Food is a science. And most of us would spend more time cooking if it were easier to innovate and less intimidating and time consuming to approach. Healthier eating, smarter shopping, and better kitchens would improve our quality of life in so many ways. So it’s no surprise that smarter kitchen appliances are making these things possible in new ways.
Here’s some things that the smart kitchen of the future already has, and will continue to develop with more precision and power.
Smart Food Recognition
We humans aren’t too good at understanding what’s going on with our food. We forget how long something has been in the oven—much less the fridge. We often can’t tell exactly how big a slab of meat is, and we don’t insert thermometers into the right spot. When is the oven really done preheating? When is our food done cooking?
Ovens
Smart kitchens of the future will make sure that all of our appliances can recognize all of our food. Your oven should know exactly what you put in it and how long to cook it for. For example, the Whirlpool smart oven, the WLabs Smart Oven, can do everything from bake to dehydrate. The smart oven can be controlled from the whirlpool app, and it’s got a camera on top so you can look in at your food while it cooks. Additionally, the WLabs Smart Oven has food recognition technology that predicts what you’re trying to put in the oven. If it guesses pizza, it will even tell you how thick it thinks the food is.
Plus, the touchscreen allows for feedback after cooking. That means that your oven learns your preferences and idiosyncrasies over time, helping you dial in your perfect cooking temperatures and lengths for each type of food.
Fridges
You’re probably used to fridges that have touchscreens with notes to add things to your grocery list. Well, Bosch’s new refrigerator can do a lot more than that. The fridge has a camera system which can identify items that you place inside. It can automatically populate a list of items in your fridge, and it can also use that inventory to tell you what you should cook.
Hubs
Nope, this is not a voice assistant for your kitchen. Those obviously already exist. The GE Kitchen Hub is a sheath for your microwave with a huge touch screen including cameras and recipe apps. The next generation for the system, the Next Gen Kitchen Hub, has cameras over your stovetop and cameras inside the microwave. While you cook, the kitchen hub can detect the ingredients that you’re using and help determine when your meal is done. It can even suggest recipes based on ingredients and change your oven temperature based on prediction models.
You may not be able to hire a professional chef to help you make decisions about weeknight dinners. But the Next Gen Kitchen Hub gives you a lot of the same experience. Sometimes all the confidence you need to cook increasingly complex dishes can come from just a few words of encouragement about how long that soup has been on the stovetop…
Smart Health and Wellness Technology
When you think about smart kitchens, you might be thinking about ease of use. But a machine that makes coffee with the touch of a button on your app won’t actually help you make smarter decisions about your health! A lot of smart technology for the kitchen, up until this point, has merely been a way to make things easier for us. But what if smart kitchen tech could also make us healthier?
Air Friers, Insta Pots, and Alternative Cooking
For a long time, to cook food in novel ways you needed to understand how to accomplish it. How would you go about air frying food without an air frier? Most of us haven’t the slightest idea of where to start. But thanks to smarter kitchen technology, smarter cooking appliances are making it easier to cook food in new ways, other than just pan searing and oven roasting.
Air friers let you enjoy the same food with less fat and less grease. With barely any oil, you can roast things at 400 degrees to get french fries and chicken that taste great and are way healthier. Unfortunately, most things that taste great and are easy to make aren’t super healthy for us. But healthy foods can be super tasty if you have novel ways of cooking. So smart kitchens can make us healthier through air friers and smart ovens that give us new ways of cooking.
Smart Juicers and Blenders
If you want to eat healthier, you have to eat healthier things. And one of the best ways to do that is to work more veggies into your diet. It’s something so many of us are bad at. Smart juicers and blenders can help us eat healthier by delivering veggies and fruit in more palatable forms.
Many modern smart blenders and juicers come with recipes on the app that show you exactly what to fill the blender with. Furthermore, there are even smart blenders that can sense what you’re putting in and can tell you what kind of nutrients you’re getting out of your smoothie! Gamification of your nutrients can make it more fun to try and pack more vitamins and macronutrients into your daily blendings.
Sous Vide Cookers
Similar to air friers and insta pots, there are easy ways to cook things to perfection without relying on seasoned cooking skills. One of these tricks is sous vide cooking, a technique that gives perfectly cooked food every single time. Sous vide means under vacuum, and is a cooking process where you vacuum seal food and drop it into hot water. This allows you to evenly cook the whole piece of food at the same time without flipping or drenching in oils.
The Anova Precision sous vide cooker is probably one of the best versions of sous vide cooking. It gives you great control, and you lose less food through disintegration. Additionally, you can walk away from the food while you’re cooking it. These smart cooking devices can transform the way you approach meals!
