Imagine standing in front of an induction cooker with your pancake batter, and the cooker’s interface tells you exactly when to pour the batter into the heated pan for perfectly cooked pancakes. They say you always mess up the first pancake, because more often than not, your pan isn’t at the right temperature… but when we made pancakes at Electrolux‘s office in Stockholm, every single one of them turned out absolutely flawless. Designed to make amateurs feel like experts, and to give experts a helping hand, Electrolux’s Intuit kitchen range uses a combination of remarkable design and cutting-edge technology, sprinkled with a secret sauce that is the AI. The appliances talk to you, and to each other to make cooking easier, taking the guess-work out of cooking ingredients at specific temperatures. The stove tells you when your eggs are perfectly poached and ready to eat, the oven steams asparagus so brilliantly you feel like you’re in an upscale restaurant, and the intelligent chimney switches on on its own exactly when the stove tells it to. It’s like working with invisible little helpers that ensure you have the best tasting meal ever… every time.
We walked right into Electrolux’s offices in Stockholm on a rather surprisingly warm and sunny day (after weeks of rain, the weather was just perfect). With the promise of good food and good tech, there really wasn’t any way we were refusing the offer. I’d honestly seen certain elements of the Intuit range at IFA in Berlin last year, but this time Electrolux wanted to show us how all the devices would integrate into a kitchen, and how both home cooks and professional chefs could rely on the appliances to help them prepare perfect food from start to finish.
Expert Cooking For Home Chefs
Electrolux’s equipment aims at bringing great cooking techniques and perfecting existing techniques so that consumers find it easier to navigate through the kitchen. They say pancakes can be pretty easy if you nail the batter, but you’re bound to always mess up the first pancake. To show us how kitchen tools could be more intuitive and involved in the cooking process, Electrolux along with celebrity chef Magnus Albrektsson demonstrated how easy it would be to make perfect pancakes from scratch. We whipped the batter up in a jiffy, while switching the SensePro hob on and telling the hob we wanted to cook pancakes by selecting ‘Pancakes’ in the hob’s touchscreen UI. The screen instantly displayed a progress bar that would tell us exactly when to pour the batter for perfect pancakes. Meanwhile, we sous-vide cooked some apples to top off our pancakes with. Bringing the power of sous-vide to the home kitchen is perhaps one of Electrolux’s biggest achievements. A cooking technique reserved for some of the fanciest kitchens, sous-vide involves vacuum-packing food along with spices and fats to help infuse and cook it at the same time, uniformly and quickly. As soon as the pan was ready, a message on the hob’s screen told us it was okay to pour the batter in. Alongside pancakes, the SensePro hob has multiple settings that allow you to easily navigate through cooking vegetables, meats, desserts, as well as perfectly boiling or poaching eggs. Couple that with its Hob2Hood feature and the you’ve got a stove that can even tell the chimney when to switch on and off, leaving the important things like cooking, Instagramming, and tasting to you!
Innovative Cooking for Expert Chefs
The Intuit range was made to empower cooks regardless of their expertise, by taking the guess-work out of cooking. Its AI for the most part, gives chefs a helping hand by allowing them to have complete control over multiple aspects of their cooking process, and also by being able to tell them when the meat is cooked to the exact desired tenderness, or the eggs are boiled to immaculate perfection. The CombiSteam Pro oven comes with its own camera that lets you look right into the oven without opening it, giving you an unprecedented level of control, while the SensePro and its wireless thermometer allow you to perfectly poach an entire batch of eggs inside their shell by maintaining the water’s temperature to the nearest degree. Chef Sebastian Gibrand, 2nd place winner of the Bocuse d’Or 2019 showed us exactly how Electrolux’s Intuit range allowed him to serve “the world’s 2nd best Asparagus and Poached Eggs” to the judges of the Bocuse d’Or. Most people boil their asparagus stalks, resulting in a flavor that’s heavily watered down because a large part of the flavor notes are lost in the boiling water. Chef Gibrand demonstrated how you could cook the asparagus just as effectively (and in lesser time) by steaming it. Steam cooks the asparagus without draining the flavor out, giving you a stalk that’s crispy, cooked, and has a much better asparagus flavor. Chef Gibrand even developed a completely new way of poaching eggs right in their shell, by cooking the eggs in a water bath at a steady temperature below boiling point for multiple hours. Crack the eggs open and you’ve got a perfectly cooked poached egg with a soft white exterior and an oozy yolk. Built with intuitive abilities that give you an extra pair of hands and eyes, Electrolux’s Intuit kitchen appliances become almost like an extra helper in the kitchen for chefs, so that their food doesn’t ever burn or overcook, or even go unnoticed. Chef Gibrand’s poached eggs and asparagus embodied exactly what Electrolux’s kitchen appliances were capable of, making sure chefs (both amateur and professional) make less mistakes and more tasty food in the kitchen!
