kitchen gadgets

Coffee is coffee. You either love or hate it, and if you’re like most people, your feelings probably skew towards fondness. There’s never a cause to be out of coffee, necessarily — there are always cafes, of course, but if you prefer to brew your own cup, discovering you’re out of fresh coffee beans sets the mood for a disappointing day. Enter the ‘Fresh Coffee Jar’, which is a smart coffee jar that works to ensure you never run out of fresh coffee. When the level gets low, the jar detects that you need more and automatically orders some.

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There’s a certain pattern to cleaning the kitchen, and some of the last two steps including taking the trash out and sweeping up the floor. While the need to heft the bag of garbage out to the dumpster hasn’t yet been eliminated, the folks behind Bruno are pining to make the dust pan obsolete. Bruno is bid as a smart trash can, and it is notable for one big reason: it has a small slot in the bottom equipped with a vacuum, allowing the user to sweep debris directly into the can using a broom, no bending over or dust pan needed.

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A new smart home appliance has just cropped up, and it aims to make throwing out your kitchen waste a convenience. It’s called GeniCan, and it is a smart device that attaches to the top of your existing kitchen trash can. When an item is thrown away, the GeniCan scans the product and adds it to a growing shopping list for the next time you go shopping. It eliminates the need to write things down on a shopping list, and is joined by a few convenient features like finding coupons for the product (if available), and more.

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Everyone loves a home cooked meal, but would it taste the same if it was made by a robot? Moley Robotics just revealed its robot-chef, which uses sophisticated robotic hands to cook just like a human. It doesn't cook any faster than a human, so it's not going to revolutionize the industrial side of cooking. This bionic-chef is designed for home kitchens. The robo-chef has the aptitude to learn from a real chef's delicate movements. Motion capture technology relays all the actions of an actual person preparing the meal and translates the actions into moves for the robotic hands.

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As the lackluster take-up of WiFi-connected refrigerators suggests, upgrading kitchen appliances with their smart equivalent is still a small market, but how about if a simple retrofit could give your stove some intelligence? Meld attempts to do just that, a combination replacement knob for your stovetop and a wireless temperature sensor that, together, can automate the cooking process according to a recipe running on the iPhone app. Meanwhile, it's counting on fashionable methods like sous-vide to give it some kitchen geek appeal.

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Kitchen tech is big money, and Googling a recipe on your iPhone while you try to remember how many tablespoons are in a cup is no longer cutting it. Orange Chef believes it has the answer with Countertop, a new smart kitchen platform that bakes in NFC and Bluetooth. Building on last-year's Prep Pad connected scale with the ability to recognize appliances from Vitamix and Crock-Pot, Countertop not only suggests - and tweaks - recipes but walks you through making them. I caught up with CEO Santiago Merea for a DIY smoothie and some kitchen geekery.

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Appkettle is a smart kettle that allows users to set the temperature, monitor the process, and more when warming up water for their morning coffee or afternoon soup. It works, as you'd expect, in conjunction with a mobile app lending hands-off control of the kettle, which can be left on its own in the kitchen (after the water is added, of course). The design itself is modern with a shiny outer shell, but conservative enough to blend in with most kitchens with its round shape and matte black base. According to its maker, this is the first kettle that offers volume and temperature control in real-time on a mobile device.

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La Marzocco may be famous in coffee but the Italian espresso machine company has never been what you'd call affordable. That's not quite going to change with the arrival of the new La Marzocco Linea Mini, but it will bring the famous nameplate (and some of its most appealing qualities) within reach of a broader enthusiast audience. Distilling the style of the classic Linea - mainstay of many a coffee shop - not to mention its consistency and ease of use into a version scaled and suited to the domestic kitchen, the Linea Mini may still carry an eye-watering price tag but it's potentially a breakthrough in mainstream coffee geekery.

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Anyone with kids in the home can tell you if you mess around and make pancakes in shapes one time, you will be making them in shapes for the rest of your life. Making a pancake in a shape isn't the easiest thing to do, thankfully a new gadget has turned up that makes printing your pancakes in just about any shape you want a snap.

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Cooking pizza is one of those things that we can all get behind. No matter how rich or poor you are, pizza is an everyman food. A new pizza oven has turned up that will cook your pizza at home perfectly brown and crisp. The little oven is called the Pizza Box and as you might guess, it looks like a box you would get your pizza out of from a delivery place.

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Smartphones are permeating our lives and appliances in more ways than one. While things like cars, lamps, and thermostats are integrating smartphone features, some are taking inspiration from another angle. GE's next generation of inductions cooktops, for example, are said to be inspired by the ease of use of touchscreen interfaces prevalent in our smartphones. GE's new Glide Touch Controls lets users slide, sweep, or touch controls to their precise preferences, without worrying about knobs or getting the controls dirty permanently.

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You probably don’t cook sous vide, and that’s a shame. Though it’s counter intuitive to much of what you know about cooking, sous vide often does a much better job of cooking your proteins evenly; often perfectly. We’ve covered several sous vide add-ons here at SlashGear, but GE’s entry might be the most intriguing. It’s also the most frustrating. The simple clip-on accessory monitors the water temp in your pot, and communicates with their new line of ranges to turn the heat up or down.

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