Hacker News Reader

A friend is getting such a system to production for Indian recipes with Mechnical Chef [1] The demo looks incredibly cool [2]

[1] http://www.mechanicalchef.com/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBB0ZaN1paE

I'm not able to seek on the video he has embedded (using Chrome on Android here). I'd probably have looked for more than 10 s if I could have.

Here you go - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPooW6tqQts

Thank you.

Your friend is a genius! Any idea, how much is it going to cost? And will they plan to sell it in India?

Building a clunky device that imitates human actions is hardly 'genius'. Resourceful maybe. An electrical coffee grinder isn't a normal coffee grinder with some rotating lever attached to it. An electrical coffee grinder has small motors attached to the grinder mechanism in order to make it move. This contraption is fun to build I am sure, but not 'genius'.

Much closer to genius is the thermomix: https://thermomix.com/

I've been served Thermomix food and it was extremely unimpressive. I don't know how easy it was to make though, since I didn't participate in the cooking. I can just say that if it's any harder than microwaving it's probably not worth it.

Our Thermomix is in use everyday, and we love it, but it's not a device for the clueless or careless. Thermomix food is like any other food, the quality is entirely down to the recipe and person cooking it.

Here in Australia, Thermomix was recently ordered to pay $4.6 million in penalties for knowingly keeping safety issues relating to one of their appliances secret.

A malfunctioning lid caused hot liquid to escape from the bowl, giving several consumers severe burns. The Court found that Thermomix knew of this risk but still continued to promote and supply the faulty product.

Beware of genius inventions, you may get burned.

Sounds like the Cornballer http://arresteddevelopment.wikia.com/wiki/The_Cornballer

Whilst an impressively ambitious amateur electronics project, this is clearly not productisable and won't work for a whole ton of reasons. A reduced scope project or device however might be.

It costs around 25k INR which would be around 370 dollars. Here is the source - https://www.thebetterindia.com/147371/bengaluru-mechanical-c....

That's impressive, really impressive.

My system looks like it was put together by a drunk person. That is somewhat true.

> My system looks like it was put together by a drunk person. That is somewhat true.

This made want to see it even more.

That's how you know its built with quabity!

A bit off-topic: Not only is this incredibly impressive, it's a great white noise video, IMHO. Can listen to the robot cook do it's thing for a loong time. The Capsicum Sabzi video has a good amount of unintended ASMR, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0kf17jxeSY

I have a lot of questions about how it might work, but above all else I'm absolutely in awe of what MechanicalChef can already do! Truly amazing automation, and I can see how this could directly benefit…nearly everyone. I wish your friend success with this (and many delicious meals too)

That sounds amazingly complex and cool at the same time. Have you looked into sous vide machines or pressure cookers? Those two are the items I use the most to get precisely cooked meals done in batches.

I've found that a lot of meals done via the slow cooker tend to taste the same because of the consistently and the type of ingredients typically involved in them.

The problem with slow cookers is that the chop a bunch of stuff up, toss them in the slow cooker, and turn it on approach doesn't work all that well. You generally want to brown things etc.--and then you're not gaining that much. But, then, I'm mostly not a huge fan of stews in general.

Not GP, but he was saying pressure cooker over slow cooker. I got an instant pot about 6 months ago and I probably use it as much as my stovetop now. Even if you're pressure cooking a stew (it makes Indian cooking actually achievable) you can brown the meat in the same pot.

While it does double as a slow cooker, I have never actually used that functionality.

I think there are three problems with most slow cooker recipes.

1.) My hi/low setting probably doesn't match your hi/low setting. From the get go, we're cooking the same meal at two different temperatures.

2.) A lot of recipes seem to call for low setting for 8 hours. This works well for a lot of people with a standard American work day, since a stew/soup will stay above safe warming temperature in a nearly sealed pot. However, the cook times are too long. Thawed chicken for 8 hours on low almost never turns out with the right texture. In this case, it's convenience > taste.

3.) The flavor is cooked out of the ingredients, and/or there isn't enough seasoning or too many ingredients. When you get the seasoning right, too long of a cook time can dull the flavor. When there isn't enough seasoning, then your meal is bland from the start. When there are too many herbs and spices, you get a mish-mash of flavors that are all competing for attention. There was an article on here a long while ago that categorized foods into low and high amplitude flavors. Something sharply distinctive was high amplitude (think nacho cheese Doritos), while a low amplitude food had weak, hard to discern flavors (plain grits). Too many different ingredients can lead to low amplitude foods, and when I see an ingredient list with 15 different herbs and spices, I almost always steer clear.

Rozanne Gold made something of a career out of cookbooks using short, simple ingredient lists and mostly easy prep. I don't care as much any longer as I mostly work from home, but my work night preference--as opposed to slow cookers--has always tended toward the fast, easy saute. Especially with so many pre-prepped vegetables etc. in the grocery store these days, it seems like the best option for my tastes.

I'm a huge fan of simple meals that don't involve a crock pot. There are so many variations on stir fry, that you can eat a distinctly different tasting meal every day of the week. You can even combine the two to help with meal prepping.

Brown a flank steak in a pan. We're not sealing in juices - we're making a crust. Throw it in the slow cooker for a few hours. Check to make sure it's tender. Prep some veggies by cutting and portioning them in containers. Find a stew sauce that's simple. When you're ready to eat, saute your veggies in a little oil, and add a generous portion of sauce when your stir fry is near complete. Throw in the meat towards to end to heat. Serve over potatoes or rice or something simple.

Or a crock pot.

Crock pots and slow cookers are essentially the same, as far as I know. The only difference I can remember is that one is a metal bowl, and the other is a ceramic bowl.

I've always thought Crock Pot was a brand. It's the Kleenex of slow cookers. I call my slow cooker a crock pot even though it's made by some Target brand.

Yep. They’re effectively the same in the end.

Absolutely, pretty much anything I could think of doing in a slow cooker would be better off done in a pressure cooker, for about the same time investment from me.

Sous-vide much more specialized, but I find super useful not for saving time, per say, but being more flexible about it. It's great when you are doing other things at the same time as cooking dinner, i.e. - leave the steaks another 30 min while I do this chore? no problem....

Your tone sounds mildly apologetic but what you've cooked up (pun intended) is overflowing with pure hacker audacity and just mad nerdiness. You are a hero!

You don't have this pushed to a repo somewhere, do you? It would be great to be able to see how you do some of this.

I'd really like to see a YouTube demonstration & explanation. Seriously, if you can make a Raspberry Pi and Python code cook for you, you will be my hero.

And how much time did you spend automating those things? Is it worth? i.e Is the time spent on cooking minus time spent on automating a positive number?

(Not OP) I think, it is worth a lot, just for the fact, that if you are the lazy partner/spouse in the house. Then you can make things easier for the one that does the bulk of the chores.

One of these activities builds upon highly valuable skills and, when done, leaves more time to build upon said skills (or do anything else). The other does not.

Your comment reminds me of my favorite Douglas Adams quote:

"I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand."

Sometimes it simply isn't about net time saved.

oh man that is hilarious. I am so on that wavelength :)

Don't read his blog though, or you'll be tremendously disappointed.

Are you confusing him with Scott Adams?

I did. Shame on me. I was just quickly skimming the comments.

You might still be disappointed at the lack of updates :*(

I spent the best of a weekend putting it together. I could have done it quicker, but my son was helping. It was his mainly his idea.

I don't really save much time. The real benefit is knowing that the food won't burn. Growing up my mother would make soups and stews, she'd leave them to simmer for 30 mins without checking. The food on the bottom of the pot would burn and make the whole thing taste nasty. I wanted to make a system that would prevent that, whereas my son just loves building robots and playing with motors.

It was as much a project for me and my son to mess around with as much as an actual kitchen time saver. But we have plans to develop it and just see where it goes.

Sometimes it's not just the time saved over doing it by hand, which assumes that when you do it manually, you do it correctly. Automating things also removes potential for human error: when doing something by hand, you might screw up, which could cost you far more time (and materials). You should factor this into the "do I bother automating this?" decision.

I did this with the healthiest packaged food I could get on Amazon (quest makes pretty good stuff) and doing subscribe and save to get a 15% discount + 5% cash back on the Amazon visa card. It comes every month and I just eat all that.

Do you have any links to what you buy? I'd like to try some.

Please do post pictures and videos. It sounds like a real life rube goldberg machine!

> It sounds like a real life rube goldberg machine!

It has a very "Wallace and Gromit" sounding vibe to me!

We're /inventing/, Grommie!

I just bought an electric slow cooker. I leave it on for 12-24 hours depending. Does the same job without the complexity.

I'd consider retrofitting a Kitchen-Aide or other stand mixer. The epicyclic rotation should give you pretty good dispersion.

I'm just wondering, how do you spend this time you saved by using this terribly sounding device?

I want to try this when my wife goes back to work (Sunday meal prep, not the robots). Are you following any resources or just winging it? Ideally a single source that includes all the materials needed for the week and then recipes to make the dinners. Preferably with multiple weeks to rotate through.

please add some photos or video of your system in action. It sounds super cool. Especially the "very clunky" nature of it would inspire people to take on pretty daunting projects like this and get a "MVP" up and running. Just your description is inspiring. Thank you.

Any chance you could share your recipes?

You might find investing into a Thermomix a good idea:

https://thermomix.com/

I imagine the reason you're being downvoted is because you've posted this link multiple times without explaining your connection (if any) with this company. At the moment you look like a spammer.

Unrelated to GP, or to the company that makes those machines. But I do have one and it's pretty decent (but also loud on high speed settings). Saves us a bit of trouble here at home by automating some common things in cooking. Most of the time we use it for soups and batters.

Fair point. I dont have a connection. I just found it relevant in both branches of the discussion. In fact, I’d never buy one. But I would buy one before I started automating stirring food in pots.