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Comment by ska | Hacker News Reader

An interesting idea, but a couple of things jumped out at me immediately.

1) Keeping track of surface and/or pan temperature is useful but it isn't nearly as useful as keeping track of internal temperature[1]. I'm not sure what the technical challenges are, but having one or more small wireless temperature probes would be far more useful to me than one limited use pan, which leads to ...

2) I cook a lot, but I have very few uses for a non-stick frypan, and very few uses for any pan that isn't oven safe[2]. That and the short useful lifetime of any non-stick pan (at any price range) make me wonder about this.

[1] Otherwise you're just hoping your inputs are roughly equivalent to the last time you did this, or what the recipe assumes.

[2] i'm making an assumption here, but couldn't find any info

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Keeping track of cooking surface time and temperature, plus knowing about what you're cooking (i.e. salmon fillet, 3/4" thick), lets us get a surprisingly good model of the internal conditions and adjust dynamically. The result is really quite delicious! We've done a lot of testing and development, and if you're following the interactive recipes in good faith, you'll get a good result when you cook. (Think about how much information even a trained chef has, using intuition about the right heat level and cooking time -- we can do better with quantitative temperature and time data, even though we can't actually poke the piece of salmon.)

Pantelligent is not oven safe -- today's electronics would not operate at oven temperatures. Having temperature regulation avoids overcooking the nonstick coatings, which prolongs their life.

(We just launched the Kickstarter campaign, and are in the middle of posting some FAQs right now!)

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.

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.

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.

My biggest problems with this:

Why would I choose this over a $180 Anova Precision cooker, or any other sous vide cooker?

With sous vide methods, you don't need to worry so much about the internal temperature of the meat when starting, because you can guarantee a homogenous temperature with enough time. With this, you will need to worry and check - just as you do now. Heterogeneously defrosted chicken, like the kind that happens when you try to defrost in a microwave, may be undercooked in some areas, overcooked in other areas. So there's no such thing as "set it and forget it" for the average consumer without fresh, because, let's face it, the average consumer doesn't always use fresh chicken.

There's no mention of support of induction burners.

Meat (aka pork and beef) will suck, plain and simple. It's going to be too hot to cook meat to a perfect doneness (maybe not with an electric burner)... but definitely not hot enough (nor with enough thermal mass) to generate a nice crust or a steak or a chop without (what I would consider) overcooking the inside.

For fresh fish, risotto, curries, etc- sure, I know it can excel there- but I don't want a $200 "set it and forget it" fish cooker, especially when there are guaranteed sous vide methods which can produce high quality food, and the saucy stuff is pretty easy anyway.

If you would want to try to change my mind, you could send one to Dave Arnold to evaluate.

Beta tester here. I have both and use them for different things. Yes, 50 minutes in an Anova and finishing/searing for 5 minutes on a pan will get you a great medium rare steak. If I'm in a rush, I will use the pan and make a 90% as a good (okay, hand waving here) medium rare steak on the pan in about 15 minutes.

Don't get me wrong, I think there are people who will love this- especially people who frequently cook fish and those who make risottos.

I'm far from a great cook, but I've been cooking 4-5 times a week the last 5 years, and what I do know is this won't do fast and furious nor low and slow well.

Furthermore, induction burners with temperature control (and even temperature probes!) are widely available, cheap, and relatively precise as well, and you can (mostly) use any pan, so long as you learn the quirks of whatever pan you are using.

As a home cooking enthusiast, this feels a lot like "not invented here" to me.

IMO, a better solution would be to pair an induction burner and temperature probes with bluetooth.

Some advantages of Pantelligent over sous vide:

  * cooks a steak in 20 minutes, not 2 hours
  * don't cook all your food in plastic bags
  * not limited to foods you can stick in a waterbath (omelettes? pancakes? etc)
  * most sous vide recipes have you finish with a pan sear anyway!

"Meat (aka pork and beef) will suck, plain and simple." -- This is false. Pantelligent steak is absolutely one of my favorite recipes! Check out some photos http://facebook.com/Pantelligent

Why isn't this an electric skillet?

Edit (oops I thought you could control temperature. My bad. An electric skillet would do that, but not look as cool.)

I would highly recommend that you experiment with modulating the temperature. You can get a measure of the thickness and total thermal mass based on spectral response. A simple heat diffusion model should also let you estimate internal temperature, if you assume the slice is thin relative to diameter. Note that the convection and radiant heat flows from the pan won't change as the food cooks (only from the top of the food)... At the beginning (assuming a heated pan) heat flow into the food will dominate and near the end I expect evaporation will change.

You should also be able to do a better job with onions and things you want to cook slowly,because you will see a rapid drop in thermal flow as moisture levels drop... Note, also that boiling evaporation doesn't depend strongly on temperature. Cooking a proper roux could likely also be made more simple,if you knew when to pay close attention.

It's a bit like a rice cooker. Those can actually be VERY smart.

The non-stick surface really makes this a nonstarter for me. I've got cast iron and stainless steel pans...I wouldn't cook on Teflon even if it were free.

For real home chefs, non-stick pans are great. They're just so easy to cook on and clean. And by actually knowing the temperature of the pan, you can avoid the deterioration of non-stick coatings that can occur in (non-smart) pans when they are unintentionally brought to very high temperatures.

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