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Scientists cook up super kitchen |
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Future home
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Written by Peter Warren
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Tuesday, 02 May 2006 |
Bought and published by Scotland on Sunday October 3, 1999
The humble kitchen, family refuge and haunt of the party bore, is to
undergo a revamp of startling proportions as scientists introduce the
computer cook.
Out will go the clutter and in will come the relentless efficiency we
normally associated with TV cookery programmes as space age technology
conjures up the exact style of cooking of your favourite chef.
Instead of those cookery books gathering dust you will be able download
recipes from the internet that will tell you what you must do to become
Marco White or Delia Smith.
In fact if the researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
have their way, soon the kitchen will turn you into a super chef and
then do the washing up.
“This is good technology,” said Joseph Kaye, the London born developer
of the system known as Counter Intelligence. “We are coming up with
things that will help people to cook and make it more enjoyable for
them.”
Things like radio controlled cookers, intelligent fridges, ingredient
containers, which can tell their own weight and know what ingredients
they hold, pans that know their own temperatures and a talking work-top
that can tell you what to do.
According to Kaye, the kitchen of the future is designed to help you and not to intimidate you.
“The idea is not create some uber computer, but to create a kitchen
which is the sum of the technology being used in the kitchen by putting
intelligence into a lot of the things ithat are in it.”
First to be rolled out according to Kaye is the smart kitchen worktop,
due to make its first appearance over the next ten years in the
hardware shops of the high streets and the catalogue collections of the
internet.
“The work-top will be able to read the jars and tell you where you are
in a recipe, preventing you from adding too many ingredients, so you
can follow a recipe exactly. But it’s not going to take away
improvisation because as well as being able to teach you it can also
learn from you so it will be able to say things to you like ‘this is
how many spoons of curry the recipe says, but you like it hotter than
that so add more’.”
An ability that will allow the system to accurately absorb the
authentic taste of ‘mother’s home cooking’ simply by asking her to
prepare a recipe in your kitchen or send you a computer disc to load
into your work-top.
Kaye’s aim is not to create a kitchen that takes over but one that
helps. It will do things like tell you when the fridge door is open, or
it could close itself. And it could either be pre-programmed to know
when breakfast is or taught to identify times of high demand so it can
pre-chill itself.
A simple enough function but one that could cut domestic electricity
bills by around 11% as the fridge is responsible for one of a
household’s biggest power drains.
Similar thinking is driving the innovations being tested by the MIT
team, which is following both shopping trends already identified by the
supermarkets and identifying some of the more hazardous problem areas
in today’s kitchens.
To cut down on the accidents caused by cooker hotplates, they have
developed a very simple device giving off an ominous glow if a hotplate
is on, and computer tags built into pans that know what temperature
they are meant to be at. If they start to exceed either the time or the
simmer they have been told to keep to, a radio signal is broadcast to
the cooker turning it down or off.
An innovation which creates a chain reaction, eradicating pans covered
with burnt food and cutting down on the energy needed to get them clean.
The kitchen of the future is all about thought.
“If your kitchen can help you cook then that’s fun, what’s not fun is
suddenly finding out that you’re cooking and that you’ve run out of
butter,” said Kaye, adding, ”washing up is no fun, the drudgery of the
kitchen is no fun.”
Something easily solved by introducing radio communication into the
kitchen. Putting the equivalent of speak your weight tags into kitchen
jars can link them directly to the internet, allowing them to create an
instant shopping list which can be sent either to a home PC, digital TV
system or direct to the supermarket.
Shopping for a dinner cooked by Delia, Anton or Marco will never be
easier, a phone call to the work-top will result in a recipe suggestion
based on what you have in, or you can tell it the recipe you want to
cook and it will tell you what you need to buy.
According to the writer Saki, by insisting on pointing your wine bottle
to the north and calling the waiter Max can massively impress your
guests but now that will not be necessary as selecting the perfect wine
will be no problem.
“That can be done in two ways. We are working on an intelligent
sommelier, that can use an information tag on the back of a wine bottle
to recommend a recipe to go it a wine and to know how long it should be
open for, or it can smell a wine and make suggestions for you.”
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