6 Smart Home Kitchen Features Every Chef Needs
These kitchen innovations are revolutionizing the way homeowners cook every meal
Home automation has rapidly entered our homes with smart devices for every room, and the kitchen is no exception. Whether you’re a busy homeowner striving to make cooking easier or simply an avid home chef seeking to take your skills to the next level, kitchen automation technology has a lot to offer. Step into the future with seven of the best smart home features for your kitchen.
1. Start Appliances and Monitor Cooking Remotely
Do you love making home-cooked meals but don’t have time to spend hours in the kitchen? When you’re having a busy day, especially if you’re running late, every second counts. You can drastically cut down your cooking times with appliances like a smart oven, which allows you to control preheat times through your smartphone or other Wi-Fi-connected device.
Smart ovens, along with other popular cooking appliances such as Wi-Fi-enabled instant pots and smart air fryers, can send you notifications about your food as it cooks. You can even set your smart appliance to start cooking at a specific time. Most models allow you to use an app or voice-activated assistant to set unique timer alerts for each device, plus control temperatures and other settings remotely.
2. Automate Your Grocery Shopping
Picture this: You’re in the grocery store, and you can’t remember if you already have that key ingredient sitting in your refrigerator at home. Or worse, you go to reach for it while cooking and it’s already expired. With a smart fridge, you can avoid these hassles.
Smart fridges offer more than just a screen to watch movies on while you cook—although that’s an option, too. Some models feature cameras inside the refrigerator that you can access from your smartphone to see what you already have in stock. Advanced models even scan items as you put them away, allowing your fridge to alert you when expiration dates are coming up.
The front-facing screen also doubles as a smart shopping list. As you cook and use ingredients, you can add them to shopping lists and share them to other smart devices. If you don’t have time to shop, order your groceries directly from your fridge’s screen and have them delivered straight to your door.
3. Monitor the Health of Your Fresh Herb Garden
Fresh ingredients can make all the difference in the taste of your cooking. However, unless you have a green thumb and the time to maintain a garden, access to fresh herbs year-round can be tough to come by.
Cue the smart indoor garden, a device that ensures that your plants have everything they need to grow and thrive. This smart device tracks the amount of water, light, and nutrients in your herb garden, alerting you something needs to change. Plug in your smart garden, and you’ll be harvesting fresh herbs and veggies in no time.
4. Get Alerts When Your Dishes are Clean
Home automation takes the dishwasher, which is already an easy alternative to handwashing dishes, to the next level of convenience. By installing a smart dishwasher, you can monitor the status of a load of dishes from anywhere with a Wi-Fi connection.
Depending on the model of your smart dishwasher, you may be able to check rinse agent levels, lock and unlock your machine, check the remaining cycle time, monitor energy use, and get alerts when your dishwasher is clogged or leaking.
5. Drink Your Ideal Cup of Coffee Every Morning
While electronically scheduled brewing has been a feature of coffee makers for decades, today’s Wi-Fi- and Bluetooth-enabled machines can curate the dream experience for every coffee drinker. If you’re looking for luxury, smart coffee makers can deliver.
Different models of smart espresso machines and smart coffee makers offer many options, some of which include:
Programming them to make coffee at a certain time of day
Precisely setting the water temperature or pressure
Having a virtual assistant track your preferences to learn what you like
Choosing from a menu of pre-set coffee-based drink recipes
Creating and storing your signature coffee recipe
Using geolocators to track your location and brew coffee when you’re heading home
6. Stay Hands-Free With Voice Activation
Voice-activated assistants come in handy when you have your hands full in the kitchen. A voice-activated smart speaker can help you with almost anything, from setting multiple timers to adjusting the temperature on a connected smart thermostat when hot ovens and burners make you sweat.
This tool is especially useful when it comes to keeping your high-tech devices clean. For example, no one wants to touch their phone to turn off a timer after handling raw chicken.
Another helpful kitchen device is a voice-activated smart faucet. You can turn these touch-free devices on and off or adjust the water temperature. You can instruct the device to measure a precise amount of water, and some models even offer freeze protection, meaning you can set them to flow just enough during winter weather to keep your pipes from freezing.