Super precise temperature control is one of the most important developments in all of cooking. If you have it, you can take almost any protein or almost any vegetable, select a final cooked state out of a (tiny) book, punch it into the control, and walk away for an hour, an afternoon, or a fortnight and come back to a 100% guaranteed perfect product.

Three example implications:

* You can buy $30 steaks, bag them, throw them in a rice cooker in the morning, go to work, come home, and have them perfectly rare-medium-rare all the way through. I'd say "better than at a steakhouse" if so many steakhouses weren't apparently switching up to cook steaks this way.

* You can take a tough braise cut (short ribs, octopus), bag it, stick it in the rice cooker for a couple days, and pull it out medium rare and tender. Tender medium rare short ribs are a novel product of precise temperature control; you can't do them on a grill.

* You can take a vegetable and cook it at a target temperature that breaks down starches but not pectin and get unique textures out of them. Keller, who has obviously better equipment than we do, combines this with compression to get steak-like textures out of things like melons.