Eight Kitchen Gadgets on the Horizon

Futurists envision a kitchen in which appliances talk to each other, the refrigerator knows to order milk when you run out, a virtual assistant tells the oven exactly how to cook a piece of fish and recipe ideas pop up on your watch depending on your specific nutritional needs that day and what you have on hand to cook. And in this kitchen of the future, just speaking into one device will do it all.

Like self-driving cars, kitchen automation is in its awkward adolescent phase. Bluetooth technology is prevalent in a plenty of appliances. Ovens have visual recognition capabilities, and you can track how your herbs are growing on your phone. 

But much of the technology out there currently creates solutions for which there are no problems.

“Is there really a consumer demand for this product?” asked Evan Dash, the owner of the appliance development company StoreBound, as he advised hopeful engineers and designers at the the Smart Kitchen Summit held Oct. 10 and 11 in Seattle. “Be honest with yourself.” 

June Intelligent Oven

The oven, already widely available at cookware stores and online, was like the popular kid at school at the conference. It has a camera that recognizes food, asking, for example, if you are cooking sausage or asparagus. Then it cooks it perfectly based on its database of recipes, your preferences and a thermometer. You can even start your steak while on your way home from work and watch it cook via an app.

e-Cooker

The e-Cooker uses pulsed electronic fields, which are short high-voltage bursts, to cook food with the low heat and precision of a sous-vide machine and the speed of a microwave. It has been widely used in medical treatment, and is trying to make the leap to the kitchen.

AVA Byte

Meet the Keurig of kitchen gardens. Insert a seed pod, add water and the machine will monitor each little plant that grows, giving it the right amount of light and water. Plants are supposed to grow faster than in your garden, and you can track it all on an app.

Stagg EKG+

One of the best-looking products on display, the Stagg EKG+ from Fellow allows coffee obsessives to remotely heat water to an exact temperature for pour-overs. Bluetooth technology and an app let  you track recipes, and remember that for your last drink, you gave that 20 grams of Ethiopian Limu two minutes at 201 degrees, and it was awesome.

HOPii

The HOPii is the latest advancement in personal beer brewing. The device uses various combinations of wort, hops, yeast and flavorings pulled from the flavor profiles of actual breweries. Pop them in the machine and, seven days later, pull fresh craft beer from its tap.

GammaChef

Some ideas were clearly in the prototype phase; GammaChef was one. Bar-coded plastic containers filled with precut food are stored in this refrigerated machine. At a set time, GammaChef will heat a pan and add ingredients in the proper order based on a database of recipes. A robotic arm stirs the meal, mixing in spices.

This article was first published on https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/13/dining/kitchen-gadgets-future.html