We’ve all been there. It’s 6:30, you’ve just gotten home from work, and you stand in front of an open refrigerator, clueless and frustrated. You have no idea what to do with the random ingredients staring back at you. You’ve been using that beautiful brain all day long and now you have to put on an apron and come up with dinner ideas for you and your family? No thanks.
If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, there’s now a site for that very problem. It’s called Gumbo, and it’s a total game-changer. Gumbo takes what you already have in your fridge, and generates tons of recipes using exactly those ingredients. No need for a last-minute trip to the grocery store.
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Let’s say you open your fridge and see, for example, raw chicken breast, oranges, soy sauce, honey, and green onions. Simply open the Gumbo app and select those items. With one click, dozens of recipes will pop up that feature those ingredients – Healthy Orange Chicken, Zesty Instant Pot Chicken Breasts, Whole Lemon and Honey Chicken Skewers — to name just a few.
No matter how random your assortment of refrigerator finds, Gumbo has a recipe for you. It also can offer recipes that only require one or two additional (yet common) ingredients. Let’s say you don’t include salt in your search. Chances are, you probably have salt at home. So, if there are recipes that call for everything you selected plus salt, Gumbo will offer that up as an option.
In addition to taking the burden of recipe creation off your plate, Gumbo will also save you money by keeping your food waste in check. A 2020 study from the American Journal of Agricultural Economics found that the average household in the United States wastes 31.9{d2b09b03d44633acb673e8080360919f91e60962656af8ade0305d5d8b7e4889} of its food, or about $1,866 annually. That’s an absolutely shocking statistic. But by knowing exactly what to do with the seemingly useless items in our fridge, Gumbo can greatly help cut back on such an enormously wasteful problem.
News of the new app has been spreading over Reddit like wildfire, and people are ecstatic, exclaiming, “Ok this is amazing! I have DREAMT of a site like this and am excited to give it a go! Here’s to (hopefully) less food waste!” and “This is freaking amazing! Thank you!!!”
The kitchen of the future is here. LG released a fascinating, color-changing party fridge this week at CES in Las Vegas, while GE Profile dropped a $1,000 smart stand mixer. And that was just the start of kitchen innovations unveiled at the world’s biggest consumer tech show, which returned in true prepandemic form this year.
Smartphones, TVs
and cars often make the most noise at CES, but there are also always some notable home and kitchen innovations to peruse. This year has been no exception, with updates on some of our favorite kitchen tools and a few new gadgets and gizmos that aim to revolutionize how we all slice, dice, mix, simmer and sear.
Though the mixer’s high price means most of us won’t be rushing out to buy this Wi-Fi-enabled baking buddy, a few very intelligent additions to the mixer — including a genius built-in scale — make it a worthy candidate for best CES kitchen tech for 2023.
Below are all the biggest and best CES smart kitchen and cooking tech announcements so far.
Read more: The most important tech trends we saw at CES 2023.
GE
GE Profile Smart Mixer
A stand mixer with serious smarts
KitchenAid has had the market cornered on stand mixers, but GE Profile’s latest entry into the category has raised more than a few eyebrows. The smart mixer features a built-in scale for nailing recipe measurements. It also has Auto-Sense technology which helps the machine determine when something is finished mixing or needs more oomph, especially when working through a guided recipe.
Speaking of guided recipes, the GE Profile syncs up with the app to help you navigate dozens of recipes from measuring the ingredients all the way through to the mixing part. CNET’s Jessica Dolcourt got to try it and it just might be her favorite thing from all of CES 2023.
Read more about the GE Profile stand mixer here.
LG
LG’s MoodUp Color-Changing Fridge
Finally, a fridge for party people
When 2023 began just days ago, I didn’t know I’d need a fridge that changes colors with the tap of a button and syncs with my music — but here we are. Yes, LG’s MoodUp fridge is flashy, and most of its features are completely superfluous, but not all of them.
Consider Instaview knock-to-view technology, which is not totally new but makes it so one of the front fridge-side panels becomes transparent when you nudge it, letting you see what’s inside without opening. Oh, and the fridge can sense you coming in the middle of the night, and offers some gentle light via one of the panels so you don’t step in the dog’s water while sneaking 2 a.m. bites of cheesecake.
This one will be pricey but, honestly, we’re starting to see the appeal. Read more about the LG MoodUp here.
Samsung
Samsung’s AI Wall Oven
The robots are cooking
Samsung’s new AI Wall Oven, introduced at CES 2023, is equipped with an internal camera and technology that lets you send a view of the inside of your oven straight to social media. The AI Pro Cooking algorithm can recognize up to 80 dishes and recommend an appropriate temperature, time and cooking mode, then send notifications to help prevent your food from burning.
Read more about Samsung’s new AI oven here.
Kaltech
Kaltech Fresh Food Keeper
The end of moldy bread and stale bagels?
Keeping nonrefrigerated fresh food from getting stale and growing mold has always been a problem, and the kitchen innovators at Japan’s Kaltech think they’ve unlocked an answer. The tech-forward breadbox is electric-powered and uses photocatalysis, a chemical procedure sometimes used in the decontamination of water, to keep bread and produce fresh for longer.
We have yet to test the $315 Fresh Food Keeper, which naturally has to be done over a period of a few days, but we’re on it and will report back with findings soon.
Brava
Brava Glass
The pricey smart oven finally gets a glass door
We like the Brava just fine, but its eye-popping price makes it hard to recommend. And this latest drop from Brava will drain even more coin from your bank account.
The new $2,000 Brava Glass, which the company unveiled at CES, has all the trappings of the original $1,300 model, including the ability to air-fry, roast, bake, broil, toast, reheat, slow-cook and warm, with the addition of a glass front door so you can see the food as it cooks. Previously, food sizzling away in the Brava could only be viewed via your phone by way of a camera housed inside the cooking chamber.
Read more about the new Brava Glass smart oven here.
Blok
Smart Cutting Boards
A new smart kitchen category makes its debut
Two smart cutting boards made their CES debuts this year, adding to a long list of kitchen tools that have been smartified.
The Blok is a snazzy and expensive walnut board with a detachable screen meant to beam in live or recorded cooking videos so you can work through dishes without having to look up at a tablet. It’s awfully nice to look at, but we’re not sure it’s worth the $799 upfront cost, plus a $39 monthly subscription.
A more practical version is the Versaware Smart Cutting Board. We don’t have pricing info yet, but we sure hope it will be less than the Blok. This gadget-y cutting board features a smaller, more manageable screen that is fixed to the bottom corner and walks you through recipes, providing useful information about technique, calories and nutrition.
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