baking
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Whirlpool's smart thermometer ensures your food is cooked properly
Whirlpool wants to be sure you never serve an undercooked roast again. Its Yummly subsidiary is introducing a Smart Thermometer that uses sensors to check the temperatures of both the oven and your food, letting you know through a mobile app when they reach the right temperature. You won't have to periodically check your turkey to know when it's ready to eat.
Hear me out: The case for Le Creuset's Star Wars cookware
Force Friday has become something of a bonanza in recent years. An event born of Disney's incredible knack for merchandising, it's the ultimate product glut for Star Wars fans. It's usually on a Friday in early October (in this year of Our Dark Lord 2019 it was triple Force Friday because of the release of The Mandalorian, the video game Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.) During this day-long reveal of incredible merchandise (from the must-haves to the I-didn't-think-anyone-would-want-this-but-now-I-want-it), different brands reveal their tie-in products. Sure, there are the usual t-shirts, Funko Pops and Porg plushes, but this year premium brands such as Bose and Adidas got in on the game with branded The Rise of Skywalker headphones and shoes, respectively. But perhaps the most shocking -- and the most talked about -- Star Wars product to come out of Force Friday this year came from cookware company Le Creuset. The premium brand, best known for its brightly colored cast-iron dutch ovens, released a pretty incredible set of dutch ovens, roasters and mini cocottes that were straight from a galaxy far, far away. If you're planning on hosting Christmas on Coruscant, these are items you need to make your holiday celebrations a success.
KitchenAid’s $3,199 SmartOven+ connects to Google Home and Alexa
KitchenAid's water- and sauce-resistant Smart Display got most of the attention at CES 2019, but the company also announced a smart oven, which it promised would come with powered grilling, steaming and baking stone attachments. Now, the SmartOven+ is ready. You can purchase the single configuration for $3,199 or the double for $4,799; a combo set-up will arrive later this year. As for the attachments, the powered grill add-on ships with the oven, but you'll have to order the others separately.
MIT is turning AI into a pizza chef
Never mind having robots deliver pizza -- if MIT and QCRI researchers have their way, the automatons will make your pizza as well. They've developed a neural network, PizzaGAN (Generative Adversarial Network), that learns how to make pizza using pictures. After training on thousands of synthetic and real pizza pictures, the AI knows not only how to identify individual toppings, but how to distinguish their layers and the order in which they need to appear. From there, the system can create step-by-step guides for making pizza using only one example photo as the starting point.
The unfiltered joy of Christine McConnell's 'Mortal Kombat' cake
Rose is an obese, Frankenstein raccoon with a pink bow on top of her ratty head and a bent fork where her left hand should be. She's blindly self-possessed, spending her days devouring sweets and torturing men -- and often vice versa. She's died at least twice, and each time, she's been lovingly brought back to life by her creator, Christine McConnell.
Netflix’s ‘Nailed It!’ casts season two with a cookie selfie challenge
Netflix's cooking competition show Nailed It! is looking for bakers for its upcoming second season and it's going a rather interesting route to find them. Host Nicole Byer announced a competition through which aspiring Nailed It! contestants can earn a spot on the show -- bake some cookies and then decorate them in your likeness. The #bakeyourselfie challenge requires applicants to bake a batch of sugar cookies from a recipe the show has provided, which you can find here. Then decorate a cookie based on a selfie you've taken and post both on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. Make sure to tag #bakeyourselfie and @nailedit.
Smart bakeware tells you when your cheesecake is ready
Temperature is everything when you're baking, but it's not all that fun to keep poking your dessert with a thermometer or toothpick to make sure it's truly finished. You might not have to before long: GE Appliances' FirstBuild community has unveiled a Precision Bakeware concept that alerts you through a mobile app when your baked goods reach their ideal temperature. Instead of hanging around the kitchen out of fear that your cheesecake is overdone, you can walk away and finish watching that favorite show.
Cooking app maker wants a standard for smart kitchen devices
There are plenty of smart cooking devices to help you bring masterpieces to the table. However, they don't usually talk to each other -- your sous vide tool doesn't know the weight of the ingredients you measured on a scale just a couple of feet away. SideChef wants to fix that. The cooking app developer is building a platform that lets kitchen gadgets work in unison. Once you pick a recipe, every device would know what to do. Your oven would start pre-heating, for instance, while your mixer would run at just the right speed to blend everything together.
A $1,495 toaster oven takes the guesswork out of cooking
It may look like the toaster oven that you fed yourself with that time you were on the lam and hiding in a seedy motel, but this could be the future of cooking. Meet June, a tabletop oven that combines cutting-edge heating elements, clever sensors and smartphone technology to build "the computer... that cooks." Technology-wise, there's an NVIDIA Tegra K1 chip with a 2.3GHz quad-core processor paired with a 5-inch touchscreen and a "full HD" camera that's been embedded in the ceiling. You guessed it: the camera is for posting pictures of your culinary concoctions to Instagram.
Drop Kitchen Connected Scale drops just in time for your holiday baking
So, you've got to bake a few dozen Christmas cookies for your little girl's robotics club, but you have absolutely no idea how to cook ... or even how to measure ingredients. Never fear -- the Drop Kitchen Connected Scale (US$99.99) and its associated free recipe app are going to turn you into a baking pro. As you can see from the snappy video above, the idea behind Drop is to turn anyone -- with an iPad running iOS 8.0 or later and some common kitchen tools -- into an expert baker. Drop can weigh anything from 6 kg down to less than a single gram, and uses interactive recipes to help you have success in the kitchen. You just pour ingredients into a bowl on the scale until you reach the correct amount, stir or blend, pour into a cake or loaf pan, then let the app tell you when to take the masterpiece out of the oven. What if you don't have enough flour or you've run out of milk? Not a problem, as the app can help you find substitutions that will work and can also scale the other ingredients so that you can still make at least part of a batch of cookies out of that remaining flour. The recipes are designed to be mixed in a single bowl for less cleanup, and there's even a social sharing aspect to the app for bragging about your latest kitchen success. Drop uses Bluetooth LE to talk to your iPad or iPad mini, and the battery should last up to a year of normal use. Drop is available for ordering online today, but the device will be available soon at Apple Stores in the US, Canada, and the UK. You can also purchase Drop online from Apple.com, Brit+Co, Food52, and Harvey Norman stores in Ireland.
PantryChic's Bluetooth ingredient dispenser is for lazy, type-A bakers
Earlier this summer, we showed you a smart kitchen scale that worked with an iPad app to make sure you were adding the right amount of each ingredient to your recipe. At the time, it seemed like the Internet of Things had reached its peak. Jumped the shark, even. Well, apparently even that requires too much effort. Meet PantryChic, an airtight food canister that dispenses ingredients into a digital scale, so that you never even have to break out a measuring cup. All told, if you were serious about your baking (and seriously OCD), you could buy any number of these stackable canisters, and fill each with a different ingredient, like baking soda or brown sugar. Then, when you need one, you attach it to the digital scale, which is pre-programmed to dispense 50 ingredients (meaning, it knows how to convert volume to weight). Oh, and don't worry about pushing any buttons: You can connect over Bluetooth using the PantryChic app, at which point the machine can "see" what recipe you're using and know, for instance, that you need three cups of flour.
Flavourit for iPhone is a good-looking, digital recipe book
Flavourrit is a new recipe management app for iPhone that lets you quickly and easily create and store recipes as attractive, interactive cards that are searchable by title, ingredients and up to 46 subcategories. The beautiful app makes it easy to see exactly which ingredients are needed and when. Well-designed, assignable icons illustrate the various cooking methods, so there's less text to get lost in. From a glance you can see what action needs to take place next. For example, a knife indicates chopping, while a mixer means all ingredients are to be mixed together. Of course, if you do need to add / see additional text, tap a button and the text appears next to the ingredients as per the stage you're at in the recipe. Once the necessary ingredients and methods have been collected, the app encourages you to take a photo of the completed dish, making it easy to find later. Adding recipes to Flavourit can feel a little cumbersome, but taking the time to do so accurately -- as well as a bit of time getting used to how the app works -- produces elegant, straight-forward recipes that can be shared via Facebook or as digital photos via email, text or printing. Flavourit has an in-app purchase that adds a shopping list feature and eliminates pop-up ads. Finally, as a version 1.0 app, Flavourit isn't as buttery-smooth as it could be. At times, I found myself having to repeatedly tap and swipe at things to get the desired result. Hopefully, updates will produce a more reliable experience. Despite these niggles, Flavourit is a great place to start. Have a look at Flavourit in action in the video below.
This robot bakes the world's most expensive flatbread
You wouldn't expect robots to be into baking, but we've seen more than a few examples of the two coming together. Rotimatic is the latest smart kitchen appliance that wants to take the effort out of making Roti -- hot flatbreads. It was invented by Pranoti Nagarkar, who found making Roti by hand so tiresome, that she built the device to save her having to do it herself. It works by pulling together flour, oil and water from three hoppers, mixing them into a dough and baking it into bread in under two minutes.
Daily iPad App: Hone your culinary skills with the Baking with Dorie app
Most people can whip up some brownies or bust out a batch of cookies on a whim, but if you want to prepare a pie from scratch, you may need some help. One of the best apps to boost your baking skills is the new Baking with Dorie app. The multimedia-rich app features baking lessons from culinary guru Dorie Greenspan. She's known for her baking cookbooks including the popular Baking with Julia, a classic cookbook that pays homage to Julia Child with recipes from more than 20 of the top bakers in the US. The Baking with Dorie app takes the recipe and images from a traditional cookbook and pairs it with videos to create the ultimate digital cooking lesson. You not only get to see some lovely baked goods, you also get to watch a video that shows you how to make them. All the recipes include text, images and tips, but the videos are extra. The app has one free recipe with videos, and you can buy additional recipe videos for US$0.99 each. You can also pay $9.99 to unlock videos for all the recipes. There are about 25 recipes available as of the writing of this post. The recipes are presented either in cookbook, stepview, spinview or chartview style, and you can pick the one that best fits your needs. Besides recipes, Baking with Dorie also has a timer and grocery list to help make sure you have the right ingredients on hand. The Baking with Dorie app is available for free from the iOS App Store. It's a must-have for anyone who enjoys spending time in the kitchen.
Engineer builds gingerbread house using CAD and lasers, aging droids approve
It's not that often we see the worlds of baking and technology mix, but when Johan von Konow went about making a traditional gingerbread house for the holidays, he added a laser to the recipe. The engineer and tinkerer first went about designing an accurate, miniature 3D representation of his summer house in a CAD program, with the help of his wife. He then printed outlines of the necessary building blocks onto sheets of baked gingerbread, and used a 50-watt laser engraver to cut them out and score icing guides for the final touches later on. Burnt edges rendered the confectionary inedible, but as its final destination was no longer stomachs, raw lasagna sheets were added for structural support, and hot glue used to bind it all together. If you've got all the kit and are feeling inspired by the picture above, the design layout and project walkthrough are available at the source link below. Hansel and Gretel needn't be worried this time around -- the tech used creating this particular gingerbread house has attracted a different kind of aged tenant.
AGA's iTotal Control range cooker packs GSM connectivity, lets you pre-heat via SMS or web
There are many options available if you want to control your appliances over WiFi, but how about an oven with its own SIM card and phone number? That's exactly what AGA has done with its latest kitchen-oriented offering, the iTotal Control range cooker. Regardless of whether you're cooking in one, or all three of its ovens, sending an SMS message to this smart appliance lets you control each one. It even texts you back to confirm whether your commands like "baking oven on" successfully initiate. The cooker naturally works over WiFi as well, giving you an on-screen emulation of its control panel on either your computer's web browser or AGA's iOS and Android apps. An external GSM remote access device -- basically a router / modem -- connects to the appliance to make it all happen, with cellular service provided by Orange. Ready to get cooking? The iTotal Control is set to sell for a hefty base-price of £10,090 (~$15,826), and you'll also be tied to a one-year contract with Orange for £5.95 (~$9) a month to enable the texting functionality. Simmer over the details at the source link below.
SWITL scoops oozy goop with amazing robotic precision (video)
Look, sometimes, not often, but sometimes we'll miss a truly spectacular and mind bending story that requires a double-back. The SWITL robotic hand is just such a case. The patent-pending technology looks to have been revealed on video back in late October showing the Furukawa Kikou robot deftly lifting a ketchup and mayonnaise mess from a table and then replacing it unchanged from its original shape. The tech was developed for bakeries with the intention of automating the handling of soft substances that were either too malleable or too icky for human hands. Unfortunately, Furukawa Kikou isn't providing any details about the science behind SWITL so we'll just assume that it's Satan's work until otherwise informed. See what we mean in the video after the break.
Breakfast Topic: What is your favorite World of Warcraft fan art or media?
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages. With the massive number of players logging in every day to WoW, there's an equally expansive amount of art and media coming from that player base. Very few games have ever brought out such a community of creative minds showing the rest of us their vision of a fantasy world. From machinima to custom WoW dolls (I mean action figures -- right, guys?), to Horde/Alliance-themed cakes, there are a ton of different venues for artists of all varieties to express their passion for the game. I've just recently begun to start watching WoW-based machinima and have discovered there are quite a few masterpieces out there from people who seem talented enough to write or direct feature films. After the Cataclysm launch, I'm going to start an ongoing fan fiction story about a rogue and what his life is like after Deathwing ravages Azeroth. It should be plum full of adventures and high jinks! Although I'd love to include custom artwork with that story, my drawing skill ends at stick figures, so I'll have to use to screen shots. Out of all the different art, videos, and other "warcrafts," are there any you'd like to participate in? Or maybe you already check out great fan art, make custom troll outfits for cosplay, or bake cupcakes shaped like murlocs. What are your favorites?
Google's gingerbread Androids are fully baked, can the OS be far behind?
Continuing with our cookery theme this morning, we now have a full tray of scrumptious-looking gingerbread Android men, courtesy of Google Mobile's Twitter account. The whole world and his poodle already know that Gingerbread, Android's next iterative update that's presently expected to be given the numerical identifier of 2.3, is coming some time soon, but now Google's taken to fanning the flames of anticipation with some home cooking. What could it mean? Well, if you're an optimist, it means Android's about to receive its update imminently, but if you're a pessimist, you'll look at that Christmas-themed red and green attire and foretell of another month of waiting and thumb-twiddling. Either way, though, this seems to confirm Gingerbread is on track to land at some point before we welcome in 2011. Which can only be a good thing.
World of WarCrafts: Sweet! Labor Day cake update
World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself by contacting our tips line (attention: World of WarCrafts) - not-for-profit work only, please.Holiday weekends call for a focus on the festive and the fun, something World of WarCrafts is uniquely qualified to deliver. How can you beat WoW cakes and WoW costumes? Actually, you'll have to wait until next week for the costumes - but they're real humdingers, including behind-the-scenes construction notes and photos of award winners from this year's Blizzcon. In the meantime, let's get an eyeful - and a taste, too, because we've got recipes! - of some of truly spectacular WoW cakes. First up: a Gnomeregan cake sent in by reader James, created by his girlfriend Charlie especially for his birthday. "She's really pulled out the stops and done a cracking job on my party, and everyone loved the cake," he wrote. We couldn't agree more - oh, sorry, didn't mean to stick a finger in the wrench there ... Let's just lick that off before we type a bit more ... Mmm ...Join us after the break for the Gnomeregan Cake recipe plus a Cake Wrecks look at WoW cakes.
