William Meppem
The oven of the future takes the guesswork out of cooking.
What can $12,000 buy you, dear reader, in 2017? A piece of art (if the artist is young and emerging), a spot on the luxurious Seabourn Encore (if you’re happy with a lesser cabin) or – wait for it – a new oven. But not just any oven. Miele’s latest wall model, the Dialog, has set out to turn home cooking on its head, using technology that intuits how much oven time your food needs.
As well as standard radiant heat and a convection fan, the Dialog utilises electromagnetic waves that not only help with cooking, but can also gather information about the texture of the food and adjust temperatures and cooking times accordingly.
While electromagnetic waves are also used in microwaves, the Dialog oven uses a much lower frequency that’s gentler on your food. Where the microwave excels at efficiency, the Dialog is all about precision.
At the product launch in Berlin on 28 August, chefs demonstrated the smart technology by baking small pieces of cod inside blocks of ice. When the cod was deemed ready by the Dialog oven, it came out cooked perfectly while the ice remained intact. Aside from trade show gimmicks, this precision cooking may have some use to the average home cook. According to Miele, Sunday roasts will become even easier with the Dialog, as there’s no need to add vegetables to a rack of lamb or roast chook in the later stages of cooking. Throw everything into the roasting dish at once, and the oven will work out the rest.
You can also browse recipes on a specially designed Miele app and send instructions to the oven via WiFi.
While smart technology is undoubtedly convenient, whether we’re ready to cede control of every aspect of our cooking is another question. Don’t they say some of the best discoveries come about from mistakes?
