Share this article
Sous-vide, or the French cooking technique of slow-cooking meats and vegetables in vacuum sealed packs at low temperatures, is becoming an increasingly popular way of cooking for home chefs. One of the reasons is that sous-vide cooking also helps to seal in moisture and flavour to your meats and vegetables. As a result, more kitchen appliance makers are coming up with new inventions to help homeowners perfect their sous-vide cooking.
To recreate these results at home, you would ordinarily have to know about cooking temperatures and times, and you would have to be there to man the process. Thankfully Mellow, the world’s first smart sous vide machine, has simplified things for the home cook.
The Mellow is connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi and is controlled entirely via your smartphone. Say you’re working all day, but want a medium-rare steak for tonight’s dinner. Simply place the meat inside a self-sealing bag and pop it into the Mellow before you leave home. Use the app to select what you’re cooking, and state when you’d like to have it ready.
The Mellow has a built-in cooling system to keep ingredients fresh, and it knows when to start cooking and for how long, so that you’ll arrive home to a ready-made meal. Because food is cooked so slowly and at such low temperatures – a medium-rare steak will take 90 minutes at 58 deg C – the moisture and nutritional value of your ingredients are preserved. Natural flavours are boosted as well, eliminating the need for salt and ensuring that you’re eating more healthily all around.
Never mind its fish tank appearance, the Mellow scores high on the cool scale for cleverly marrying two of our most current food obsessions: fancy gadgets, and the eat clean movement. Besides, as far as fancy prefixes go, “sous vide” sounds infinitely sexier than “slow cooked”.
If you like this story, be sure to check out other cooking tips here:
Article by Angeline tse, originally appeared in The Peak.