In the past we all thought the future of cooking would like adding a drop of water to a pill
and poof a turkey dinner. Well it’s 2015 and the closest we’ve got is a cup of noodles.
So while we scale back our visions of Just Add Water food pills, what does the future
of cooking actually look like?
Hey guys Julia here for DNews
For most of human history cooking required raw ingredients and applied heat, usually
in the form of fire. And all that peeling and slicing, to boiling and baking cooking
took a lot of time. Not to mention just heating up a pot of water meant heating up the whole
fire or stove which heated up the whole kitchen or house. So cooking was laborious and time
intensive.
Then little inventions like the refrigerator and microwave changed everything. The countertop
microwave hit the scene in 1967 and suddenly dinner could be ready in a matter of minutes.
So it’s been nearly 50 years since then, so how would a kitchen 50 years from now look?
The former CTO of Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold, came out with a high tech, high price tag
cookbook of the almost future. Many of the recipes and suggestions in Modernist Cuisine
are currently used by chefs in very fancy kitchens. But they’re mostly out of reach
for the average joe. But it’s certainly fascinating look into what happens when a
scientist steps into the kitchen.
The most within-in reach is a recent trend sweeping cooking in the Western world is sous-vide
[soo-veed] cooking. This is essentially slow cooking food by vacuum-sealing it plastic
bags and placing the bags in a temperature controlled water bath. When I say slow, I
mean slow, a few days at least. This keeps the meat evenly cooked throughout. So it’s
not over cooked on the outside and undercooked in the middle, it also keeps the moisture
in. My old roommates actually used a thing like this to cook their food sometimes. It
was pretty tasty.
The book also suggests some tools you’d more likely see in a scientific lab than in
a kitchen. homogenizers and centrifuges and liquid nitrogen. The liquid nitrogen is used
to cryo-fry meat and vegetables. A quick dunk in the LN tank before it goes in the frier.
This makes the outside of the food hot and crisp but doesn’t over cook the middle.
Industrial kitchen sized centrifuges can costs tens of thousands of dollars which basically
looks like a typical washing machine. But instead of a spin cycle for your dirty jeans,
it can puree peas. If you’ve ever used one of the table top versions in a lab, you know
pretty much what a centrifuge can do. It spins the peas, or whatever so fast that is actually
separates the different layers of juice, starch, and fat.
And even the blender, a steady kitchen staple, gets an update in modernist cooking. A rotor-stator
homogenizer, again, something you’re used to in a lab, can suck up your ingredients
spin them around really fast, and shoot them back out through holes located in the tip.
Basically, it mixes better and blends food better and smoother than traditional blenders.
While many of these gadgets already exist and are used frequently in scientific labs,
high tech and a high quality chefs are bringing them into the kitchen. Even writer Corby Kummer
who reviewed the Modernist Cuisine for the MIT Technology Review said that he "came away
convinced that these techniques and ingredients will be essential for cooks of the future."
But the modernist cuisine is just one look into the future. Other companies and organizations
get all heated up when thinking about the kitchens of the 21st century and beyond.
Innit®, a new company that manages and connects food information, are designing what they
call “the self-driving car of ovens”. It’s a broiler, baking, convection, and
microwave oven all in one. The oven knows what food you’ve put in it and knows exactly
how long to cook it thanks to built in sensors. But the sensors don’t stop there.
Innit envisions a kitchen covered in sensors. Sensors in your fridge could tell you exactly
what you have in there, how long it’s been sitting there, and how to turn those ingredients
into the perfect meal.
Even your cutting board will be covered in sensors. It can tell you how to chop that
tomato and what sort of recipes will go along with it. While these inventions could help
making cooking for people like me a little easier, they also cut down on waste.
I always leave cucumbers in the back of the fridge and forget about them for weeks, so
I wind up throwing them out. But if my fridge at a sensor on it, it could remind me of food
that’s been sitting there for a while and how exactly it’s best to use that food now
that it’s a little softer than it should be.
While some of us take our modern kitchens and even our microwaves for granted, other
places in the world struggle to have basics like electricity and still use open fire to
cook. Be sure to check out our other episode on Seeker Stories, where we discovered how
constant blackouts and a lack of electricity in general impacts daily life in Tanzania,
and to learn more about people who live with energy
poverty, visit One.org/energy
Since all of this fancy kitchen stuff is still a little far off, for now I’ll stick microwaving
my mac and cheese. Speaking of microwaves, how do they cook your food anyways? Find out
how in this episode, right here.
So what sort of gadget would you like to see in your kitchen in the future?