Two Ideas

The New York Times’ annual Ideas issue highlights food wrapping that changes color when the food is bad.

I suggested this idea back in February 2005.

This week, my Cuisinart CSC-650 Slow Cooker trashed another batch of food. The temperature was too hot, and stayed too hot, and burned the heck out of my sweet potatoes. When I made stock this week, it also cooked too hot, and spit and made a mess of the countertop. The Amazon reviews suggest that many other people have the same problems that I did.
The Cuisinart has ruined food before, but enough was enough. This time, I gave up on the cooker, and got permission from my lovely wife to disassemble it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have a real thermostat, so it wasn’t something I could adjust. I ended up trashing the device, which was somewhat cathartic (not as cathartic as fixing it would have been). Oh well, I wasn’t going to be using it again anyway.
Wikipedia says that , for “safety” reasons. A couple of people have also looked into hacking slow cookers, but nobody seems to have done much work to solve the problem.
I’ve considered just buying another slow cooker after reading some reviews and meta-reviews, but I feel sure that whatever I get will just cook at too high a temperature.
What I really want is a tweaked-out slow cooker with a PID controller that’s content to let me cook at “unsafe” temperatures. It looks like this Hamilton Beach model actually uses a temperature probe to control cooking, and at $50 I might give it a try, but the absence of a high-end gadget model with more precise controls is disappointing at best.

I love making risotto, but all the stirring! What if there was a nice, heavy risotto pot with a top like one of those old crank-driven popcorn poppers? It could slowly spin (driven electrically, presumably), making the risotto all nice and happy.

It’s easy to find a zillion flavored bagels, all of which are too sweet and too soft.

A good bagel with some solid coffee flavoring, toasted, with a schmear, sounds pretty good to me.

Chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, and peanut-butter chips can all be acquired for use in cookies. It seems that there must be a zillion other kinds of chips one might wish for: berry-flavored chips, coffee chips, and so on. The flavors might not be “real,” but kitchen shortcuts sell well regardless… plus they’re shelf-stable.

My stove was set to “medium” last night, but medium on my large burners is nothing like medium on my small burners. If I had a fancy stove, they would be different again.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the numbers shifted, so that the big burner started at 2 or 3 and went up to 11 or 12?

“This burner goes to 11” jokes aside, ratings based on a constant scale across different stoves could make recipes more universal.

I admit that I’ve always wanted the Hello Kitty Toaster that burns an image of everyone’s favorite promotional vehicle. Unfortunately, I don’t eat toast much, and I already have a toaster oven, which is useful for cooking fish sticks, too.

Even so, I’d buy a toaster that burned a jolly roger onto every slice of bread.

We’ve got self-heating lattes; I want self-popping popcorn, in a similar canister.

Wasteful? Lazy? You betchya! But it’d also be mighty convenient. Popcorn is so much better when it’s popped fresh…

Now that tablet computers are becoming affordable, there’s a whole lot of use for them in the kitchen. Including the Electronic Recipe Assistant. (Queue announcer voice: “A new ERA in home cooking has arrived…”)

Really it’s simple stuff. Aggregating the groceries for the week’s menus, and letting people “cross off” stuff they already have shelved, to produce nice grocery lists (print to any networked printer in the house). Touch the screen to see the next step — ERA will need a plastic screen guard, to keep the grease off, something you can toss in the dishwasher. Heck, if it’s got a loud enough speaker, it can read the next step, and respond to requests: “ERA: Next Step!”

I don’t know if I’m just a geek, but when I’m alone in the kitchen cooking, I could use an ERA…

Sliding panels are always cool. Hidden anything is neat. But Tupperware storage containers for the fridge that include secret compartments would be super-cool. Among other uses, you could hide leftovers of the good stuff from roommates and other potential scavengers. Plus they’d just be fun to play with.

One of the frustrations of making tea, or presspot coffee, is that boiling is rarely the correct temperature of the water. Especially for coffee and green tea, but also for other hot beverages, the water should typically be 20 degrees or more below a temperature that will set your kettle a-whistle.

It would be easy to build in a probe thermometer, which would test the temperature in the middle of the water, and to have it beep when the temperature gets to whatever you set, like a kitchen timer but for temperature.

It might be nice if it had a nice silcone-covered handle, like those fancy oven mitts.