InternetofJim

It cooks with heated plates, but it's an entirely different cooking process than something like Foreman-- more versatile, and with dramatically better results and enables new cooking techniques which can't be done reliably on any other device.

Good suggestion. We plan to do that. There are already two early examples in our blog at blog.cindercooks.com: The grilled cheese grilled sandwich (the cheese is browned inside the sandwich) and an example of testing salmon recipes 4 different ways. But lots more to come...

I try to eat as little solder as possible, even RoHS stuff :-) more seriously, getting a whole 10x10 plate to the same temp is trickier than just controlling a single point...

There's only one version, and it has both an app and a an onboard UI based on a knob-button with an embedded dot matrix display. We're very conscious of the tradeoff between onboard and app controls.

The knob lets you have full manual control of temperature, but is not a good way to share recipes or learn how to cook something you don't do every day. So you want to make a quick panini or egg, the knob is great. On the other hand, we don't want to be like your microwave, with tons of features hidden behind scrolling text prompts and a keypad.

On the other hand, an app interface lets you have a different UI for each food type, so you can ask for a medium rare steak or light brown caramelized onions.

Once you've used the app to set things up, you'll be hands-on in the kitchen, so the next few steps can be controlled from the knob or the app.

We're shooting for around 4 minutes, but depends on our production heating plates, which will have better heat transfer than the beta units. Also a question of whether/how we take advantage of 20A kitchen circuits.

Internally, it's all metric, and we'll have that choice in the app.

The cooker goes up to a brief peak of 1600W when it's heating up rapidly, but for the extended cooking period, it stays well under 100W average.

Also worth mentioning is that there isn't a lot of juice running out of the food, because it generally stays inside. When you see a lot of liquid running out of meat, that's the taste running down the drain. Since I've started cooking on this, I've found that I do a lot less saucing, because the food itself is so much juicier and tastier.

It's pretty, but there's nothing delicate about this cooker, and we plan to do a fairly extensive test program. We intend for this to be a real workhorse for cooks, usable several times per day for years.

We really haven't noticed any significant oxidation over cook times of up to 4 hours; We have not yet tested something like a 72 hour recipe.

We do plan to have public demos from time to time (we've already done a few at various meetups and other events -- we're based here in SoMa). If you'd like, email info >>at<< cindercooks.com, and we can add you to our mailing list so you could be notified of these events.

Check out my blog post, which covers a bunch of this at http://blog.cindercooks.com/cinder/2015/3/4/hot-tips. We'll keep talking there about what we can do and soliciting ideas on new creative ways to use it.

Our sensor elements are accurate out of the box, so in theory we shouldn't have to. But I'll admit, for our beta units, we still are calibrating each unit, largely for our readout electronics. We'll either fix this in the production model, or we'll have a highly automated calibrator.

We raise the temperature back up as quickly as possible without overshooting in thst case. During low temp cooking, you really only care about the maximum temperature, so you don't care much, it just takes a little longer to finish. But during sear of a protein, you just drive the temperature high enough that any loss from adding food or water to the plate is acceptable.

Absolutely, it works beautifully from frozen. Incidentally, it's also great at rewarming, since many of the bad effects of reheating are from local overheating in a microwave or oven.

Thus far, it's been a lot easier to make people think of the positive connotation and ignore the negative than is generally thought. The name is intended to evoke low heat-- blow on a coal and it glows softly red, gently warming your food.

Induction is the best kind of burner for traditional cooking, but it's not capable of either the evenness or the accuracy required. Even a copper pan can have as much as a 30-50 degree differential across the surface, regardless of how you heat it. And medium rare is a 5 degree range, caramelization is just 8 degrees for that nice sweetness, and eggs change with literally every degree. So those degrees count.

No, not using induction, just traditional resistive heating plus materials, shape and heater design to get even heating.

Preventing overshoot is a matter of the control method. We have a model of the system and use a predictive control algorithm to cut off heating just when we need to in order to hit the target without overshoot.

Precision cooking is the same, but this goes way beyond sous vide, because we can go above boiling, which is where all the fun reactions happen.

Caramelization, browning, and similar reactions are what produce the really great, complex, flavors in the best food. It's not just about searing steak -- we can take apples and convert them into apple pie filling with no added sugar. We can make butternut squash sweet and eggplant creamy. We can perfectly brown cheese without burning it, so you can have a grilled cheese where the cheese inside is browned, like the stuff that sticks to the grill.

We have a test chef who is coming up with new ways to use this all the time, and we're going to share them through the app so everyone can play.

Co-founder/CTO here with a little backstory. Cinder (YC W’15) is like a countertop grill that controls temperature precisely to 2F across the entire cooking surface. I’m hoping this is exciting to HN because it’s not just a connected cooker— it means you can hack your food. With this accuracy, you can target specific kinds of chemical reactions, fine tune your preferences and when you come up with something amazing, send the cooking recipe and your friends can replicate it anywhere. I put a quick summary of some of these things at http://blog.cindercooks.com/cinder/2015/3/4/hot-tips.

Feel free to ask me any questions here about Cinder or the magic of cooking more generally.