No kitchen is safe from the IoT: the smart fridges are back and this time they're more high-tech than ever, with Samsung and LG both revealing upgrades on their connected refrigerators. Both appliance-makers have been pushing smart kitchen tech for some years now, but what began with effectively a big tablet embedded into the door has turned into something a lot more useful.
Sous-vide maker Nomiku may have helped accelerate the kitchen tech's transition from pro-restaurant to domestic countertops, but that hasn't been enough to rescue it from discontinuation. The company has confirmed today that its Nomiku Smart Cooker is being axed, along with the prepared meal service launched back in 2017.
The Mellow sous-vide is getting a second-generation version, with Mellow Duo adding a dual-vat option to the all-in-one cooking system. Launched back in 2014, in the early days of domestic sous-vide, the first-gen Mellow promised smarter meals with added convenience features like refrigeration. Now, it's getting an update.
Williams Sonoma has teamed up with Instant Pot to launch a new line featuring iconic imagery from the Star Wars universe. The new Instant Pot designs are available exclusively through Williams Sonoma, including the smallest model featuring the BB-8 design and the large 8qt model featuring a Chewbacca-inspired design. A total of five new Instant Pot special editions are available.
Smoking meat might seem like a simple matter of combining, well, meat and smoke, but Traeger's range of connected grills are now adding Alexa support for more straightforward remote control. Owners of Traeger WiFIRE-enabled models will be able to use Amazon's assistant both to control their pellet grill and to remotely check its current status.
Amazon isn't afraid to make a weird product, and while you can question the value of Alexa inside a microwave, there's no denying that the idea of connected appliances and other gadgets is one worth exploring as the IoT spreads. Today's big news might have been more mainstream smart speakers like the Echo Studio, along with cutting-edge experimental tech such as the Echo Frames, but that didn't mean Amazon lacked some oddball gadgetry as well.
PicoBrew is unveiled its new Pico MultiBrew, a single machine that can be used to brew multiple types of beverages, including coffee, kombucha, horchata, tea, cold brew, craft beer, and chai. The appliance is said to offer 'computer precision brewing,' as well as a microprocessor and 'advanced sensors.' Among other things, the MultiBrew uses eco-friendly and compostable cups.
Instant Brands, the company behind the wildly popular Instant Pot pressure cooker, has introduced a new product called the Instant Vortex Plus. Unlike the Instant Pot, which essentially functions as a pressure cooker and slow cooker, Instant Vortex Plus is an air fryer that comes with a rotisserie mode, as well as other common, useful functions.
Being a pit-master is a serious business, sweating over a smoker, tending its coals, and coaxing delicious flavors from hunks of meat after hours of careful cooking. It almost makes the Traeger Pro 780 feel a little blasphemous, in fact: the combination of picking from a range of tested recipes, dialing in a temperature, and then tracking it all from an app on your phone via WiFi could be accused of being too foolproof to be authentic.
Everything is connected today, and not just the obvious culprits like phones, computers, and TVs. These days, even refrigerators and ovens are connected to the Internet or to each other. The latter is what KitchenAid is trying to sell with the new Smart Oven+. First shown of at CES 2019, the smart single or double wall oven allows users to control it through various means, from touch to phone to even, of course, voice.
Anova has a new connected sous-vide, the Anova Precision Cooker Pro, expanding its easy-to-use kitchen gadgets to pro and prosumer chefs. Designed to be more powerful and stable when cooking larger meals, it also promises to be rugged enough to cope with a busy professional kitchen.
Meal-prep can be convenient, but the new Hoover H-KEEPHEAT 700 oven promises to take it even further, doing away with freezing and re-heating and instead keeping meals at the perfect serving temperature for up to two weeks. While it may look like a regular convection oven, the new model adds a "keep warm" system for individual portions.