was working on product design at Toyota headquarters in Japan. Now, he’s taken his love of cuisine and food and is applying much of what he learned creating big metal boxes to cart us around to helping create the next generation of cooking devices.

You can find out more about Cinder at www.cindercooks.com

What’s Next From Those That Brought Us Consumer Sous Vide?

When you look at the recent history of kitchen tech, one of the biggest categories to emerge over the past decade is sous vide.  What started as a fixation for molecular gastronomy explorers like Nathan Myhrvold has moved to the early stages of becoming mainstream as big retailers like Target and Best Buy plan nationwide rollouts of consumer sous vide circulators.

And while sous vide is still early in its life from a consumer adoption standpoint, many of those who helped consumerize the technique and the products are busy working on their next act to help make people better cooks through the application of precision, technology and understanding.

Before looking at what’s next after sous vide, it’s worth looking at what sous vide itself brought to the table (and the kitchen):

It was the starting point for precision cooking in the home. Before sous vide, cooking really was a guessing game with the widely varying precision of traditional cooking appliances in terms of heat and temperature. For the first time with sous vide, a cook knows exactly the temperature they are cooking at and can get fairly precise results.

It’s an example of how applying modern technology can democratize a professional cooking technique.  Sous vide cooking has been in restaurant kitchens for well over a decade, but it’s only now become more widely adopted in consumer kitchen as companies like Anova and Sansaire use modern technology to bring the price down to consumer levels.

It represents a natural and organic integration of app with cooking hardware. We’re seeing more and more kitchen hardware come to market with apps, whether that’s connected refrigerators like the Samsung Family Hub or connected ovens, but sous vide apps were one of the first and most obvious examples where connectivity to manage a device makes sense.

But now, here we are in 2016 and things are changing rapidly. Those that helped pioneer the early sous vide market are still pioneering, only now they’re working on new things. Here are some ideas of what they may be cooking up:

Guided Cooking. I wrote about this trend in March, where I saw the fusion of connected cooking appliances, precision cooking and app guidance as the emergence of a new category. In some ways this is a very natural evolution of sous vide, and companies like ChefSteps are essentially creating a guided cooking system in the form of a sous vide circulator. Others like Hestan Cue (which is the result of the acquisition of Meld) are working on what we call a guided cooking system, with the help of veterans of the sous vide world in Darren Vengroff and Christoph Milz.

The Hestan Cue

The Hestan Cue

New Cooking Appliances, New Ways To Cook. One thing that is clear is that once you add more computing power, connectivity and software to a cooking device, it not only gives you a more intelligent device, but it can also fundamentally change the way you cook.  The folks at Innit and June see the possibilities from applying machine learning and data analytics to a cooking device. NXP’s RF cooking division (previously Freescale) is working with home appliance makers to create new ways to cook food with radio frequency technology. Anova, the leading consumer sous vide company, has made it clear they don’t plan to stop with sous vide circulators and could be exploring new cooking devices.

The Searzall

The Searzall

New Scientific Techniques May Mean New Consumer Products. Other cutting edge culinary explorers like Dave Arnold are also busy trying to create new products, and after the Searzall, a steak searing accessory that pairs well with sous vide, Arnold is busy working on a consumer friendly home centrifuge machine that could do interesting things with sauces and mixing drinks. Not exactly cooking, but an example of some of the new approaches we’ll see from folks fusing scientific technique and the kitchen.

And Then There’s Modernist. After helping to usher in the modern food science revolution, the folks at Modernist Cuisine seemed content to mainly write books and put out some specialty cooking kits .

But that may be changing. The company recently brought on a new technical director, someone who is pretty well know both in the sous vide world as well as Modernist Cuisine: Scott Heimendinger. Scott had worked at Modernist Cuisine previously as the director of applied science, but had in recent years had been focused on launching his own sous vide startup in Sansaire. He is back at Modernist, working on,according to his Linkedin, some stealth products.

I’ve asked Scott what he’s working on and he’s remaining tight lipped for now, which makes me wonder if Modernist is working on creating some new product(s) that could help change the way consumers cook. Time will only tell, and we’ll have to see if Modernist Cuisine CEO Nathan Myhrvold has anything to talk about at the Smart Kitchen Summit.

Looking forward, I expect to see lots of innovation in cooking, and there’s no doubt the foundations for much of the innovation we’ll see in the kitchen over the next decade