Comment by ska | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ska | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

Interesting.

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.

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.

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