I've been lucky enough to watch this throughout all of the evolutions and help test it. It's been great learning more about how the cooking process actually works and perfecting my technique.
EDIT: More information was requested so here goes: I've always been interested in food science and trying to make food more predictable. I think that's why I like baking so much. Pantelligent has given me the tools and visualizations to figure out what is actually happening on my stove. I've learned how to gauge the temperature of the pan, and how my electric stove has a really huge carryover heat capacity. I can pretty much turn the stove off halfway through the cooking process and coast the rest of the way with residual heat and still cook all the way through, without overcooking.
I've had the chance to try the latest three versions and use it every time I cook now.
Before I had no idea how wildly the temperature on my stove would vary, and would basically burn or undercook everything. I'd had luck using temperature probes for things like chicken, but that doesn't work for eggs, fish, etc.
Now I just pull out my phone, pick what I'm cooking, and get a predictably delicious result.
> I'd had luck using temperature probes for things like chicken, but that doesn't work for eggs, fish, etc.
Why not use a temperature sensor and an app; why do I need to buy a whole pan? Is it that hard to for a sensor to read the heat of the pan's surface without being integrated?
Summary: The pan has temperature sensors which report to an app via Bluetooth. The app displays the actual and desired temperatures, and the user adjusts the heat on their stove.
The obvious next step is to connect the sensor to the heat control, eliminating the human from the loop, and to add sensors for humidity level, pressure, weight (e.g., to determine how much water has boiled off), smoke (either for that mesquite/caramelized touch, or perhaps it's a good place to display a sponsored link to a food delivery service) and more.
EDIT: Come to think of it, microwaves use sensor AFAIK. I had one that defrosted surprisingly well by simply pressing the 'Defrost' button. My impression was that it used a moisture sensor.
Yup! And intelligent recipes have both a desired time & temperature curve, but also correct for deviations (i.e. extending the time slightly if the temperature is too low). We've found that temperature is the key variable to repeatably getting great meals.
I cook a ton, and I thought I would hate this. Having tested Pantelligent from very early alpha, though, I was really surprised.
I thought it would be "cook-by-number" and for many people that's exactly what they need and exactly what they want.
For me, "cook-by-number" would drive me crazy, since I like being in the driver's seat, so to speak. Over time, learning the temperatures of my pan and being able to have instant access to it in 'Freestyle' mode blew me away. No more infrared thermometers == mind blown.
Also, the record feature is stupendous - I finally get that dish /just right/, and I never have to worry about it again. I have recorded the temperatures, the times, and everything so I can repeat it the same way every time.
Seriously though, try the salmon. It will blow you away. You've never had salmon this good.
This is a gross oversimplification of quality cooking. For amateurs, this might be great... but it will keep them amateurs as they won't be able to develop the chef skills. My wife always cooks perfect salmon without any gadgets - there are other low-tech ways to know when it's done.
You may mean something broader by "quality cooking". In the more specific sense of "cooking" being the controlled addition of heat to ingredients, Pantelligent solves that perfectly by enabling time and temperature control. It's still up to you to compose the meal, procure good ingredients, etc. Pantelligent is a tool, and a powerful one.
Well, it solves a problem (for some), but unsolves another - adds Teflon that's been out of my household for over 10 years! And I'm sure it's not just me, because all stores are full of alternative coatings.
I'm sure the answer is yes, but is this being marketed to large corporate customers also? Because this seems like a great way to increase consistency and maybe even increase efficiency of cooks in large kitchens...
Commercial kitchens already have some aspect of this technology in place: thermostatically-controlled griddles, and standardized cooking times. But yes, where our technology applies, we'd love to get into restaurants as well!
Hasn't Cisco already solved this problem by doing the cooking at the factory? That would be an additional advantage of the sealed bag. It's basically a short term canning process.
I'm not sure what you mean, could you expand? Do you mean Sysco?
Also, I don't think this is really the same as canned food... I'm thinking more of the case where there's a relatively large restaurant with lots of cooks in the kitchen (or even multiple kitchens)
I missed your comment until today. Sysco is a giant company that supplies food material to restaurants. I've read that even at supposedly fancy restaurants, if you order soup, it's likely to be canned. If you order meat, it's pre-cooked in a bag, and is re-heated by throwing in boiling water.
It probably saves money and could be more sanitary. On the other hand, it kinda diminishes the appeal of restaurant dining for me.
Ah, yeah, I've heard of Sysco, they served my school lunches way back when.
And yes, what you're saying is probably true... in that case this wouldn't do very much good, I think. Maybe the idea of a restaurant that still makes it's food completely from scratch at every order is farfetched nowadays
Indeed. I think it's in France where the government has tried to create a legal definition for a restaurant that prepares food on site, and from what I read, they still ended up with a variety of weird loopholes.
I like the idea of constant temperature feedback, but I'm not going to switch out the pans I already have. I'm inspired to tear apart an IR temperature gun, place the sensor above each burner and mount the guns' readouts to the front of the hood.
Part of the trick is getting the pan surface temperature, which (to an overhead pyrometer) is often obscured by the food in the pan. But yes, an IR thermometer is a good kitchen tool!
One thing I didn't see is how the pan's transmitter is powered? Is it drawing energy from the heat of the pan or is there a battery in there somewhere?
Try their instructions for cooking Trader Joes 'Mandarin Orange Chicken'. So good!! Better than any I have had anywhere. I'm probably making it like once a week now.
There are so many empty testimonials on this thread: "mind blown" "stupendous", "there's nothing like this pan", "perfect steak every time", "predictably delicious" etc.
If you use the pan, a more insightful, informative report of the technology, its use, etc. would be helpful to your fellow readers.
Fair enough. The technology is, in itself, very simple: a temperature sensor built into the bottom of a frying pan, hooked up to an iOS app over low-power bluetooth.
That's it.
But the technology, in this case, isn't the point. It is a very simple idea, but one that works exceedingly well in doing its job.
Not every solution to a problem has to be incredibly new technology - applications of simple technology to problems that lots of people have is just as much a definition of "make something people want" as building the Oculus Rift. Whether this is a problem that lots of people have is, I suppose, what this kickstarter will help elucidate.
I didn't think I had this problem, and then I used the pan. My mind was changed solely because of the record feature and instant, always-on, access to the temperature of my pan.
Borski: Thanks. But what are its strengths and weaknesses? When does it work well and where does it need work? Does it run only on iOS? How good is the pan as a frying pan? What's the construction quality? Customer service? etc etc.
I did not mean to imply that it had to be cutting edge or complex tech.
Fair enough. I'd say it works well for cooking protein or veg in a frying pan.
It does run only in iOS. Construction quality is quite good - it's not a Calphalon pan, but it isn't the $10 Target pan either. It's somewhere in between. The construction of the handle (where the electronics are stored) is top-notch.
Customer service I can't vouch for, as they're friends and live nearby, but I suspect they would make things right very quickly.
An interesting idea, but a couple of things jumped out at me immediately.
1) Keeping track of surface and/or pan temperature is useful but it isn't nearly as useful as keeping track of internal temperature[1]. I'm not sure what the technical challenges are, but having one or more small wireless temperature probes would be far more useful to me than one limited use pan, which leads to ...
2) I cook a lot, but I have very few uses for a non-stick frypan, and very few uses for any pan that isn't oven safe[2]. That and the short useful lifetime of any non-stick pan (at any price range) make me wonder about this.
[1] Otherwise you're just hoping your inputs are roughly equivalent to the last time you did this, or what the recipe assumes.
[2] i'm making an assumption here, but couldn't find any info
Keeping track of cooking surface time and temperature, plus knowing about what you're cooking (i.e. salmon fillet, 3/4" thick), lets us get a surprisingly good model of the internal conditions and adjust dynamically. The result is really quite delicious! We've done a lot of testing and development, and if you're following the interactive recipes in good faith, you'll get a good result when you cook. (Think about how much information even a trained chef has, using intuition about the right heat level and cooking time -- we can do better with quantitative temperature and time data, even though we can't actually poke the piece of salmon.)
Pantelligent is not oven safe -- today's electronics would not operate at oven temperatures. Having temperature regulation avoids overcooking the nonstick coatings, which prolongs their life.
(We just launched the Kickstarter campaign, and are in the middle of posting some FAQs right now!)
You hit on the key problem, which is: what if my salmon steak is 1 1/2 " thick? Or 1/2" ? Are you going to have a selection grid? What if I just took it out of a fridge? What if its starting at room temperature? A bit dry?
One of the first things you need to learn to improve as a cook (professional or just out of interest) is to control temperature. And that temperature isn't what it says on a dial, it's what's happening at the interface of your food and the heat. But pan temperature is only one variable, and others are at least as important.
At the end of the day, you are never cooking "a salmon steak", you are cooking this salmon steak, with all it's characteristics, on this equipment. Part of getting better as a cook is to be aware of this and always adjust what you are doing, not to your expectations of what should happen (e.g. any recipe, or what happened last time, or ...) but to what is actually happening. To that degree having a live readout of a particular pan could be useful, but not earth shattering.
Anyway, I don't think it's a terrible idea and may well help people who are afraid to diverge from a recipe. Heck, it may be very useful to some people who are very experienced, I don't know.
My initial reaction though is the form factor is too constraining, and the benefit too marginal, for me to get excited about it.
Beta tester here. There's a built in ruler/selector for thickness. The temperature of the pan surface actually changes depending on the starting temperature of the salmon and given the conductivity of aluminium and the location of the embedded sensor, you do get a good approximation of the temperature at the interface not at the dial. The temperature actually drops immediately when you flip a piece of food or add something in, so the app can tell when you've done something. It's pretty neat!
It's true that if you start with a really dry/old salmon, this won't magically make it not dry.
Hi ska, we understand. As engineers and chefs, we were also skeptical and curious as to how well surface temperature feedback would effect the pan cooking. So we built it, and the answer is that it worked far better than we imagined! Like, it's really, really tasty. Within a reasonable range of inputs, we found that the "other [variables] are at least as important" was an incorrect assumption. Surface temperature and time, when controlled via an adaptive recipe, really is the biggest upgrade you can make to your cooking.
For salmon in particular: yes there's an input selection of thickness. For steak, there's doneness and thickness.
Re: "other [variables] are at least as important" being an incorrect assumption...
I can see this being possible for some foods (your salmon steak being a good example, given you include thickness, but you'd need different models for many different types of fish), but really unlikely for others. How onion behaves, for example, is pretty regional and highly dependent on type. For many vegetables water content is highly variable and very important to how it cooks, but I feel like i've got better proxys for what is going on than cooking surface temperature would be....
This isn't targetted at the experienced cook. It's targetted at somebody with limited experience cooking who wants a little more probability at success. My internal geek is fascinated by it, and I'd buy it if I had the spare cash lying around, but my internal cook sees its applicability limited (though perfect salmon every time is tempting; I'm not that great with fish).
It's unfortunate that the generational tradition of teaching cooking really fell apart in the last 40-50 years. My generation was the first who had to completely teach themselves.
Why would I choose this over a $180 Anova Precision cooker, or any other sous vide cooker?
With sous vide methods, you don't need to worry so much about the internal temperature of the meat when starting, because you can guarantee a homogenous temperature with enough time. With this, you will need to worry and check - just as you do now. Heterogeneously defrosted chicken, like the kind that happens when you try to defrost in a microwave, may be undercooked in some areas, overcooked in other areas. So there's no such thing as "set it and forget it" for the average consumer without fresh, because, let's face it, the average consumer doesn't always use fresh chicken.
There's no mention of support of induction burners.
Meat (aka pork and beef) will suck, plain and simple. It's going to be too hot to cook meat to a perfect doneness (maybe not with an electric burner)... but definitely not hot enough (nor with enough thermal mass) to generate a nice crust or a steak or a chop without (what I would consider) overcooking the inside.
For fresh fish, risotto, curries, etc- sure, I know it can excel there- but I don't want a $200 "set it and forget it" fish cooker, especially when there are guaranteed sous vide methods which can produce high quality food, and the saucy stuff is pretty easy anyway.
If you would want to try to change my mind, you could send one to Dave Arnold to evaluate.
Beta tester here. I have both and use them for different things. Yes, 50 minutes in an Anova and finishing/searing for 5 minutes on a pan will get you a great medium rare steak. If I'm in a rush, I will use the pan and make a 90% as a good (okay, hand waving here) medium rare steak on the pan in about 15 minutes.
Don't get me wrong, I think there are people who will love this- especially people who frequently cook fish and those who make risottos.
I'm far from a great cook, but I've been cooking 4-5 times a week the last 5 years, and what I do know is this won't do fast and furious nor low and slow well.
Furthermore, induction burners with temperature control (and even temperature probes!) are widely available, cheap, and relatively precise as well, and you can (mostly) use any pan, so long as you learn the quirks of whatever pan you are using.
As a home cooking enthusiast, this feels a lot like "not invented here" to me.
IMO, a better solution would be to pair an induction burner and temperature probes with bluetooth.
* cooks a steak in 20 minutes, not 2 hours
* don't cook all your food in plastic bags
* not limited to foods you can stick in a waterbath (omelettes? pancakes? etc)
* most sous vide recipes have you finish with a pan sear anyway!
"Meat (aka pork and beef) will suck, plain and simple." -- This is false. Pantelligent steak is absolutely one of my favorite recipes! Check out some photos http://facebook.com/Pantelligent
Edit (oops I thought you could control temperature. My bad. An electric skillet would do that, but not look as cool.)
I would highly recommend that you experiment with modulating the temperature. You can get a measure of the thickness and total thermal mass based on spectral response. A simple heat diffusion model should also let you estimate internal temperature, if you assume the slice is thin relative to diameter. Note that the convection and radiant heat flows from the pan won't change as the food cooks (only from the top of the food)... At the beginning (assuming a heated pan) heat flow into the food will dominate and near the end I expect evaporation will change.
You should also be able to do a better job with onions and things you want to cook slowly,because you will see a rapid drop in thermal flow as moisture levels drop... Note, also that boiling evaporation doesn't depend strongly on temperature. Cooking a proper roux could likely also be made more simple,if you knew when to pay close attention.
It's a bit like a rice cooker. Those can actually be VERY smart.
The non-stick surface really makes this a nonstarter for me. I've got cast iron and stainless steel pans...I wouldn't cook on Teflon even if it were free.
For real home chefs, non-stick pans are great. They're just so easy to cook on and clean. And by actually knowing the temperature of the pan, you can avoid the deterioration of non-stick coatings that can occur in (non-smart) pans when they are unintentionally brought to very high temperatures.
For whatever its worth, I find salmon to be the easiest thing to cook. Put oven on broil high. Salmon out of fridge. Little lemon, salt, pepper, dill, in the oven, 20-25 minutes and bam best salmon I ever made or had, every time. Also a lot probably depends on the quality or age of the fish.
I'm constantly cooking, and temperature is a constant worry. However, "affordable" may be a bit misleading, if $169 is the discounted version, I assume this will be under $200 at retail.
I can pick up a durable frying pan for $15 at most, and it does the job with my skill level.
What would the real draw for me be? Exact temperature readings are great, and interactive recipes are cool, but I'm not sure it's worth 10x more than I can get a regular frying pan. (Hope I didn't come off as snarky, I'm genuinely curious.)
I just bought one of these so I can cook more often with extra virgin olive oil without approaching the smoke point. At $19 for an IR thermometer, they should probably be in every kitchen next to the probe thermometer.
Get in the habit of looking at the oil in the pan. As it approaches the smoke point, its refractive index will change and its viscosity will decrease, giving a dimpled appearance. This is due to convection cells from the heating; it's easier to see in olive oil because it's relatively thick and dark compared to other liquids or light oils. In a round, level pan, you'll get a pleasing hexagonal pattern. Once you have nice stable convection cells you're ready to cook.
After a while you'll get used to your individual pans and how they transfer heat, to the point that you don't need to think about how to adjust the heat any more. Likewise watching the food itself will eventually tell you most of what you need to know about when it's done.
Note that this is a lot easier with Gas than with Electric due to the heat retention of the rings, at least I found. You can kill the heat really quickly with Gas (which is why no commercial kitchen uses electric).
This is a great point. Pantelligent works great on electric stoves (resistive coils or radiative glass flat-top), even though they retain a lot of heat. It doesn't magically fix your stove and make it as responsive as a gas stove, but it does give you the information you need to dial in on the right temperature.
I can pick up a durable frying pan for $15 at most, and it does the job with my skill level.
Just in passing, if you cook a lot, you should spend more than that on a frying pan, like $50. A heavy pan distributes heat more evenly and an anodized or ceramic finish is an awful lot less work to clean (which will easily pay off the cost of the pan in terms of time and meals saved).
Oh, I agree, I just mean the previous pans I've used. My daily pan that I share with my roommate was $15 and is already warping and starting to become more difficult to clean.
My next pan will be in the $40-50 range (started scoping them out) but that's still 4-5x less than a Pantelligent pan.
I got a gift of some Wearever ceramic pans a while back and I've fallen in love with them, despite having a complete set of All-clad cookware on hand. They're excellent value and have nice ergonomics as well.
When I was in college, I'd boil some water, make some pasta, and sear some chicken for every meal. Estimated pan cost: $10 (maybe free, actually, as I got it from a departing senior).
Nowadays, I like to eat out a lot, with food costs at least $25/meal (SF Bay is ridiculous). I get healthier meals if I cook at home but I also want my food to be delicious. Approximating subjectively: I think I get 90-200% of restaurant deliciousness depending on recipe and restaurant, 25-50% of restaurant sodium intake, and 50% cost with this device, which is a fixed cost. Given this, it'll pay for itself in less than two weeks.
I guess the difference is that I enjoy eating out, but I much prefer cooking at home. Even with my $10 frying pan, I can cook some delicious things, but I assume the target market is for people who haven't been cooking as much as I do.
From the viewpoint that this pan makes cooking a little more accessible to new cooks, I think it's fantastic. I was just trying to find value for someone like myself, who might be a little more experienced and have a few dishes, we can make without recipes, under our belts. :)
This is pretty neat, but why not just learn how to cook?
This is the kind of idea only Silicon Valley could cook up – if you've eaten nothing but catered meals your young adult life, you have no idea how to cook eggs without burning them. The solution is obviously a bluetooth enabled pan.
Do you just drop in the raw ingredients and it processes them through those devices in serial? It is just all of those devices on one machine, no different than buying them separately? Thanks for explaining!
It can combine functions, e.g. mix while cooking. But as far as I know, it can't do anything that you couldn't do with separate devices (like using a hand mixer and a pot), it's just more convenient.
FWIW, I am italian and while most people in my country enjoy cooking "bimby" (brand name for thermomix in IT and PT) is still relatively popular.
Of course it does have the problem of costing a shit ton of money, but on the other hand it solves a far bigger problem than pantelligent (i.e. long cooking procedurs, such has slow cooking+stir frequently for 8 hours and such).
A Thermomix is actually super useful. You can cook quickly a lot of stuff that's hard / annoying to cook otherwise... Soups, crêpes / waffles dough, hot chocolate, etc...
The panintelligent on the other hand is just a pan with temperature control. Any person with cooking experience won't gain too much from this.
Our team is actually made up of both people who have never cooked for themselves and people who have cooked all their lives and love cooking. Pantelligent will never replace loving cooking. It's a tool that can make anyone's cooking better. In our beta testers, we have found that people who already cook use it as a tool to make their cooking more repeatable and stress-free, and people who don't know how to cook gain an extra super power that they didn't have before.
I uaven't watched the video yet. Does it work on induction hobs? Is there an option to use Celsius?
EDIT: is it aluminum? That won't work on induction hobs. Also, if anyone knows of good quality tiny non-stick pans that work on induction hobs, on sale in US, I'd be interested.
How can the pan know how cooked my steak is? If there was a spike at the center that measured the inner temperature of the meat, then I'd understand. But from just pan surface temp and time it must only be guessing? It would have to be fed (very) exact measurements of both meat thickness and initial temperature, right? The difference between 55 and 57 deg (C) steak is huge, so presumably you'd need to know the initial temp with a similar confidence? On the website, I can't see the app having inputs for exact thicknesses/temperatures?
A comparison: even in an oven where you can set a perfect temperature, there is no way the oven temp + time will give you "perfect steak every time" (unless the oven temp is the target temp)? How is this different?
Having the pan report its surface temp is neat of course, but wouldn't a tiny BT pinboard pin-style probe instead of a pan surface temp probe remove a lot of the variables involved, and report the thing I'm actually interested in (inner temp), rather than the pan.
Edit: the temperature I'm looking for in a frying pan when cooking fish or meat is usually "as hot as it goes". Pan just to sear, and let the temperature be sorted out in Sous Vide or low temp oven.
This is a cool idea. I personally use a IR temperature gauge for the surface my pan (I thought of wiring it up once, but it was too fiddly for me), and a wired therm for internal meat temp.
I'm currently in two minds about backing this. On the one hand, it frees me from using multiple devices. On the other hand, I already have a solution, and this solution is exactly the same as the one I have (I probably have more accurate readings). And this solution is a lot more expensive (199 for shipping to Australia) than my current solution
An innovation I'd like to see is something like sous vide for a frypan, where the pan temperature automatically changes (this is hard because well, I like a flame stove too)
I feel that this actually takes away from the experience of cooking. When I cook, I've always learned from playing around and experimenting, I only ever roughly read recipes and never follow one without a little change here or there.
With this, people won't learn to cook, they'll learn to do x when y happens. That's not learning to cook, that's being a robot.
It's a gateway tool into good cooking - I can see users actually making something tasty and impressing their friends for the first time with this. That will make them want to learn more.
If the end result is better, people will use it. At some point in history people were probably emotionally satisfied by knitting their own clothes. I'm sure some still do this for fun.
If you love experimenting, Pantelligent gives you repeatability and data that you've never had before (Freestyle Mode), and the ability to walk away from the stove or get distracted and still keep an eye on your meal. You're still the chef -- Pantelligent is just a powerful tool.
"The experience of cooking" - this can be applied to most of the technologies we develop. (i.e. does the Kindle take away from the experience of reading?) But it's not just as simple as "better is better", either.
If you want total convenience, you use a microwave, but it's not the do-all kitchen appliance that people originally thought it would be (see: microwave recipe books). If you want total experience and the joy of making something for your family with your own hands, you use traditional tools. Perhaps this pan meets some middle need, or provides a gateway for people who wouldn't cook otherwise, or perhaps it's an expensive novelty. But it's interesting to think about what we're losing when we replace old ways of doing things, and whether any of it's worth keeping around even if it isn't the most efficient way of doing things. The Betty Crocker add-egg trick tells us that there's a big emotional component wrapped up in this that isn't present in most product categories.
(I make http://supermechanical.com/range and enjoy Soylent, so the balance of new cooking interactions vs integration into an existing kitchen flow is something I think about.)
As a colorblind person, this is actually quite useful. It's probably significantly easier to use this than constantly checking using a meat thermometer (and needing to wash the thermometer between checks lest you contaminate cooked meat with residue from when it was raw)
edit: To clarify, trying to cook meat by sight as a colorblind person (at least for me) typically results in either raw meat or dried out overcooked meat.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadEDIT: More information was requested so here goes: I've always been interested in food science and trying to make food more predictable. I think that's why I like baking so much. Pantelligent has given me the tools and visualizations to figure out what is actually happening on my stove. I've learned how to gauge the temperature of the pan, and how my electric stove has a really huge carryover heat capacity. I can pretty much turn the stove off halfway through the cooking process and coast the rest of the way with residual heat and still cook all the way through, without overcooking.
Before I had no idea how wildly the temperature on my stove would vary, and would basically burn or undercook everything. I'd had luck using temperature probes for things like chicken, but that doesn't work for eggs, fish, etc.
Now I just pull out my phone, pick what I'm cooking, and get a predictably delicious result.
Why not use a temperature sensor and an app; why do I need to buy a whole pan? Is it that hard to for a sensor to read the heat of the pan's surface without being integrated?
The obvious next step is to connect the sensor to the heat control, eliminating the human from the loop, and to add sensors for humidity level, pressure, weight (e.g., to determine how much water has boiled off), smoke (either for that mesquite/caramelized touch, or perhaps it's a good place to display a sponsored link to a food delivery service) and more.
EDIT: Come to think of it, microwaves use sensor AFAIK. I had one that defrosted surprisingly well by simply pressing the 'Defrost' button. My impression was that it used a moisture sensor.
I thought it would be "cook-by-number" and for many people that's exactly what they need and exactly what they want.
For me, "cook-by-number" would drive me crazy, since I like being in the driver's seat, so to speak. Over time, learning the temperatures of my pan and being able to have instant access to it in 'Freestyle' mode blew me away. No more infrared thermometers == mind blown.
Also, the record feature is stupendous - I finally get that dish /just right/, and I never have to worry about it again. I have recorded the temperatures, the times, and everything so I can repeat it the same way every time.
Seriously though, try the salmon. It will blow you away. You've never had salmon this good.
I'm not sure what you mean, could you expand? Do you mean Sysco?
Also, I don't think this is really the same as canned food... I'm thinking more of the case where there's a relatively large restaurant with lots of cooks in the kitchen (or even multiple kitchens)
It probably saves money and could be more sanitary. On the other hand, it kinda diminishes the appeal of restaurant dining for me.
And yes, what you're saying is probably true... in that case this wouldn't do very much good, I think. Maybe the idea of a restaurant that still makes it's food completely from scratch at every order is farfetched nowadays
If you use the pan, a more insightful, informative report of the technology, its use, etc. would be helpful to your fellow readers.
That's it.
But the technology, in this case, isn't the point. It is a very simple idea, but one that works exceedingly well in doing its job.
Not every solution to a problem has to be incredibly new technology - applications of simple technology to problems that lots of people have is just as much a definition of "make something people want" as building the Oculus Rift. Whether this is a problem that lots of people have is, I suppose, what this kickstarter will help elucidate.
I didn't think I had this problem, and then I used the pan. My mind was changed solely because of the record feature and instant, always-on, access to the temperature of my pan.
That's all.
I did not mean to imply that it had to be cutting edge or complex tech.
It does run only in iOS. Construction quality is quite good - it's not a Calphalon pan, but it isn't the $10 Target pan either. It's somewhere in between. The construction of the handle (where the electronics are stored) is top-notch.
Customer service I can't vouch for, as they're friends and live nearby, but I suspect they would make things right very quickly.
1) Keeping track of surface and/or pan temperature is useful but it isn't nearly as useful as keeping track of internal temperature[1]. I'm not sure what the technical challenges are, but having one or more small wireless temperature probes would be far more useful to me than one limited use pan, which leads to ...
2) I cook a lot, but I have very few uses for a non-stick frypan, and very few uses for any pan that isn't oven safe[2]. That and the short useful lifetime of any non-stick pan (at any price range) make me wonder about this.
[1] Otherwise you're just hoping your inputs are roughly equivalent to the last time you did this, or what the recipe assumes.
[2] i'm making an assumption here, but couldn't find any info
Pantelligent is not oven safe -- today's electronics would not operate at oven temperatures. Having temperature regulation avoids overcooking the nonstick coatings, which prolongs their life.
(We just launched the Kickstarter campaign, and are in the middle of posting some FAQs right now!)
One of the first things you need to learn to improve as a cook (professional or just out of interest) is to control temperature. And that temperature isn't what it says on a dial, it's what's happening at the interface of your food and the heat. But pan temperature is only one variable, and others are at least as important.
At the end of the day, you are never cooking "a salmon steak", you are cooking this salmon steak, with all it's characteristics, on this equipment. Part of getting better as a cook is to be aware of this and always adjust what you are doing, not to your expectations of what should happen (e.g. any recipe, or what happened last time, or ...) but to what is actually happening. To that degree having a live readout of a particular pan could be useful, but not earth shattering.
Anyway, I don't think it's a terrible idea and may well help people who are afraid to diverge from a recipe. Heck, it may be very useful to some people who are very experienced, I don't know.
My initial reaction though is the form factor is too constraining, and the benefit too marginal, for me to get excited about it.
It's true that if you start with a really dry/old salmon, this won't magically make it not dry.
For salmon in particular: yes there's an input selection of thickness. For steak, there's doneness and thickness.
Re: "other [variables] are at least as important" being an incorrect assumption...
I can see this being possible for some foods (your salmon steak being a good example, given you include thickness, but you'd need different models for many different types of fish), but really unlikely for others. How onion behaves, for example, is pretty regional and highly dependent on type. For many vegetables water content is highly variable and very important to how it cooks, but I feel like i've got better proxys for what is going on than cooking surface temperature would be....
It's unfortunate that the generational tradition of teaching cooking really fell apart in the last 40-50 years. My generation was the first who had to completely teach themselves.
Why would I choose this over a $180 Anova Precision cooker, or any other sous vide cooker?
With sous vide methods, you don't need to worry so much about the internal temperature of the meat when starting, because you can guarantee a homogenous temperature with enough time. With this, you will need to worry and check - just as you do now. Heterogeneously defrosted chicken, like the kind that happens when you try to defrost in a microwave, may be undercooked in some areas, overcooked in other areas. So there's no such thing as "set it and forget it" for the average consumer without fresh, because, let's face it, the average consumer doesn't always use fresh chicken.
There's no mention of support of induction burners.
Meat (aka pork and beef) will suck, plain and simple. It's going to be too hot to cook meat to a perfect doneness (maybe not with an electric burner)... but definitely not hot enough (nor with enough thermal mass) to generate a nice crust or a steak or a chop without (what I would consider) overcooking the inside.
For fresh fish, risotto, curries, etc- sure, I know it can excel there- but I don't want a $200 "set it and forget it" fish cooker, especially when there are guaranteed sous vide methods which can produce high quality food, and the saucy stuff is pretty easy anyway.
If you would want to try to change my mind, you could send one to Dave Arnold to evaluate.
I'm far from a great cook, but I've been cooking 4-5 times a week the last 5 years, and what I do know is this won't do fast and furious nor low and slow well.
Furthermore, induction burners with temperature control (and even temperature probes!) are widely available, cheap, and relatively precise as well, and you can (mostly) use any pan, so long as you learn the quirks of whatever pan you are using.
As a home cooking enthusiast, this feels a lot like "not invented here" to me.
IMO, a better solution would be to pair an induction burner and temperature probes with bluetooth.
I would highly recommend that you experiment with modulating the temperature. You can get a measure of the thickness and total thermal mass based on spectral response. A simple heat diffusion model should also let you estimate internal temperature, if you assume the slice is thin relative to diameter. Note that the convection and radiant heat flows from the pan won't change as the food cooks (only from the top of the food)... At the beginning (assuming a heated pan) heat flow into the food will dominate and near the end I expect evaporation will change.
You should also be able to do a better job with onions and things you want to cook slowly,because you will see a rapid drop in thermal flow as moisture levels drop... Note, also that boiling evaporation doesn't depend strongly on temperature. Cooking a proper roux could likely also be made more simple,if you knew when to pay close attention.
It's a bit like a rice cooker. Those can actually be VERY smart.
I can pick up a durable frying pan for $15 at most, and it does the job with my skill level.
What would the real draw for me be? Exact temperature readings are great, and interactive recipes are cool, but I'm not sure it's worth 10x more than I can get a regular frying pan. (Hope I didn't come off as snarky, I'm genuinely curious.)
After a while you'll get used to your individual pans and how they transfer heat, to the point that you don't need to think about how to adjust the heat any more. Likewise watching the food itself will eventually tell you most of what you need to know about when it's done.
Just in passing, if you cook a lot, you should spend more than that on a frying pan, like $50. A heavy pan distributes heat more evenly and an anodized or ceramic finish is an awful lot less work to clean (which will easily pay off the cost of the pan in terms of time and meals saved).
My next pan will be in the $40-50 range (started scoping them out) but that's still 4-5x less than a Pantelligent pan.
When I was in college, I'd boil some water, make some pasta, and sear some chicken for every meal. Estimated pan cost: $10 (maybe free, actually, as I got it from a departing senior).
Nowadays, I like to eat out a lot, with food costs at least $25/meal (SF Bay is ridiculous). I get healthier meals if I cook at home but I also want my food to be delicious. Approximating subjectively: I think I get 90-200% of restaurant deliciousness depending on recipe and restaurant, 25-50% of restaurant sodium intake, and 50% cost with this device, which is a fixed cost. Given this, it'll pay for itself in less than two weeks.
From the viewpoint that this pan makes cooking a little more accessible to new cooks, I think it's fantastic. I was just trying to find value for someone like myself, who might be a little more experienced and have a few dishes, we can make without recipes, under our belts. :)
This is the kind of idea only Silicon Valley could cook up – if you've eaten nothing but catered meals your young adult life, you have no idea how to cook eggs without burning them. The solution is obviously a bluetooth enabled pan.
Of course it does have the problem of costing a shit ton of money, but on the other hand it solves a far bigger problem than pantelligent (i.e. long cooking procedurs, such has slow cooking+stir frequently for 8 hours and such).
I uaven't watched the video yet. Does it work on induction hobs? Is there an option to use Celsius?
EDIT: is it aluminum? That won't work on induction hobs. Also, if anyone knows of good quality tiny non-stick pans that work on induction hobs, on sale in US, I'd be interested.
Having the pan report its surface temp is neat of course, but wouldn't a tiny BT pinboard pin-style probe instead of a pan surface temp probe remove a lot of the variables involved, and report the thing I'm actually interested in (inner temp), rather than the pan.
Edit: the temperature I'm looking for in a frying pan when cooking fish or meat is usually "as hot as it goes". Pan just to sear, and let the temperature be sorted out in Sous Vide or low temp oven.
I'm currently in two minds about backing this. On the one hand, it frees me from using multiple devices. On the other hand, I already have a solution, and this solution is exactly the same as the one I have (I probably have more accurate readings). And this solution is a lot more expensive (199 for shipping to Australia) than my current solution
An innovation I'd like to see is something like sous vide for a frypan, where the pan temperature automatically changes (this is hard because well, I like a flame stove too)
With this, people won't learn to cook, they'll learn to do x when y happens. That's not learning to cook, that's being a robot.
If you want total convenience, you use a microwave, but it's not the do-all kitchen appliance that people originally thought it would be (see: microwave recipe books). If you want total experience and the joy of making something for your family with your own hands, you use traditional tools. Perhaps this pan meets some middle need, or provides a gateway for people who wouldn't cook otherwise, or perhaps it's an expensive novelty. But it's interesting to think about what we're losing when we replace old ways of doing things, and whether any of it's worth keeping around even if it isn't the most efficient way of doing things. The Betty Crocker add-egg trick tells us that there's a big emotional component wrapped up in this that isn't present in most product categories.
(I make http://supermechanical.com/range and enjoy Soylent, so the balance of new cooking interactions vs integration into an existing kitchen flow is something I think about.)
edit: To clarify, trying to cook meat by sight as a colorblind person (at least for me) typically results in either raw meat or dried out overcooked meat.