There’s an app for that
No matter what field you’re in, if you blink an eye you’ll miss a whole raft of new innovations, and many of those innovations are coming in the form of an app, or include an app component.
Apps have gone crazy over the past few years, and according to 2016 data there are more than 2 million of them in the Apple app store and 2.2 million on Google Play for Android devices.
There are many apps and app enabled devices for the kitchen and for cooking – here are a few we spotted on our travels around the interwebs we thought you might like to know about…
App enabled fridges
All the major fridge manufacturers are busy installing all sorts of technology into their top of the range models. At a recent consumer electronics show in Germany Samsung demonstrated a fridge that sends statistics about what’s in it to your smartphone along with a photo of what you have in there, and then orders your groceries for you. At the other end of the scale Haier, a Chinese manufacturer, has a bar fridge which can ‘deliver beverages by remote control’, whatever that means.
Check how fresh your eggs are with your phone
The Egg Minder app developed by a company called Quirky* (that’s about right) and US giant company GE, makes sure that you don’t run out of eggs and in addition tells you how old the oldest one is. You need a special tray which holds up to fourteen eggs and when you’re just about to cook, using eggs obviously, the ‘smart egg tray’ tells you which ones to pick first. If this gadget is made for you, you can get it on eBay for AUD$20.24.
Worried you’ll overcook the steak?
Here’s the tech solution for this conundrum… the Pantelligent. This is a very smart frying pan with a built in temperature sensor and Bluetooth connectivity so you can hook up the pan’s app with the pan itself. You can simply choose a recipe from the Pantelligent recipes in the app, sync the pan and phone by tapping the phone against the panhandle and you’re good to go. The app tells you if the temperature is too high or too low and when it’s time to turn whatever you have in the pan. At US$199 it’s not the cheapest frying pan around, but it might improve your cooking skills!
A plate that tells you what to eat
If you’re worried that you don’t eat the right sort of food, or maybe you need to follow a particular diet for health or you’re in training for sport, the SmartPlate helps you make sure you’re on the right diet. The plate is divided into three sections and you simply put food into one or more of the sections, the plate takes photos of the food with in built smartphone type cameras, and weighs the food with its (again) in built scales and then submits the photos to a huge food database – the USDA’s database of 8,000+ household foods. A few seconds later it lets you know if you’re good to go, or whether you need to throw it all out and start again.
And finally… if all this technology is just too much, maybe you should just call Intertain. Intertain is an Australian based website where you can book a chef to come and cook for you at home (as long as you live in either Melbourne or Sydney). No preparation, no worrying about whether the food will work out and – most importantly – no clearing up afterwards. All you have to do is pay the bill.
And what about knives? If you’d like to know what knives might be like in the future, check out an article we put together back in 2014 ‘Kitchen knives of the future‘, plus while you’re there maybe check out our other article ‘Will the electric knife sharpener hold its own in the kitchen of the future?‘.
Whatever the future may hold, rest assured IO Shen knives are likely to remain stubbornly traditional, whether in the hands of humans or any future cooking robots.
Let us know if we’ve missed any important apps or inventions and we’ll feature them in a future article.
*on closer inspection, it’s actually a website for budding inventors and the Egg Minder is one of those inventions
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