Get Over The Past, Take A Look At The Future...

 

Cooking Equipment of the Future?

December 30, 2008 at 3:21 PM by Paul Hope | comment

This holiday season may have been one of the most exhausting yet. The company was great all around though as someone who celebrates both Christmas and Hanukkah, I must say that the burden was unusually large. Since I graduated culinary school, I'm also of course expected by my family to cook. After spending days slaving over roast beef, flipping latkes and roasting veggies, I began to wonder if there wasn't something to simplify the process, in time for next December.

It was this quandary that led me to the TurboChef, one of the hottest new appliances to hit the market. It's a built-in single or double wall oven that combines conventional, convection and microwave cooking into one appliance. The result is an oven that, according to the manufacturer, can roast a 12-pound turkey in forty-two minutes! If you're not a fan of turkey, it can also prepare a full rack of lamb in four minutes, chocolate soufflés in two minutes or roasted asparagus in forty-five seconds.

While we haven't tested it at the Research Institute, here's how it works. The controls allow you to select a cooking mode, temperature and time, just like a normal oven. It's also pre-programmed with over 500 recipes like chocolate chip cookies or roasted butternut squash. It works by baking conventionally and with microwave heat. Hot air jets spray foods constantly which keeps them crispy and seriously shortens cook times. It does have limitations however. At $7,500, it's way too pricey for most of us, and the oven is only 2.5 cubic feet, about half the size of a traditional oven, something which is bound to interfere around the holidays when oven space is already limited. The double oven model offers a conventional lower oven, for those times you just need a regular oven.

While it may not seem too practical for the time being, in as little as ten years we could all be using these to prepare our holiday feasts. Or, some other technology could come along and make these obsolete. While it's probably best not to make a wager on what the future of any technology will be, one thing I'll bet on is by the time my grandchildren are making holiday meals of their own, they'll laugh when I tell them that once upon a time, it took me over an three hours to roast a turkey.

 ENJOY your future see you there...