A case for Smart Cooking

Cooking is a blend of both art and science.

While combining ingredients, understanding flavor pairings, figuring out how to fix a dish might require some creativity, the rest of it is automating mundane tasks like stirring, sauteing, maintaining the same temperature, and watching over the food. Cooking is usually not just the act of making food. It also includes: deciding what to eat, planning meals, shopping for groceries, maintaining your groceries, chopping, prepping, cooking, and cleaning up after.

The aid of technology in most cases can definitely make a few things simpler and more efficient in cooking.

What is smart cooking?

In the traditional IoT sense, smart cooking is the usage of connected devices that work through the internet to cook food. The device can be typically controlled through a mobile phone which acts as the data exchanger between the device and the mobile phone.

Here’s how a tech idealist’s dream of a smart cooking kitchen would look: What if you had a smart refrigerator that conveys that something is going to expire and then your smart cooking assistant urges you to try this out to minimize waste in your refrigerator. Controlling things from your phone. Bluetooth-enabled devices that can talk to each other. Voice-controlled devices.

Well, one can dream.

While the above scenario doesn’t seem entirely impossible, we are in reality, far away from the kitchen is entirely disrupted.

So let's for the sake of simplicity define smart cooking as follows: Use of technology to simplify a specific aspect of cooking.

A snapshot of a few smart-cooking devices

Extending beyond cooking, there are a ton of smart kitchen devices that also help you manage your pantry, order groceries more efficiently, and minimize waste. Smart blenders, toasters, refrigerators, stovetops, are a few examples of smart cooking devices.

Beyond this, there are also smart devices like the Ovie which help you store your food in a smart way or smart chopping boards that also double up as a weighing scale.

How does smart cooking help?

Apart from helping you manage your cooking process efficiently, there are hidden benefits of smart cooking.

Helps the novice cook:

For novice cooks, cooking is an anxiety-ridden process. Understanding if the temperature is right or even knowing if something is cooked through, is something that only comes with a lot of practice. Whereas, smart cooking enables novice cooks to get a level-playing field where technology does most of the heavy lifting for them. This drastically reduces the fear of failure and gives the novice cook a lot of confidence to put a nice meal on the table.

Outsource cooking:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women do most of the household chores, grocery shopping, and cooking. For women, who are working and are primary caregivers of the household, this can be a very tiring process. The usage of smart kitchen assistants can enable anybody, irrespective of their cooking skills, to fix themselves a nutritious meal.

Related: 10 Reasons Why Cooking at Home Trumps Eating Out

Designed for you

Take the humble pressure cooker. For the uninitiated, a pressure cooker is a simple gadget that builds up pressure inside the pot and cooks things faster, especially beans and legumes that take a long time.

The problem?

Most people were scared to use a pressure cooker. There have been stories of explosions. The mere name signifies that it could be a potentially dangerous device.

But the Instant Pot changed it all. It became an instant hit with many who discovered a newfound love for cooking through the instant pot. The valve is designed in a way that.

Helps you be more efficient

By this time, we have established that cooking is a tedious process. It is time-consuming, it takes a lot of mental and physical effort. But with the aid of technology, what if things could be easier? Devices are designed to cut down on cooking time, or take the entire process away from you.

Helps you explore newer cuisines

One of the advantages of having your meal cooked for you is that you simply tend to try out newer things. Typically, this entire process is more expensive in restaurants. But in the comfort of homes, the barrier to exploring new cuisines could be simply the knowledge of cooking the new dish. Whereas, if you rely on a smart kitchen device, the process becomes easier and pushes you to experiment with newer cuisines.

How Julia enables smart cooking?

Being a company that wanted to disrupt the way kitchens are, here’s how we’ve incorporated some of the essential principles of smart cooking.

• Fully Autonomous: Choose a recipe, load all the ingredients, and Julia takes over to cook the meal for you.
• Customize your food your way: Hate spice, love cheese? Add a little extra to your food and customize it to
• Make it really simple for anyone to use: Novices to experts. In fact, here’s a video of a kid using Julia.

If you’d like to take Julia for a run, sign up to get on our waitlist.