- Feb 14, 2004
- 51,181
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Yet another Kaido food discussion thread 
Background:
We looked into doing a kitchen renovation at my current place - we have a small galley kitchen (imagine a submarine) with 80's laminate countertop (aka garbage) & no ventilation (smokes out all the time). However, (1) the prices for renovations are crazy (easily tens of thousands of dollars), and (2) I'm not in love with my current place & wanted to focus on useful workflow/output (i.e. making it easier & faster to cook & being able to create great meals on a regular basis) vs. making it look pretty, so it made more sense to invest in usable technology instead of, well, aesthetics. For the money, I would rather have a kitchen that allows me to consistently & easily produce good meals instead of just looking pretty.
Concept:
So the idea is to take a smaller amount of money (let's say $2k base for a full set of gear) & buy functional kitchen appliances (not junk gadgets) in order to increase the toolset for improving cooking at home. These can be purchased individually (not everyone will like all of the items listed) & can be purchased over time if you want to build up a full set (to fit your budget). The equipment list in the next section is simply a list of my suggestions after many years of cooking with various kitchen gizmos.
I've had several positive results from doing this. First, I actually cook at home now because it's easy to get consistent results without actually having to learn how to cook. I do not consider myself a real chef; I just happen to have some good kitchen toys & the ability to follow instructions online. Second, I cook more consistently at home. That means several things: it means my meals tend to be healthier than take-out, restaurants, fast food, junk food, and prepared meals because I control the ingredients.
It also means I'm saving money because it's almost always cheaper to cook at home than going out to a decent restaurant, and I can also buy in bulk, buy on sale, etc. to save money. I am unfortunately not in the ATOT billionaire club, so budgeting is important for me. It also means that there's no limit to how good you can make your food taste, so by digging around Pinterest, food blogs, Youtube, and other resources like Facebook groups, you can find really amazing, top-notch recipes for your personal collection. My current approach is what I call "small batch gourmet meal prep", more details here:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/freezer-storage-discussion-thread.2491122/page-2#post-39221599
I have a separate, growing thread on kitchen appliances, which I add to from time to time, which is slightly different than this thread, in that this thread is all about the higher-tech appliances meant to make cooking easier & to help you do it more consistently:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/kitchen-appliance-discussion-thread.2478633/
Equipment:
8 categories:
1. Electric pressure cooker (EPC)
2. Sous vide (SV)
3. Vacuum sealer
4. Freezer storage
5. Temperature-controlled induction hotplate
6. Specialty countertop oven
7. Electric smoker
8. Voice-assist recipes tablet
Discussion:
Electric pressure cookers:
Stovetop pessure cookers have been around forever (and scare me); the new electronic ones are easy & versatile (and tend not to blow up if you're not babysitting them, so there's a strong safety factor too). The most popular (and arguably best) model is the Instant Pot or "IP" (stainless-steel bowl, quality construction, huge online following = tons of recipes, extra features like yogurt-making, etc.). With that said, even the cheaper ones do most of the same job, which you can find as low as $50 (even Home Depot carries them now, no joke). We have a pretty good discussion thread going here:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/instant-pot-owners-whats-your-favorite-recipie.2469830/
Some n00b information:
https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...avorite-recipie.2469830/page-11#post-39130699
I don't really know how to define what I use it for, because it's so versatile. The most common description is that it's a fast crockpot. So instead of waiting 16 hours for pulled pork, you're only waiting 90 minutes, which means you can get home from work or school and have dinner ready. Plus it cooks automatically, so you don't have to sit there & babysit it. I really like hands-off stuff so that's a huge bonus in my book. I mean, things I've made in the last week include blueberry compote for waffles, 24-hour SCD yogurt (high probiotic count!), pork carnitas, copycat Starbucks egg bites, a head of fresh broccoli, "adult" Mac & Cheese (i.e. made with real cheese, not powder), applesauce, and some other stuff I forgot.
It's a particularly great device if you like to do Internet research (like if you've ever gotten stuck surfing Wikipedia for hours on accident) & dive down rabbit holes because there is just a huge amount of information out there for it, and the recipe base is always growing. I consider my Instant Pot indispensable. I have several units: a 3qt, a 6qt (use this the most, "standard" size), an 8qt, and also a 14qt (from GoWise, a competitor). They get used in parallel a lot...rice, potatoes, veggies, etc. all at the same time.
Sous vide:
SV for short; also called a "water oven". This works by sealing the food in plastic (either a ziploc bag or a vacuum-sealed bag), putting that pouch underwater, and heating the water at a strict temperature for hours. It can make meat incredibly tender. It's most often used to make steak (ex. take an $8 NY strip steak & make it taste like a $50 steakhouse steak). So kind of a similar idea to a slow cooker, but really, entirely different. The Anova is the most popular unit & is the one I started out with. I also have a Mellow, which is a 2nd-gen model that has a chiller built-in, so you can drop your food in, keep it cold all day (or all night) long, and then remotely schedule it to cook your food for you, so that it will be ready at a certain time. I've only had my Mellow for a short time (vs. a couple years for my Anova), but I already rely on it a ton thanks to that scheduling feature with the chiller.
I mostly do proteins with my SV machine: steak, hamburgers, chicken, shrimp, salmon, tuna steak, turkey, duck, etc. It's pretty much bulletproof. Deep-frying is also amazing with sous-vide'd items; you can make some amazing fried chicken & French fries by sous-viding it first & then doing a quick dip in a big pot filled with hot oil. There is some crossover functionality with the Instant Pot as well (ex. dulce de leche, creme brulee, egg bites, tempering chocolate, yogurt, and so on), so it just depends on how you want to cook something in particular. I often pair up my SV with my IP, so I'll do something like a steak in the IP & then corn on the cob in my IP for an amazing, effortless dinner. We have a pretty good discussion thread here:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/i-got-my-anova-today.2360863/
Vacuum sealer:
This goes along with sous vide in particular, but has a variety of other uses. For sous vide, I use the bags to seal the food for fridge & freezer cooking & storage (raw food to be cooked & for storing after cooking as well), as well as to store finished food that can be re-heated later. Outside of sous vide, I use it to store 3 things:
1. Raw materials (ex. a single boneless skinless chicken breast)
2. Partially-cooked items & ready-to-cook items (ex. SV French fries or a copycat Bertollis skillet meal)
4. Finished items that can be reheated (ex. one-pound bags of smoked pulled pork)
Vacuum-sealing is cool because it extends the life of food & keeps it tasting good. You can easily get 2 years out of a lot of food items in a deep freezer (although hopefully you cycle out your provisions more often than that, haha). I currently have a Monoprice model, although Foodsaver vacuum sealers are pretty standard. VacMaster makes larger chamber vacuum sealers if you have the room (and the bucks) & also let you easily vacuum-seal wet stuff like soup more easily.
There's a longer discussion in my Food Storage thread: (side note, I'm working on a kitchen workflow & meal-planning tutorial, which is a little more involved/detailed...release date...someday lol)
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/the-food-storage-thread.2519120/
Freezer storage:
My deep freezer is more or less the backbone of my cooking system. I can vacuum-seal food & keep it in there for months/years without affecting the quality, and it's large enough that I can bulk up on food purchases to save money & reduce the number of shopping trips I have to do. There's a longer discussion on freezer storage in my Freezer Storage thread:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/freezer-storage-discussion-thread.2491122/
I have some racks in my basement for storing my appliances & for storing my food-grade buckets with gamma-seal (screw-on) lids, so that, with my freezer, is what I base a lot of my home food production on. I still get fresh stuff for the fridge (ex. lettuce) and room-temp stuff (ex. bananas) from the store, but freezer storage has reduced how much time I have to spend shopping & just lets me kind of pop in to grab what I need & pop out of the grocery store, which is a nice perk.
My particular model at the present time is a huge upright frost-free deep freezer (20 cubic feet). It's very easy to access & goes down to -20F (I have a wireless temperature monitor in it, which sounds an alarm if the temp crosses a preset threshold, in case the door gets left open or something - that way I don't lose my frozen food investment). Chest freezers are also nice, but I get easily frustrated from digging around in them & have found the upright version to be better suited for my usability requirements. Plus it's frost-free, so there's virtually no maintenance required, and it's an Energy Star model, so it only uses something like $58 in electricity per year, which is pretty reasonable for the size. So while it's not overly high-tech, I have it on the list because the newer stuff is nicer (cheaper to operate + almost no maintenance required + gets crazy cold so stuff can be frozen forever).
Temperature-controlled induction hotplate:
Boy, that's a mouthful. A hotplate is a standalone burner like you have on your stovetop. Induction uses magnetic induction to quickly heat a pan. Temperature-control is the new feature in recent years. The lastest "gen2" model is the Tasty OneTop:
https://tastyshop.com/collections/tasty-one-top
This has two temperature probes: one in the base of the burner, which reads the pan's temperature, and a plug-in probe that you can stick in meat (ex. see when your chicken gets to exactly 165F), in water (for basic sous viding, if desired...nice multi-functional feature), and in oil (great for deep-frying), oh and also for candy-making & chocolate-tempering, if you're into that. You do need special induction-compatible cookware; they are currently selling the OneTop with a skillet, 2 pots, and a lid for $184 shipped, which is pretty reasonable for everything you get.
You can do basic temperature setting on the OneTop itself (it has a line of LED lights for low, medium, high, and in-between) or else set a specific temperature (which I've found stays within +/- 3F pretty consistently) on your smartphone. This is really cool for a lot of reasons, but primarily because like sous vide, you get exacting temperature control, so if you know exactly what temp your favorite pancake recipe or famous grilled cheese likes to be cooked at, this will nail it every time.
I have a really crappy stove/range combination with a flat glasstop burner set on top; it takes forever to heat up, the temperatures are inconsistent, and it spreads the heat out over the entire surface, which is annoying. I'm not a fan of cooking with gas or electric coils because of the cleanup. Plus I rarely use more than one pot at a time, so the OneTop has proven to be excellent for me...heats up insanely fast & lets me set precise temperatures for my pots & skillets. I may pick up a second unit at some point in time, but I haven't really seen a need to use more than one burner because I do a lot of stuff in the Instant Pot instead.
It's kind of hard to explain why temperature control is important without just sounding like an infatuated nerd going on about a seemingly minor feature. In short, it lets me get repeatable results; it's not a guessing game anymore. Not that it's impossible or even very hard to cook the traditional way, and I'm sure any professional chef would scoff at a device like this because of their training, but for me, I have found stuff like the OneTop to be super useful. Just more barriers in the kitchen removed...
6. Specialty countertop oven:
This is a specific device; the Breville "Air" model:
https://www.brevilleusa.com/products/the-smart-oven-air
$400 retail, although it sometimes goes for $70 off (just use CamelCamelCamel for price tracking). Note that I said countertop oven, not toaster oven (although it is also a toaster oven). This is a mini (albeit very large) "portable" oven that sits on your counter. This particular model has some really great features:
1. It's frickin' huge for a countertop unit, so plenty of room for activities (fits a 14-pound turkey, a 12-cup muffin tray, 9 slices of toast, etc.)
2. It is an oven, a convection oven, and a toaster oven, plus does broiling & all the other good stuff
3. It is an airfryer (largest one on the market afaik) via the "super" convection feature
4. It includes a 13" pizza pan, two oven racks, a 9x13" broil rack, an enameled roasting pan, and a mesh basket rack (for dehydrating & air frying)
5. It has a proofing feature for dough/bread
6. It has a temperature range of 80F to 480F. Not as hot as a decent oven (ex. 550F) but still pretty dang good, plus the low temperature range is useful for a lot of stuff (warming foods, proofing dough, etc.)
7. It has phased cooking, so you can link together roasting a chicken & automatically finish it with a broil
My oven is a piece of junk (it's a combo unit with my stovetop, which is the piece of junk built into the top haha), plus I don't usually use the whole huge oven all that often. Like, when I bake cookies, I only tend to do like a half a dozen max (I freeze the cookie dough balls for later use, for convenience), just enough for my family, instead of dozens & dozens. So a smaller oven suits me better. Preheats quick too!
There are a lot of cool heated cooking gadgets out there like the June Oven, Cinder Grill, Miele Dialog, TurboChef, etc., but I liked this one the best...tons of real-world usable features & a not-too-insane price (the June Oven is $1,500, and some of the higher-end ones like the new RF ovens are $10k+). And it's something you can use virtually all day long...throw dough in to proof in the morning to use in the afternoon, bake it in, then turn on the dehydrator at night for beef jerky, fruit rollups, dried fruit, etc. Very very cool device.
Electric smoker:
I am a sucker for good smoked food. However, I do not like to manually tend the fire for hours. I got interested in electric smokers, like the Bradley smoker, and after a fair amount of research, ended up getting a Traeger pellet smoker four or five years ago (note: uses food-grade wood pellets, not the chemical house-heating kind). The basic idea is that it's a temperature-control convection oven with smoke. You can set the temp to something like 180F to 400F or so. The "smoke" setting I believe is around 180F, so you can smoke something for a few hours & then bake it right there in the grill. This is not a good grill for grilling, however...you'll want a propane or charcoal unit for that; burgers are better with flame. But for stuff like whole turkeys, whole chickens, pork shoulders, apple pies (mmm, smoked apple pie), pork top loin, traditional stuff like briskets, etc. it is absolutely fantastic.
Right now, Green Mountain Grills is more highly recommended than Traeger & also have wi-fi built in for doing temperature monitoring & whatnot. The nice thing about pellet smokers is that, aside from the oven-like temperature control, you can do long smokes without having to babysit it. So if you want it to smoke something overnight, you just have to make sure you fill up the pellet hopper (each model cooks for a different number of hours, and you can buy pellet bin extenders if you want even longer cook times without refilling, so you have to look into how long the particular model you're looking at can smoke for without needing a manual pellet refill).
I also have a deli slicer (kind of a prosumer model...not a huge, expensive commercial unit) & we slice homemade smoked deli-style meat on it a few times a month. That can then be vac-sealed & thrown in the freezer for a better taste & cheaper cost than going down to the grocery store (especially if you want the good stuff, like Boar's Head, which can be as high as $9 a pound). Another cool gadget to check out is the Fireboard, which is a temperature data logging unit with multiple inputs. I personally just use a wireless grill probe system right now (a nice Ivation unit, although it doesn't do any historical data tracking or anything) & it works great.
I recently played with an Oster Smoker-Roaster (can be had for around $50 shipped at times), which is similar to a giant 16-quart crockpot, but with smoking features. I tested out pellets successful on it, and it has a temperature dial on the front. So far, I actually REALLY like it. It's ridiculously cheaper than a pellet grill & does pretty much an equal job, so if you are on a budget & want a somewhat compact smoker, I'd recommend this unit. If you need more room, a grill is the way to go, but this is a really cool alternative!
Voice-assist recipes tablet:
I have gone through a lot of iterations of recipe management systems in my kitchen...from paper, to a ringed notebook, to my laptop (soooooo messy), to a small 4K TV with a mini computer hooked into it, to currently a tablet. The tablet of choice is the Amazon Fire HD 10, which is a 10" model that has hands-free Alexa built-in. A more detail review is here:
https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...scussion-thread.2358016/page-22#post-39168378
I have a little kickstand for it & so far, it has been working out great. I can pull up my personal recipes from Google Drive, I can pull up websites, I can use Alexa for a variety of tasks like timers & conversions, and can also play music & Youtube videos (cooking & entertainment) for fun. This really beats all of the other methods I've tried because it's small, portable, and can hold a wealth of information, and doesn't cost $500 like an iPad (it starts at $149 new).
Conclusion:
So that's the basic approach I took to kitchen renovation...rather than spending a boatload of money on making my kitchen look spiffy, I invested in some hi-tech & modernized appliances. A quick price list:
I wouldn't necessarily recommend purchasing everything at once, because you need time to learn each item & develop your skills with it, and I didn't necessarily create this post for people to go out & do a massive hi-tech kitchen tools purchase (although that would be awesome), as much as just explaining how I'm currently doing my cooking at home & explaining some of the advantages that modern technology has to offer.
Food statistics is another interesting area of discussion I'll touch on for a minute. For starters, and numbers vary, but a typical weekly American grocery budget is $150 for 7 days of breakfasts, lunches, dinners, snacks, drinks, and any kind of eating away from home methods like take-out, restaurants, etc. Times 52 weeks, that's nearly $8,000 a year. Being able to not only manage that better financially, but also upping the quality of your food & of your meals through "better cooking through technology" is a very attractive option. Last year, for the first time, Americans spent more money eating out than they did on food at home. Also, we waste a ton of food (40% in America), so being able to vac-seal & deep-freeze leftovers is huge as well. So reduce waste, increasing savings, and improving your meals to quality food are all great benefits of using modern tech to help you with your diet.
Discussion welcome!
Background:
We looked into doing a kitchen renovation at my current place - we have a small galley kitchen (imagine a submarine) with 80's laminate countertop (aka garbage) & no ventilation (smokes out all the time). However, (1) the prices for renovations are crazy (easily tens of thousands of dollars), and (2) I'm not in love with my current place & wanted to focus on useful workflow/output (i.e. making it easier & faster to cook & being able to create great meals on a regular basis) vs. making it look pretty, so it made more sense to invest in usable technology instead of, well, aesthetics. For the money, I would rather have a kitchen that allows me to consistently & easily produce good meals instead of just looking pretty.
Concept:
So the idea is to take a smaller amount of money (let's say $2k base for a full set of gear) & buy functional kitchen appliances (not junk gadgets) in order to increase the toolset for improving cooking at home. These can be purchased individually (not everyone will like all of the items listed) & can be purchased over time if you want to build up a full set (to fit your budget). The equipment list in the next section is simply a list of my suggestions after many years of cooking with various kitchen gizmos.
I've had several positive results from doing this. First, I actually cook at home now because it's easy to get consistent results without actually having to learn how to cook. I do not consider myself a real chef; I just happen to have some good kitchen toys & the ability to follow instructions online. Second, I cook more consistently at home. That means several things: it means my meals tend to be healthier than take-out, restaurants, fast food, junk food, and prepared meals because I control the ingredients.
It also means I'm saving money because it's almost always cheaper to cook at home than going out to a decent restaurant, and I can also buy in bulk, buy on sale, etc. to save money. I am unfortunately not in the ATOT billionaire club, so budgeting is important for me. It also means that there's no limit to how good you can make your food taste, so by digging around Pinterest, food blogs, Youtube, and other resources like Facebook groups, you can find really amazing, top-notch recipes for your personal collection. My current approach is what I call "small batch gourmet meal prep", more details here:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/freezer-storage-discussion-thread.2491122/page-2#post-39221599
I have a separate, growing thread on kitchen appliances, which I add to from time to time, which is slightly different than this thread, in that this thread is all about the higher-tech appliances meant to make cooking easier & to help you do it more consistently:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/kitchen-appliance-discussion-thread.2478633/
Equipment:
8 categories:
1. Electric pressure cooker (EPC)
2. Sous vide (SV)
3. Vacuum sealer
4. Freezer storage
5. Temperature-controlled induction hotplate
6. Specialty countertop oven
7. Electric smoker
8. Voice-assist recipes tablet
Discussion:
Electric pressure cookers:
Stovetop pessure cookers have been around forever (and scare me); the new electronic ones are easy & versatile (and tend not to blow up if you're not babysitting them, so there's a strong safety factor too). The most popular (and arguably best) model is the Instant Pot or "IP" (stainless-steel bowl, quality construction, huge online following = tons of recipes, extra features like yogurt-making, etc.). With that said, even the cheaper ones do most of the same job, which you can find as low as $50 (even Home Depot carries them now, no joke). We have a pretty good discussion thread going here:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/instant-pot-owners-whats-your-favorite-recipie.2469830/
Some n00b information:
https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...avorite-recipie.2469830/page-11#post-39130699
I don't really know how to define what I use it for, because it's so versatile. The most common description is that it's a fast crockpot. So instead of waiting 16 hours for pulled pork, you're only waiting 90 minutes, which means you can get home from work or school and have dinner ready. Plus it cooks automatically, so you don't have to sit there & babysit it. I really like hands-off stuff so that's a huge bonus in my book. I mean, things I've made in the last week include blueberry compote for waffles, 24-hour SCD yogurt (high probiotic count!), pork carnitas, copycat Starbucks egg bites, a head of fresh broccoli, "adult" Mac & Cheese (i.e. made with real cheese, not powder), applesauce, and some other stuff I forgot.
It's a particularly great device if you like to do Internet research (like if you've ever gotten stuck surfing Wikipedia for hours on accident) & dive down rabbit holes because there is just a huge amount of information out there for it, and the recipe base is always growing. I consider my Instant Pot indispensable. I have several units: a 3qt, a 6qt (use this the most, "standard" size), an 8qt, and also a 14qt (from GoWise, a competitor). They get used in parallel a lot...rice, potatoes, veggies, etc. all at the same time.
Sous vide:
SV for short; also called a "water oven". This works by sealing the food in plastic (either a ziploc bag or a vacuum-sealed bag), putting that pouch underwater, and heating the water at a strict temperature for hours. It can make meat incredibly tender. It's most often used to make steak (ex. take an $8 NY strip steak & make it taste like a $50 steakhouse steak). So kind of a similar idea to a slow cooker, but really, entirely different. The Anova is the most popular unit & is the one I started out with. I also have a Mellow, which is a 2nd-gen model that has a chiller built-in, so you can drop your food in, keep it cold all day (or all night) long, and then remotely schedule it to cook your food for you, so that it will be ready at a certain time. I've only had my Mellow for a short time (vs. a couple years for my Anova), but I already rely on it a ton thanks to that scheduling feature with the chiller.
I mostly do proteins with my SV machine: steak, hamburgers, chicken, shrimp, salmon, tuna steak, turkey, duck, etc. It's pretty much bulletproof. Deep-frying is also amazing with sous-vide'd items; you can make some amazing fried chicken & French fries by sous-viding it first & then doing a quick dip in a big pot filled with hot oil. There is some crossover functionality with the Instant Pot as well (ex. dulce de leche, creme brulee, egg bites, tempering chocolate, yogurt, and so on), so it just depends on how you want to cook something in particular. I often pair up my SV with my IP, so I'll do something like a steak in the IP & then corn on the cob in my IP for an amazing, effortless dinner. We have a pretty good discussion thread here:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/i-got-my-anova-today.2360863/
Vacuum sealer:
This goes along with sous vide in particular, but has a variety of other uses. For sous vide, I use the bags to seal the food for fridge & freezer cooking & storage (raw food to be cooked & for storing after cooking as well), as well as to store finished food that can be re-heated later. Outside of sous vide, I use it to store 3 things:
1. Raw materials (ex. a single boneless skinless chicken breast)
2. Partially-cooked items & ready-to-cook items (ex. SV French fries or a copycat Bertollis skillet meal)
4. Finished items that can be reheated (ex. one-pound bags of smoked pulled pork)
Vacuum-sealing is cool because it extends the life of food & keeps it tasting good. You can easily get 2 years out of a lot of food items in a deep freezer (although hopefully you cycle out your provisions more often than that, haha). I currently have a Monoprice model, although Foodsaver vacuum sealers are pretty standard. VacMaster makes larger chamber vacuum sealers if you have the room (and the bucks) & also let you easily vacuum-seal wet stuff like soup more easily.
There's a longer discussion in my Food Storage thread: (side note, I'm working on a kitchen workflow & meal-planning tutorial, which is a little more involved/detailed...release date...someday lol)
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/the-food-storage-thread.2519120/
Freezer storage:
My deep freezer is more or less the backbone of my cooking system. I can vacuum-seal food & keep it in there for months/years without affecting the quality, and it's large enough that I can bulk up on food purchases to save money & reduce the number of shopping trips I have to do. There's a longer discussion on freezer storage in my Freezer Storage thread:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/freezer-storage-discussion-thread.2491122/
I have some racks in my basement for storing my appliances & for storing my food-grade buckets with gamma-seal (screw-on) lids, so that, with my freezer, is what I base a lot of my home food production on. I still get fresh stuff for the fridge (ex. lettuce) and room-temp stuff (ex. bananas) from the store, but freezer storage has reduced how much time I have to spend shopping & just lets me kind of pop in to grab what I need & pop out of the grocery store, which is a nice perk.
My particular model at the present time is a huge upright frost-free deep freezer (20 cubic feet). It's very easy to access & goes down to -20F (I have a wireless temperature monitor in it, which sounds an alarm if the temp crosses a preset threshold, in case the door gets left open or something - that way I don't lose my frozen food investment). Chest freezers are also nice, but I get easily frustrated from digging around in them & have found the upright version to be better suited for my usability requirements. Plus it's frost-free, so there's virtually no maintenance required, and it's an Energy Star model, so it only uses something like $58 in electricity per year, which is pretty reasonable for the size. So while it's not overly high-tech, I have it on the list because the newer stuff is nicer (cheaper to operate + almost no maintenance required + gets crazy cold so stuff can be frozen forever).
Temperature-controlled induction hotplate:
Boy, that's a mouthful. A hotplate is a standalone burner like you have on your stovetop. Induction uses magnetic induction to quickly heat a pan. Temperature-control is the new feature in recent years. The lastest "gen2" model is the Tasty OneTop:
https://tastyshop.com/collections/tasty-one-top
This has two temperature probes: one in the base of the burner, which reads the pan's temperature, and a plug-in probe that you can stick in meat (ex. see when your chicken gets to exactly 165F), in water (for basic sous viding, if desired...nice multi-functional feature), and in oil (great for deep-frying), oh and also for candy-making & chocolate-tempering, if you're into that. You do need special induction-compatible cookware; they are currently selling the OneTop with a skillet, 2 pots, and a lid for $184 shipped, which is pretty reasonable for everything you get.
You can do basic temperature setting on the OneTop itself (it has a line of LED lights for low, medium, high, and in-between) or else set a specific temperature (which I've found stays within +/- 3F pretty consistently) on your smartphone. This is really cool for a lot of reasons, but primarily because like sous vide, you get exacting temperature control, so if you know exactly what temp your favorite pancake recipe or famous grilled cheese likes to be cooked at, this will nail it every time.
I have a really crappy stove/range combination with a flat glasstop burner set on top; it takes forever to heat up, the temperatures are inconsistent, and it spreads the heat out over the entire surface, which is annoying. I'm not a fan of cooking with gas or electric coils because of the cleanup. Plus I rarely use more than one pot at a time, so the OneTop has proven to be excellent for me...heats up insanely fast & lets me set precise temperatures for my pots & skillets. I may pick up a second unit at some point in time, but I haven't really seen a need to use more than one burner because I do a lot of stuff in the Instant Pot instead.
It's kind of hard to explain why temperature control is important without just sounding like an infatuated nerd going on about a seemingly minor feature. In short, it lets me get repeatable results; it's not a guessing game anymore. Not that it's impossible or even very hard to cook the traditional way, and I'm sure any professional chef would scoff at a device like this because of their training, but for me, I have found stuff like the OneTop to be super useful. Just more barriers in the kitchen removed...
6. Specialty countertop oven:
This is a specific device; the Breville "Air" model:
https://www.brevilleusa.com/products/the-smart-oven-air
$400 retail, although it sometimes goes for $70 off (just use CamelCamelCamel for price tracking). Note that I said countertop oven, not toaster oven (although it is also a toaster oven). This is a mini (albeit very large) "portable" oven that sits on your counter. This particular model has some really great features:
1. It's frickin' huge for a countertop unit, so plenty of room for activities (fits a 14-pound turkey, a 12-cup muffin tray, 9 slices of toast, etc.)
2. It is an oven, a convection oven, and a toaster oven, plus does broiling & all the other good stuff
3. It is an airfryer (largest one on the market afaik) via the "super" convection feature
4. It includes a 13" pizza pan, two oven racks, a 9x13" broil rack, an enameled roasting pan, and a mesh basket rack (for dehydrating & air frying)
5. It has a proofing feature for dough/bread
6. It has a temperature range of 80F to 480F. Not as hot as a decent oven (ex. 550F) but still pretty dang good, plus the low temperature range is useful for a lot of stuff (warming foods, proofing dough, etc.)
7. It has phased cooking, so you can link together roasting a chicken & automatically finish it with a broil
My oven is a piece of junk (it's a combo unit with my stovetop, which is the piece of junk built into the top haha), plus I don't usually use the whole huge oven all that often. Like, when I bake cookies, I only tend to do like a half a dozen max (I freeze the cookie dough balls for later use, for convenience), just enough for my family, instead of dozens & dozens. So a smaller oven suits me better. Preheats quick too!
There are a lot of cool heated cooking gadgets out there like the June Oven, Cinder Grill, Miele Dialog, TurboChef, etc., but I liked this one the best...tons of real-world usable features & a not-too-insane price (the June Oven is $1,500, and some of the higher-end ones like the new RF ovens are $10k+). And it's something you can use virtually all day long...throw dough in to proof in the morning to use in the afternoon, bake it in, then turn on the dehydrator at night for beef jerky, fruit rollups, dried fruit, etc. Very very cool device.
Electric smoker:
I am a sucker for good smoked food. However, I do not like to manually tend the fire for hours. I got interested in electric smokers, like the Bradley smoker, and after a fair amount of research, ended up getting a Traeger pellet smoker four or five years ago (note: uses food-grade wood pellets, not the chemical house-heating kind). The basic idea is that it's a temperature-control convection oven with smoke. You can set the temp to something like 180F to 400F or so. The "smoke" setting I believe is around 180F, so you can smoke something for a few hours & then bake it right there in the grill. This is not a good grill for grilling, however...you'll want a propane or charcoal unit for that; burgers are better with flame. But for stuff like whole turkeys, whole chickens, pork shoulders, apple pies (mmm, smoked apple pie), pork top loin, traditional stuff like briskets, etc. it is absolutely fantastic.
Right now, Green Mountain Grills is more highly recommended than Traeger & also have wi-fi built in for doing temperature monitoring & whatnot. The nice thing about pellet smokers is that, aside from the oven-like temperature control, you can do long smokes without having to babysit it. So if you want it to smoke something overnight, you just have to make sure you fill up the pellet hopper (each model cooks for a different number of hours, and you can buy pellet bin extenders if you want even longer cook times without refilling, so you have to look into how long the particular model you're looking at can smoke for without needing a manual pellet refill).
I also have a deli slicer (kind of a prosumer model...not a huge, expensive commercial unit) & we slice homemade smoked deli-style meat on it a few times a month. That can then be vac-sealed & thrown in the freezer for a better taste & cheaper cost than going down to the grocery store (especially if you want the good stuff, like Boar's Head, which can be as high as $9 a pound). Another cool gadget to check out is the Fireboard, which is a temperature data logging unit with multiple inputs. I personally just use a wireless grill probe system right now (a nice Ivation unit, although it doesn't do any historical data tracking or anything) & it works great.
I recently played with an Oster Smoker-Roaster (can be had for around $50 shipped at times), which is similar to a giant 16-quart crockpot, but with smoking features. I tested out pellets successful on it, and it has a temperature dial on the front. So far, I actually REALLY like it. It's ridiculously cheaper than a pellet grill & does pretty much an equal job, so if you are on a budget & want a somewhat compact smoker, I'd recommend this unit. If you need more room, a grill is the way to go, but this is a really cool alternative!
Voice-assist recipes tablet:
I have gone through a lot of iterations of recipe management systems in my kitchen...from paper, to a ringed notebook, to my laptop (soooooo messy), to a small 4K TV with a mini computer hooked into it, to currently a tablet. The tablet of choice is the Amazon Fire HD 10, which is a 10" model that has hands-free Alexa built-in. A more detail review is here:
https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...scussion-thread.2358016/page-22#post-39168378
I have a little kickstand for it & so far, it has been working out great. I can pull up my personal recipes from Google Drive, I can pull up websites, I can use Alexa for a variety of tasks like timers & conversions, and can also play music & Youtube videos (cooking & entertainment) for fun. This really beats all of the other methods I've tried because it's small, portable, and can hold a wealth of information, and doesn't cost $500 like an iPad (it starts at $149 new).
Conclusion:
So that's the basic approach I took to kitchen renovation...rather than spending a boatload of money on making my kitchen look spiffy, I invested in some hi-tech & modernized appliances. A quick price list:
- 6qt Instant Pot: $130
- Anova: $130 (or Mellow with chiller: $400)
- Vacuum sealer: $70 (Monoprice)
- Deep freezer: currently $630 (if you have the room for it!)
- Tasty OneTop: $184 (with a pot set)
- Breville Air: $400 (wait for a sale for $300 to $330 if you're not a in a rush)
- Electric smoker: Price varies, $320 to $500 for a basic unit (or $50 for the Oster, which is awesome!)
- Voice tablet: $150
I wouldn't necessarily recommend purchasing everything at once, because you need time to learn each item & develop your skills with it, and I didn't necessarily create this post for people to go out & do a massive hi-tech kitchen tools purchase (although that would be awesome), as much as just explaining how I'm currently doing my cooking at home & explaining some of the advantages that modern technology has to offer.
Food statistics is another interesting area of discussion I'll touch on for a minute. For starters, and numbers vary, but a typical weekly American grocery budget is $150 for 7 days of breakfasts, lunches, dinners, snacks, drinks, and any kind of eating away from home methods like take-out, restaurants, etc. Times 52 weeks, that's nearly $8,000 a year. Being able to not only manage that better financially, but also upping the quality of your food & of your meals through "better cooking through technology" is a very attractive option. Last year, for the first time, Americans spent more money eating out than they did on food at home. Also, we waste a ton of food (40% in America), so being able to vac-seal & deep-freeze leftovers is huge as well. So reduce waste, increasing savings, and improving your meals to quality food are all great benefits of using modern tech to help you with your diet.
Discussion welcome!
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