The Vergecast - A very smart Vergecast Thanksgiving

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

Today on the flagship podcast of connected meat thermometers: It’s Thanksgiving week, so we’re going to do something a little different. We’re going to make Thanksgiving dinner! Jen Pattison Tuohy, The Verge’s smart home reviewer and reporter, is also an excellent cook. So she’s at home in South Carolina, and she’s going to make us a meal and tell us all about the state and future of the smart home and kitchen gadgets. This episode, fair warning, will make you very hungry. I’m sorry in advance. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcast of Connected Me Tremometers. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am at Trader Joe's two days before Thanksgiving. Pray for me, honestly. All the turkeys are gone. There's like 95,000 people in this grocery store right now. And it feels a little like what I imagine it would feel like if they just came on and announced that the apocalypse was happening in two hours, if that makes sense. But I need stuffing. So here we are.

Anyway, we have a great show for you coming up today. It's Thanksgiving week, so we're going to do something a little different than a normal Vergecast episode. We're going to make Thanksgiving dinner. Jen Paterson-Tewy, the Virges' smart home reviewer and reporter, is also an excellent cook. So she's at home in South Carolina, and she's going to make us a meal and tell us all about the state and future of the smart kitchen and the smart home in general. This episode, fair warning, is going to make you really, really hungry. So I'm sorry in advance about that. All that's coming up right after the break.

But I just found the stuffing aisle and I think I'm going to have to fistfight somebody to get it before it's gone. So wish me luck and please come bail me out of jail. This is the verge cast. See in a sec. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog.

That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom.

And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports. Mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome back. So we had other plans for this episode. We recorded a bunch of stuff. We had big ideas about stories we want to do. We'll get to all of those later. But we ended up just wanting to spend all of this time talking about the smart home. It's an interesting time in the smart home with Matter and a bunch of new gadgets coming out that all promised to make the smart home make a lot more sense, but also it's Thanksgiving week. And all I can think about is Thanksgiving

food and stuffing and cranberry sauce and all of these other things. So we ended up just spending like a really long time hanging out with Jen Toey and recording and talking about the smart home and smart gadgets. And we made a Vergecast cooking show without even really meaning to. So that's what this episode is now. This is the Birchcast cooking show. It's Thanksgiving week. Like I said before, Jen is in her kitchen in South Carolina. She's been cooking like for hours. it seems. I think, if I remember correctly, we're like mid-turkey. That's what seems to be going on here. So let's just dive into it. Let's see what's going on. Hi, Jen. Hey, David. Happy Thanksgiving. Happy almost Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving to you too. It's not always my favorite holiday because I

spend it all in the kitchen. But I have a great smart kitchen, so I get to play with my gadgets. So that's always fun. You do a lot of smart home reviewing for us, which means your house is I would say like a chaotically smart home, which is that you don't get to have things that like make sense and work well together. You just have all the things and then you get to figure it out. Is that fair? That is fair. Yes. I have dueling. I don't have dueling. I have competing voice assistants in my kitchen. I have four because I actually have Bixby built into my fridge. I'm so sorry.

As well as Siri and Google and Alexa, they're all going to go off now. And that is one of the downsides of being a smart home reviewer. Everyone says to me, oh, you your house must be so smart. Like, e-e. It is, but I'm always changing things up and breaking things, so troubleshooting things. But the kitchen is the one space that I do actually try very hard to keep, you know, operational. Whereas, you know, the lights might not go in on the bathroom every time you walk in, but I want my kitchen to work because I want to be able to feed my family.

That's fair. And there aren't actually that many great smart home gadgets for the kitchen yet. I like to say the reason is probably because the kitchen is already one of the most technologically advanced rooms in your house, right? You've already got a robot that washes your dishes. You've got a fridge and an oven that does its job very well, doesn't really need an internet connection to do what it does well. So I tend to limit my smart gadgets in the kitchen, but I do have one or two that I really like. Yeah, give me a quick tour. Let's just do kind of a whip around the Gen Smart Kitchen here.

The first thing I see is this enormous screen on your fridge behind you. So let's start there. What do we have here? So this is a Samsung smart fridge. It's an older model. It does have some hiccups because of that built-in Android screen. I did try and order the turkey and everything through Instacart on the fridge, and it kept crashing. So I had to use my phone.

So that was a bit of a disappointment. I'd never done that before because normally I'd just go to the grocery store. But yes, so the smart fridge, the main thing I use it for, watching TV. Sure. I mean, I have a TV not too far away, but if my family's watching something in the living room, it has the Samsung TV Plus app in it, and I get like a little screen and I can watch some tennis. Nice. Okay. So it's my kitchen TV primarily. The fridge itself is great, though. It's a great fridge, plenty of room. It has cameras in it, so if I am at the grocery store and can't remember if I've got something, you can look on the app on your phone and see what you've got.

It also has recipes and a number of other things you can do with it. It's a smart things hub, so I can technically control smart devices from it. But in the kitchen, I like to be hands-free, so I have my voice assistance. And I have to say, the Amazon is the one that I use the most in the kitchen. It has some of the better features. I really like its timer feature. I also like the Echo Show 10 because it moves with you. So when, if you're trying to follow a recipe and you're walking around the kitchen, it kind of follows you.

It's a bit creepy, but it's handy. I do feel like you're like one small step away from being like, and here is my tiny robot that follows me around my house and is my sous chef all that. Like, this is coming for you. You know this, right? It is. Well, I had the Astro here for a while. He would have actually, it would have been very helpful as a sous chef. But we, yes.

My favorite sous chef, though, is the thermomix, which many people listening may not. be familiar with. I'm certainly not. It's a fantastic kitchen gadget. I mentioned not a big gadget fan in general. I like things that just do one thing good and don't necessarily mean that I have to clean a ton of parts afterwards or, you know, read a manual to figure out how to use it. I want something that's just going to cook my dinner, help me cook my dinner. The biggest thing is not have to clean up. So many gadgets you spend half the time pulling them apart and cleaning them. This thing cleans itself, which is like the number one thing you need to know about it. So you don't have any wash to do afterwards, and you can also stick the whole thing in the dishwasher.

Oh, I love that. But to explain what a thermomix is, it's a company that's been around for a really long time. European listeners would probably be familiar with it. It started as a blender company, and now they've come out, well, this has been around for a few years. The thermomix is a blender that cooks. So that's kind of the easiest way to explain it. So I just made, before we got on mashed potatoes in my blender, or in the thermomix, and they came out perfectly. and now I'm going to make pumpkin pie cheesecake in my blender.

Is it like a slow cooker in that you just like dump a bunch of stuff in and like stuff happens and then it's done? But it does it for like other kinds of food? So actually it can be a slow cooker. It can be multiple things. It can be a pressure cooker, a slow cooker. It can boil eggs. I mean it does hundreds of things. It's it's pretty neat. But what I use it for is as I said, as like a sous chef. So it does little jobs for me. So, for example, I'm going to make pumpkin pie with a cookie crumb crust. So instead of getting out the rolling pin and a plastic zip-lock bag and sticking the gram-crackers in and smashing away, that is really fun, I can just throw the ground crackers into the thermomix and it has a little recipe.

So it has a screen, a little Android touch screen, and you follow along on the recipes on there. And it will blend the crumbs for me and then it will melt the butter and cook them. so then I can just pour the pie base into my pie pan, and then I give it a rinse, and then I can put all the ingredients for the pie filling, and it'll mix them for me. So it's a bit like a kitchenade as well, except for if you're cooking something like the pie base, it will cook it for you. Cooked my mashed potatoes. I also did the stuffing in it this morning, cooked the onions and the sausage before they went in the turkey. So it's a really handy sort of extra pair of hands. Don't have to do as much chopping, although, you know,

still have to do some because you can't put like a whole potato in it because it would kind of vibrate and explode. So you do have to chop the potato up before you put it in. And as I mentioned, it also cleans itself. So all you have to do is put a little bit of water. So press clean button and it goes and it comes out clean and then you do the next stage. I know some people will have two or three of it. So it has like a blender, a stainless steel blender. That's what heats up. And you can have multiple of those so that you can rotate and cook different things. It also steams. So I'm going to do the green beans at the end of the cooking process has what's called a varoma dish that you put on the top and it heats up from the blender and steams the food for you.

So you could do fish in there as well and I'm going to do green beans. This is also like perfectly speaking my kitchen gadget language because to me it's like, I don't mind figuring out what temperature something needs to be. And I don't really mind just like setting a timer and checking it. But if you can prevent me from needing to chop things or do dishes, I'm all in. Like, all in. Yes. That sounds wonderful to me. It is, though, the downside. Oh, hang on, the turkey timer is going off. All right, time to get the turkey out of the oven before it overcooks. There we go. Alexa, stop turkey timer. All right, sorry about that. Didn't mean to interrupt you, David. You're right, it is a great gadget. It does cost quite a bit, though.

As kitchen gadgets are want to do, unfortunately, it's $1,500. for the whole sort of package, and then there's lots of add-ons that you can buy. Basically, I like to say it kind of make everything but the turkey. How's the turkey looking, speaking of? The turkey is looking really good. Let's have a look. I'm looking at my probes. It looks like we are right on. We have the right temperature, but the little red thing is still saying that we don't. But I'm not putting it back in there. I'm not coming out with charcoal turkey. Yeah. I think we're good. I'm just going to let this sit now. I think it can

sit an hour or more. So we've got our mashed potatoes, we've got our turkey. The green beans I'm going to do at the end, my foil. And then I thought, seen as we've got a little party here, it might be a good time to make a cocktail, because that's kind of the best part of Thanksgiving. I agree with that. I mentioned I have the Echo Show 10, which I will use sometime for recipes, but I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to recipes. And unfortunately, the ones that come up on the Echo aren't always great. So my go-to is actually, my iPad mini. This is the best sort of kitchen companion

for cooking, I find. I totally agree. Do you do a lot of cooking, David? So I like to cook. My wife doesn't really let me cook because she's a control freak is essentially what it is. She'll never hear this podcast,

so it's okay. I can say all of this stuff that I want. I like to cook, and I agree. I experimented with a million different kitchen gadgets, try it all the different, you know, echoes with the screen and the nest stuff, and also landed on an iPad.

And it's like, what I do is I watch a show on the iPad with the recipe in the slide overview. And it is, it is perfect. It solves all my problems. I love it. Well, my favorite thing about the iPad is actually the New York Times cooking app, which is my favorite cooking app. It's very good. Some really good recipes on there.

And then my other favorite thing is she doesn't have an app, sadly, but is Delia Smith, who's England's version of Martha Stewart. She's the woman that taught me how to cook. And she doesn't have an app. She's not tech like that. but I can just pull up her website. She is who I am following for my turkey. I have always gone to Delia.

So, yes, use the iPad. That's sort of the key for me. And then I also, I love having the Alexa because it has, I have this fun routine set up where when I start running water, it will start playing music for me, which I've turned off for today because I didn't want to interrupt our recording. But every time I turn the tap on, it'll start the radio for me. So just, you know, when you get in the kitchen,

you start cooking, sometimes you forget to put music on. and it's a nice, nice little feature. Speaking of water, my absolute favorite gadget in my kitchen, alongside the thermomix, is my hands-free voice-activated Moan Smart Fawcett. Okay, that is so many words that I've never heard people use next to Fawcett. Is it one of the ones you, like, wave in front of when your arms are dirty? Is that the kind of stuff we're talking about? Okay.

So, yes, that's the sort of main function, and you don't need to connect it to the internet for that. You can just wave your hand in front, starts the water, and then wave again and it stops. And then it has a handle for hot and cold. But if you want to get fancy and when you're cooking, your hands are always busy

or covered in turkey or sausage or you may be a little ways away and you want it to be hot when you get over there. So I can say, and I can do a little demo for you now if you like. Please. Alexa, tell Moen to dispense two cups of warm water. First, I will run the water to temperature.

Wait for the water to stop. When the light is solid, you can wave over sensor for two cups of water at 105 degrees. So as a soon-to-be father, congratulations, by the way. I haven't had a chance to send my congratulations yet. But this is great. Okay, so now the radio is playing because the water is running. Okay, sorry. This is an unbelievably good idea.

I'm now all in on me. Every time I turn on the water, it should. I thought that was crazy until you did it, and now I'm like, this is the best idea of it ever. It was fun. You see, it gets a little, you know, festive in the kitchen. So it's now running the water to temperature. And as I'm saying, as a soon-to-be-father, it's great for baby bottles because you can get the exact temperature you need. Totally.

For your baby bottle. I'm beyond that stage. So right now, I'm running the water to get hot enough for the pie. Once it shows me that it's at the right temperature, it's flashy. right now and it's getting hot. It takes a while because I have a tank plus hot water heater, which is very efficient but also very slow. And then once I go over to it now, I'll stop it from running and then I wave again and it will dispense exactly two cups into my bowl for me. So I'm going to, I will do that now. Just going to grab my bowl. Oh, it stopped. And now,

and I got my two cups of water. 104 degrees. I don't have a thermometer handy that's not in a turkey to test. But it feels warm. You know, the thing where you walk over to the faucet with like the tablespoon or whatever and you turn on the water too hard and it just like explodes the water all over your entire kitchen, this solves that problem. This is like, this is what you're talking about. This is like an actual thing that you do in the kitchen that this makes better. And that makes me happy.

Yes, it is. It's very handy. I mean, to be honest, the main thing I use is the waving. But when I'm full on cooking a big dinner, it definitely is very helpful. And it's fewer dishes. I hate washing measuring cups. I don't know why. I just hate it.

And for little things like that, like, I guess this one's just water, so you don't need to wash it anyway. But like... But you've got it wet. You have to put it on the drying rack. Yeah, it's a whole thing. Yeah, actually, that's another thing that's really fun about the firma mix, just to go back to it. But it's at the top of the thermomix, it's lit, is a built-in measuring cup. So it's very well thought out. But yes, so I've got my smart faucet. I got my smart fridge, got my semi-smart oven, my Fermi mix, my smart voice assistants. What else? Oh, I have an indoor air. quality monitor. Okay. Amazon's indoor air quality monitor. And that doesn't have a ton of use, but I do like that when I, if I've forgotten or one of my other smart devices have failed me, it will send an alert through one of my smart speakers if the indoor air quality is turned to pour, which often happens when you're cooking on a gas stove, which is what I have, and might alert me that something's burning. Well, I was going to say, isn't the answer to that, this is, you know,

what we here in America have smoke alarms for. I don't know if you're aware of this. It gets you there a little bit before the smoke alarm. Fair enough. The gas thing actually makes sense that you're like, if I leave a burner on, it'll tell me before my house explodes. Like, that's fair.

It gives me a little heads up, reminds me. But yes, by the time, you know, if things start to burn, yeah, I do have some smoke alarms around. I will say, the thing that occurs to me as you're talking is that you have an enormous number of screens in your kitchen. And yet you just do everything on your iPad, mini. This feels very telling to me about how all of these screens actually do their jobs. Yes. I have a Google Nest Hub Max right here too, which also has a big screen. And yeah,

they're just not designed well enough yet. The interface isn't good for kitchen use. It's fine for playing a video, you know, or watching TV or music. I mean, I use, and the timers are the main thing I use it for. The nice thing about the Nest Hub timer is it will show in like, really big numbers, the timer counting down. But actually the echo that I'm using that you heard just recently, it's the echo dot with clock. So that also has the little LED screen that shows the timer counting down. So rather than having to constantly ask how long is left on my timer, I can just glance and have a look. The stove also has a timer on it, but that's not as convenient because it's not at eye level. But yeah, I'm looking forward to the Google Nest tablet that's going to be,

is going to mount to the speaker because I feel like the tablet experience is what you really need in the kitchen. The smart displays just aren't at that level. And this tablet built into the fridge is just a little outdated. It's not fast enough. It's an older Android tablet. It crashes. So I don't find that one is useful. So yes, the mini, the iPad is the way to go.

Yeah. No, there are a bunch of things you've described here that I think are like very good, very smart ideas. I continue to think smart fridges might just be a terrible idea. Like, my fridge is some unknowable number of years old, but like it keeps my food cold. And until it doesn't keep my food cold, I'm good. But like to worry about like the security updates to the Android operating system on my fridge is just like not a thing I need in my life. So I'm going to stick to my old ass fridge and an iPad and it's going to serve me just fine. I mean, smart fridges had such great promise when they first came on the scene.

And the idea, the thing that I really liked, the concept I was looking forward to. And Samsung made some good strides. here, but it hasn't really capitalised yet, is telling you when you're low on something and automatically we're ordering it for you. It does have food recognition based in using the camera and it will tell you what products you have in your fridge and then it can say you're running low on this. You might want to order more, but it's so unreliable. It misses things. So they're working on it. And I think once we got to a point where a fridge could really do that, maybe with sensors, you know, to see how much weight you had left. So your milk carton weighed.

you know, 50% less this morning than yesterday, so you probably need to order milk. Those kind of things will be useful, especially if they reorder for you automatically. The one thing my fridge constantly wants me to do, though, is reorder my water filter. Like every morning. It says, your water filter expired. Would you like to reorder it? No, I don't want to spend $100 on a water filter. I'm just going to use my tap.

Thank you very much. Those are the things that make you realize, like, I had a Britta for a long time, and it was like, there would be the thing that would, like, the red light that would say, you know, you're supposed to change your filter. And it was like, oh, I'm supposed to change this thing like 10 times more often than I actually change this thing, which is just like once every two years when I think about it while I'm at Target is how often I replace it. So yeah, I just, I don't need to know all that stuff, I guess.

All right, we need to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about a bunch of stuff I've seen in your kitchen as we're moving around. I see a bunch of beverage things. So we're going to talk about smart beverages because this is a thing that is near and dear to my heart. And we're going to check on that turkey. We'll be right back.

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Jen, I have two gadget questions for you, and they're both about beverages. One, have we solved coffee in the smart home? Do you have anything? Have you tested anything? Is there anything that's good? Because that's the one. I want to wake up to perfect coffee every morning. It doesn't seem to exist yet.

Well, I have here a GE Cafe smart espresso maker. This is the Afeto Automatic Espresso machine. So, I mean, you know, coffee is very subjective. So I don't know what your perfect cup is, but my husband loves this thing because it's one of the ones where you just press a button and it dispenses an espresso for you. So you can connect it to an app and then you can dial in your exact like grind time. brew strength, how many ounces you want your espresso to be. You can do long expressos. You could do double expressos.

And all you do is press this one button. It's called My Cup in the morning and then it'll just dispense that for you, which is pretty handy. It's nice because, I mean, there's lots of automatic espresso machines out there. They're all quite expensive. This one is too. I want to say it's around $700. Oof.

But this one has, because the app connection gives you that customization. So it has its regular buttons. So you've got espresso, Americano, and then My Cup. And the My Cup is the one you can customize. And then it also has the milk frother, which is not automatic. Obviously, you just still have to stand there with your little pot. Who has the time, Jen? Who has the time for that?

Thermomix should do that for you. You should just be able to pour your coffee into the thermomix, and it'll froth it for you. But he drinks black coffee, so it doesn't bother him. But it's been great for eggnog lattes so far this season. So it sounds like the hybrid of like an espresso and an actual fancy espresso machine. Yes. And it's not like huge either. It's nice and compact, which is because those big fancy espresso machines like take up half your kitchen counter. Oh yeah, they're nuts. I have tried many times to buy one and my wife who doesn't drink coffee is just straight up. I'm always like,

that would be a cool present for you to get me sometime and she's just like absolutely not. Like I have to look at that thing all day and never use it. Absolutely not. Oh, this one's quite pretty actually. It's white with rose gold accent. So she might like it. All right. Okay. So then the other one is another beverage thing that I'm very curious about, which is like a, I want something that is like better and more automatic than a soda stream for like making my own fizzy stuff. I've like gone down the road of like should I drill a faucet into my like I drink like an inappropriate amount of Seltzer and I'm like this I just want a tap in my house where I can just make Seltzer. Does this exist? Do you have the answer for me? I do. I do. I'm excited to do this is something you wanted

because it's not something I'd ever really considered. This is my dream. Like literally like a better than Soda Stream semi smart way to just make sparkling water all day is like there's a terrifying amount of money and effort that I would spend to do this. $130? Sold. Literally. Yes. Done. Tell me the website. I'm there. So have you used soda streams? Because I've never used a soda stream. Like, I never really got the thing. It was so big in my childhood.

But the big selling point of this one, it's called the Sparkle. And it's also, I believe, German, is you don't need the carbonator. You don't need the, like, canister, I guess, is what you need to use in a soda stream. Okay. And the problem was, just to tell you why soda stream sucks. There was a whole big controversy about soda stream that I never really understood. So I didn't worry about that. But the real problem was you have to go, like, take your canister to get it replaced at, like,

Target are a handful of places, and they're always out, and nobody ever has any stock, so you just have to, like, go to Target every day and be like, do you own new soda streams? And they say, no, and then you leave. And it's like, it's a nightmare. And so I eventually just gave up. And this is why I'm like, I want a thing that lasts longer at my home that would solve this problem for me. Well, so this machine is, as I said, it's called the Sparkle, but it has a little

umlaught thing on the E, because it's German. And it uses, it uses sachets. Oh. carbonator sachets. So, I mean, not so environmentally friendly because there's lots of little pieces of plastic, but as opposed to these big carbonated pressure canisters, perhaps, I'd have to do the green work there. But so there's two sachets that come wrapped together and the sparkle came with a ton of them, like a big bag of them. So you use one every time you have a drink. You just snip the top off and you pour it into a little canister at the back.

and then it's a very kind of space-aging machine. I can actually, I will do one right now if you like. Do it. We can hear it. You can make anything. You could just do your salsa water if you wanted. Or you could do like a mimosa. Oh yeah, you were going to make us a cocktail.

For today, I was going to make us a Thanksgiving-themed pineapple and sage cocktail. How does that sound? Sold. I love this. Okay. So it's quite the machine. It has this bottle that you fill up with your desired ingredients. And the kind of a selling point here is that you can use anything that's in your home, like a fresh juice.

You can put sage in it, like fresh sage. You could also, I did one with some rosemary sprigs from my garden. It's like an infuser. So as well as doing the carbonating, it also kind of infuses your water with flavour. So you could put cucumber or lemon, anything you like. And I believe all I need to put in this one for my pineapple surprise is pieces of pineapple, which I've got here. So I'm going to put in a few chunks. and then some sage, which I also have because I had a little left over from stuffing my turkey.

So we're going to pop in pineapple chunks, a little bit of sage and some water. And it says vodka. I'm not a big vodka fan. So we're going to put some gin in instead. I support this. Yeah. We'll put some pineapple juice. And then you just fill it up with water, depending on how. how big a drink you like.

So one bottle here would make probably three adult drinks. And then I'm using the smart fridge because the colder the water is the better for the sparkle for some reason. I think it's the way the chemicals or are they chemicals. Okay, so it uses sodium bicarbonate and granulated citric acid. So once you've got your ingredients together and you find the lid, pro tip, you have to have to make sure this thing is on really tight because I sparkled my kitchen floor yesterday. Trying to make an apple's fizz. And I was like, oh, that's making a loud noise. And I went

over and there was, it was everywhere. That was not fun. But then I called the robot mop over to clean it. Problems on. Okay. So, popping the machine in, there's a little slot at the back here that you lift up and you put your powders in, both at the same time. I guess, If you mix them together, they do something. I'm not, I was never very big at science. And then I'm going to push this big handle down. It'll make a big thud. And then can you hear that making its little sparkle noise?

And then I've got one through five here. This is the level of carbonation that you can choose. So if you want it super fizzy, you choose five. And we'll probably go for four here. And then you press the sparkle button. And then here it goes. And it takes a couple minutes. But yeah, it'll come out with carbonated water.

As I said, I did a mimosa the other day. It was pomegranate and orange juice with white wine. You just found my Christmas present for myself this year. It's very exciting. Yeah, I'm quite impressed. I don't know how many of those sachets. I mean, if you drink two or three bottles a day of sparkling water, you'd be getting through some sachets,

but you'd have to kind of weigh that with the soda stream debacle. Or in my case, just the number of cans I crush and throw into the recycling, which is bad. go. Yeah. This much better, much better for the environment than that, yes. I think so. All right, so let's walk through a couple of Thanksgiving things, just to get a feel for how this all works. So, like, let's do turkey first. We're at, like, the end of the turkey process. You've successfully turkied, congratulations. But, like, you come home with a frozen turkey. You throw it in the smart fridge. Then what? Walk me through the process. Okay, so according to Delia, who is my

queen of the kitchen, you want to get your turkey out the night before because you want the turkey to be at sort of room temperature or below before it goes in the oven because that helps it cook more evenly because it's so hard to get the balance right between crisping the turkey and making sure it's cooked nicely inside. So yeah, bring it up. Oh, sparkles stop sparkling. We are sparkled. We are sparkled. Whoa, it's like a spaceship taking off. Yeah, that was quite the noise. That's a sparkly, sparkly sounded thing right there. And it might be a little early for gin. But yeah, here's my...

There we go. It's steamy. It's like a witch's brew. Yeah, wow. I guess I should have had the cup ready to go. So, yeah, oh, that's got some kick. The nice thing about this machine is you could, like, leave it out on your counter when your guests arrive,

and they could each make themselves their own Thanksgiving cocktail. That is nice. That's a good-looking drink. Well done. Cheers. Next year, I just want this on record. I'm coming to your house and we're doing this. We're doing this in person, next.

here. Oh, that's good. Okay, sorry. Turkey out the night before and then in the morning, and I did this this morning, which was kind of cheeky, but it was kind of early. You do have to get the turkey in the oven kind of before dawn if you're going to eat around lunchtime. So I was able to whip out the phone and open the Home Connect app, which is the Thermidor app. Thermador is owned by Bosch, and that's Bosch's main smart home app, which actually works with quite a few different manufacturers and it works with Alexa and Google so you've got voice control but yeah so I whipped out the app and I was able to set the temperature that I wanted the oven at can you say that again sorry Alexa is talking to me from my fridge and showing me a polar bear for some reason okay so then I was

able to set the oven from the comfort of my bed and didn't need to get out of bed for an extra 45 minutes while the oven heated up and then used the thermomix to make the stuffing so we did onions sage some other herbs popped it in the thermomix gave it a little whiz for about three or four seconds and then it cooked for about 10 minutes so it kind of helps with the flavors put a little bit of butter in there too then mix that in with some sausage and some breadcrumbs stuffed it in the turkey popped all the probes in the three probes I had for the turkey today including, well, the four probes. And then went in the oven at 400 degrees for 40 minutes.

That's my favorite trick because you want to blast it with heat to start with. And then cook, I think it's like 12 to 15 minutes per pound. So depending on how big your turkey is. And then it'll cook like that for the rest of the cooking time. And that's kind of the extent of the smart part for me, because then from that point, I just keep an eye on the probe temperature. Have an alert on my phone that I can check if I'm not in. in the kitchen. And then the nice thing about the Weber or Weber, I'm not sure how they pronounce it.

Grilling hub is that it shows it in nice big numbers on the display, which is outside the oven. Got it. So you can just keep an eye on that. And then basting, key part of turkey making. Once you get through the main cooking part, then every sort of 10 minutes for the last hour you want to baste. Now it's going to sit for about, I think that they recommend sort of 60 minutes because you want all the juices to sort of reabsorb so that you have nice juicy turkey breast. And so I will transfer the turkey out of the roasting pan and use the pan to make some gravy. I have two thoughts about this. One is that it feels very much like we're like one Jetson-style robot arm away from this being

just like completely. All I want is the thing that just like opens your fridge or like your Samsung fridge should like catapult the turkey out of the fridge and into the oven. Would you really want it to do that? Like, yes. If I'm being honest, yes. I really, really would. I don't know if this is a good idea, but I do want that to be a thing that I can do very

badly. And then the other part is I'm trying to decide like there's still a bunch of like steps in the process. It's definitely fewer. And part of me is like is the future for the smart oven that you just like hit a button that says turkey. And then hours later it does all the temperature. It does all the cooking.

It does the waiting for 60. minutes for you. It has like a tinfoil dispenser at the top that it puts down at the right time. And then it's just like turkey accomplished and you like go and take it out and eat it. And that's like I feel like where a lot of these companies want to go. But it kind of comes back to the same like I still sort of want to do the cooking here. I don't know. Like is that does it feel like the right balance for you of like it doing stuff for you versus kind of making you do some of the steps? Yeah. And you know, it depends on your level of comfort in the kitchen too. I like to cook. My grandmother was a cook. That was her job, not a chef. She was a cook, a good old English cook.

And I loved cooking with her in the kitchen. I like having my daughter help me cook in the kitchen. My son just baked me brownies last night. So I'm passing on the gene. So, you know, cooking for me is a sort of experience that I enjoy. It's the way I kind of wind down as well. So I really love it. And I show my love to my family through food. So I love to present them with a lovely dish, even though it's just the four of us for Thanksgiving this year, my husband and my two children, and they don't eat turkey. So I'm going to be eating a lot of leftovers. So for me, this level right now is a good level because it's helping me, but it's not

overbearing and it's not getting in the way, which like a robot arm, I feel like might feel a little overbearing. I did see at CES, I think last year and the year before, you know, they had the kitchen arms that Samsung was demoing that will kind of come down from your hood and chop things. And I could imagine that could, in theory, lift a turkey up and put it in the oven for you. Totally. But GE has, last year they released a turkey mode, which does what you were just describing. So if you have one of their ovens, they're connected smart ovens.

They have a number of different modes where you just press a button, say you're cooking a pot roast or you're cooking a turkey or something. other sort of dish that needs varying temperatures and has different sort of levels as you go through the process of cooking. And the turkey mode just, which GE showed me a demo, they had their turkey with lots of probes and they had, you know, done all the calculations to get the exact temperatures based on the size of your turkey and the exact cooking process. And all you had to do is press a button and it comes out perfectly done at the end. And when it's finished, the oven goes gobble, gobble, So, you know, just for that extra little piece of flare, I don't want my turkey to gobble

because that's kind of a bit disturbing, actually. Yeah, that's true. It should be well past that point. It should gobble at the beginning, and then at the end it should just be like bleak silence. It's just like, don't. This is just like Darth Vader music at the end. But yeah, for people who aren't comfortable in the kitchen, I think that's a great feature. You know, you just go buy turkey, stick in the oven, press a button, and out comes a great turkey.

I am not saying that that is what happens. I've never done it myself. If anyone out there has ever done that, I would love to know how good the turkey mode is. My thermidor doesn't do that. My thermidor is much more lets me be in control, which is how I want it in the kitchen, to be fair. Other than, you know, for mashing the potatoes,

I'm happy to have someone else do that for me. Right. Yeah, I think you're right that the right answer is probably that there should kind of be a whole spectrum of stuff. And even that your oven should be able to give you lots of options, right? Because there's probably some days where you're just Like, I need this to be made and I don't have time to make it. And you should be able to just, like, open a door, shove some stuff in and have it be made.

And then there's other times where it's like, I want to be part of the process. It's like, it makes me think about self-driving cars, right? Like, there will be times you don't want to drive yourself and times you do. And both of those things should be possible and allowed. Yeah. And, you know, there are, I mentioned earlier, the June oven, which I tested a while back. And I loved some of the features of that where you could just put a dish in or a piece of meat and just say, you know, press a bite. button and it would do the whole process for you. And what I really liked, which I would like in this

oven, I miss not having, is the camera because I like to be able to look inside the oven without opening it because as any chef will tell you, every time you open the oven, you're messing up the cooking process and being able to look with a camera in at how your turkey's browning or whatever it is that your cooking is in there, how it's doing. That's useful. That's something I would definitely would like to be able to do with my smart oven. But unfortunately, Thermador isn't at that stage. There's also like the air fryers and smart, like, toaster ovens, which have these presets.

And I think it's nice to have the option to be able to, yeah, just press a button and, you know, the chicken nuggets are done. And I can focus on the beef bourguignon for me and my kids can eat their nuggets. Do all these things talk to each other at all? Obviously, you have four voice assistants, which is just absolute chaos. and that sounds like a total insane nightmare. But like are they integrated in any meaningful way, all these different gadgets,

or are you the connective tissue of all this stuff? So this has been a part of the smart kitchen that has been very slow to evolve. And it was an area I think we thought voice assistants would be able to help with. For example, yes, my oven can be controlled by the two voice assistants here, the Amazon's and Googles. If I had a smart Samsung oven, then the fridge and the oven would be. talk to each other. I did not want a Samsung smart oven because I wanted my Fermidor. I won't go further. Samsung ovens don't have a great reputation. But the problem is all of the individual...

Uh-oh. Did you hear that? What are we burning? I think I'm burning my bacon. Let me have a look. Oh yeah. Oh, it's crispy. Oh, I like crispy bacon. There we go. So this was on top of the turkey to keep it moist. I forgot that to tell you about that step. So yes, the next. next step in the smart kitchen is this integration. And there's been a recent development because the problem is most people have different brands in their kitchen. So I have different smart fridge for my oven and a different brand for my microwave and a different brand for my dishwasher. Sometimes you'll buy all your pieces and parts from one brand, but not that often. And then when one thing breaks, you might want to get a different one. So even if you did have all the same

pieces, it doesn't necessarily help you with communicating with everything in your home, too. For example, my TV can connect to my fridge. So when my fridge is telling me the doors open, I get an alert on my TV. But what I'd really like is an alert on my TV that my oven had reached the right temperature. But Thermador, actually, Thermador does work with smart things. So it's beginning. We're getting these connections. What's happened that's made a big difference, and I think we'll make a big difference probably in the next 12 to 18 months is a new organization called the Home Connectivity Alliance. And this is similar to, and I can't believe we've gotten through this much of a smart home verge cast and not mention the word matter. I blame you. This is all

your fault. I'm outraged. It took you this one. This is similar to the Matter Alliance, which is where a lot of the big companies in the space have got together and are working on a common protocol and communication method. But the difference between matter and the home connectivity Alliance is the Home Connectivity Alliance will be entirely cloud-based. So it's basically a way for all the appliance manufacturers to connect their appliances on the back end. And so LG, GE, which is Hayer, Samsung, a number of large HVAC manufacturers are all on board. I think there's even more, like they've been announcing new members. This launched about a year, year and a half ago. John, one of our reporters at EFA, saw a demo of how these devices were.

work together and basically you can use Samsung's app, LG's app, to control any appliance that's part of this home connectivity alliance. So that is a beginning to be, you know, a point where when our appliances talk to each other, then maybe you could start to see some artificial intelligent layers being built on top. That could help you get to a more useful smart kitchen in terms of like reordering food or sending recipes from the fridge to the oven, telling the dishwasher it needs to do an extra hard load because, you know, you used the deep fat friar. But at the moment, I just don't see a lot of really useful, compellingly use cases for consumers. I think the appliance manufacturers need to kind of get that connectivity

layer sorted and then maybe start building some good experiences on top of that. Okay. I like it. We're making progress. This is what I like to hear. All right, Jen, we're going to leave you for a few minutes. You need to cook. You need to finish some stuff. We're going to do the cooking show magic where you just put something in the oven. Go to a commercial break.

Come back and it's finished. We have to talk about dessert. We have a lot more to do. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited.

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This is all very good. Catch me up. It's been a couple of hours. Tell me what's been going on. What have you been working on? So, yes, it has been quiet time just while the turkey rested. Well, I have two things left to do. One that we're going to go through now.

And then my final thing is the green beans, because we want those done last, so they're nice and crisp and tasty with the turkey. So I did do some gravy. So I got the turkey out of the pan, and I did pan gravy, which is my favorite way to do gravy. Didn't need any gadgets for that, just a whisk. But now it's time for pie, which is my favorite part of Thanksgiving. Again, I'm coming back to my trusty thermomix. And this is we're doing smart pie, right?

No ordinary pie. And just to make it, you know, take it up a notch and skill level, we're doing pumpkin cheesecake, not just pumpkin pie. Fancy. So I have my spring form pan, which is what you need for cheesecake. And now my thermomix is going to do most of the work for me. So it's pretty straightforward. As I described before, it has a little Android-powered screen, Android-powered screen built into

the thermomix. And once you powered it on, this is the one thing I find it's a little slow. I was just about to say, as soon as you said Android powered screen, I get nervous. Yeah, it's a little laggy once it's up and running. What kind of icons are we talking about here? How, like, give me a design review of the thermomix interface here. It's actually pretty nice. It's very much custom. It's not something you would recognize. The keyboard, you would definitely recognize, just like on any other Android interface. So it's a little laggy. And I just managed to spell cheesecake wrong, so it's not able to find my recipe. But it gives you the option to save. So like before you start Thanksgiving dinner,

you can go through and like save all the recipes that you want in a little recipe book. So it's really easy to just pull them up and tap them. So you don't have to go through the whole laggy Android tablet process. Does this connect to some like outside service that you can do the recipes? Like I want this to like integrate with the New York Times cooking app. That would be Great, no. Actually, this is a key point that I didn't mention before. It integrates with its own cooking app, which is called Cookie Do. I hate that. You have to pay. I did forget to mention that. And that is actually one of the frustrating things about using the device. It's not too expensive. I want to say it's $23 a year, but without the cookie do subscription, it does all the basic functions that you expect. It doesn't

take away the functionality, but it's just not as easy because it's much easier when you're following a recipe and it's all there for you to just hit the button rather than having to figure it out as you go. But yeah, so the Cookie Do app, you can download that onto your smartphone so you can go in and like add everything, get your recipes ready. You don't have to stand in front of the device to get it all set up. Is there an app for your Samsung smart fridge though? That's the real question. No, and they don't, it doesn't integrate at all. There's that whole, going back to the whole, the Smart Kitchen just doesn't really talk to itself yet. There's not enough integration there.

Although, to be fair, I'm not entirely sure what I would use it for. I was kind of disappointed when I first started using this that it didn't have integrations, but as I've used it, I haven't really found like I needed them. What I do when I'm sometimes going through working with this is would, you know, add something to my shopping list, which I can do with voice on the Samsung Smartfridge, which has Alexa built in as well as Bixby, and I do tend to use. use Alexa. For obvious reasons. It's fun to do Bixby occasionally. Is it? I feel like someone should use it. It's out there. It's just a lonely dog butler with shoes just waiting for you to ask it to do something.

I get it. So my thermomix is telling me the first step in my pumpkin cheesecake is to preheat my oven. So it's like it gives you all the steps. It's not just what you're doing on the device, which is nice. And then you're going to grease your pan, which is my spring form pan. And in the grand tradition of all cooking shows, I should have done this earlier. So we're going to put our unsalted butter cubed into the thermomix. And I'm just going to grab my knife so we can chop away. So as I mentioned, this doesn't really chop because it's a blender. So if you don't chop things up, it gets a bit stuck.

So I've added in my butter. And then this is the fun part. It uses this thing called a simmering basket. So like you can use it to make rice. It's a rice cooker as well. I don't think I mention that. I kind of lose track of all the different things this can do. Well, yeah, I'm kind of, I'm at the point now where like it does so many things that it's like,

can it possibly do all of these things well? But it kind of seems like it does. The one thing it doesn't do that well is chop, as I mentioned. Like it's good if you want a puree. So if you want whipped mashed potatoes, but if you want lumpy mashed potatoes, which you know is a choice. It doesn't do that well because it'll chop. and whip things like a blender.

I see. Again, so if you want like nice little cubes in your stew or something, or if you're doing carrots with your turkey and you want nice little cube carrots, then you might want to crack out the cuisine art food processor for that. Okay. If you've got the time and energy. Okay, so now I've got my butter in here and it's the little Android screen, which is quite handy.

It has shown me how long it's going to cook, what temperature it's going to cook to, and then I turn the dial for the speed. And so the slower speed won't turn everything into mush, whereas if I do full speed, it's a blender, and then, you know, I'd get a smoothie. So you probably just heard it then. It has two arms on either side that clamp the lid down so that you can't accidentally pull it off while it's cooking.

And then it's going to go ahead and cook, it's melting the butter for me, which, you know, I could do in the microwave, but then I have to get another bowl out, and I have to put in the microwave, and I have to check every couple of seconds to make sure it's melted enough, and I haven't burnt the butter, which I always do. So that's melting away, and then I'm getting my cookies out, because my cookies are going to be our base. Rather than using graham crackers, which is the tradition, I'm going with ginger snaps,

just to give a little extra flavor. I like that idea. What does your family think of your smart kitchen insanity? Are they hopelessly intimidated by trying to cook in your kitchen now? Do they love it? So my husband is a bit like you. He loves to cook, but I don't let him do it. So he's actually a fireman, so he cooks a lot on shift.

So he'll cook for his fire crew. So he gets to do the cooking there. And quite often he'll ask me for recipes and stuff. But no, I don't let him actually cook in this kitchen ever. Fair enough. What is this very charming noise we're hearing right now, by the way? So this is the thermomix. It is done with the melting of the butter.

It's a nice noise. We've heard some hideous noises from this gadget. but that was a nice one. I like that one. This is a gentle one. The downside is it will not stop until you come and press the button. So if it's done and you don't, you know, you don't want to mess with it, you have to get up and shut it up. That's the one thing that annoys me about it. Okay, so now I'm going to put in my ginger snap cookies. And now I can't remember if I mentioned this before, but this is a built-in scale. So I don't need to get the scales out to weigh how many ginger snap cookies I need.

I just pour it in and it shows me on the screen what quantity I'll add in. So, oh, love the smell of ginger snacks. I think it's just going to be the whole bag. Yep. There we go. So the whole bag goes in. This will be noisy. So now we have basically all the ingredients of your pie crust in there.

Oh, and sugar. I forgot the sugar. So one ounce of sugar. Do you have to do all the measurement conversion in your head? The difference between like an ounce and a gram and a tablespoon. Does it show you all the different measurements all at the same time? So you can choose in the settings what measurements you want if you want to use Imperial or metric.

Okay. And then on the screen, as I add it, it's showing me the weight. So it showed me when I added, I've added 1.2 ounces of sugar, which, you know, I don't need to be exact. And then if you want, like I mentioned, it's also got this cup measure up here. So if you're adding liquid, you can just measure that. It can weigh or measure. So you've got lots of options, which is nice.

Because again, I don't, I've cooked this whole meal and I haven't got a cup or a tablespoon thing out once. It's pretty great. Yeah. Which I really like. I've got my ingredients for the crust in, and it's telling me it's going to take five seconds, and it's going to heat it up to 160 degrees for five seconds

and go really fast. So this is going to be noisy. Okay. That's not too noisy, actually. Oh, nope. That's it. It did it all. That was so fast. Yep, that was really quick.

So the device comes with a spatula. So it's asking me to scrape down the sides. Because obviously when you blend something in a blender, it all kind of goes up sides. Is this like a special spatula? Yeah, it comes with it. It's very neat. It's actually designed to use. It has a little hook in it.

And it hooks onto the simmering basket. So like say you're doing rice or boiled eggs or something, it can just lift the simmering basket out. for you without you getting burning your hands on the steam and because it boils you can boil eggs in this as well and of course you can i i literally haven't found anything it can't do yet okay so now we're going to blend again 10 more seconds that was faster yeah oh and of course okay okay i've i've changed my mind about that noise by the way if it does that noise until you make it stop every single time that's a lot of that sound it is and you you're Yeah, and I can't, like, stop it remotely or anything with the app.

So, yeah, that's definitely a downside. I would like, I'd like a bit more control there. I also just feel like it should play, like, three seconds of a song or, like, tell you a joke or just, like, something different when it's done. Yeah, because it does get quite repetitive. So now I've got my crumb base, so I'm going to put that in my pie-filling spring-form pie pan, which is what you need for a cheesecake, if you're not familiar with cheesecake cooking. Okay, I will make that into a pie just by sort of pressing it down with the spatula.

So like into a crust, sorry. Graham cracker crusts are normally on cheesecakes, yeah? Yeah, usually. Yeah, so that's what this is a lot like. So I'm going to just tap that down and then it tells me to just put it in the fridge so that it chills while I'm making the filling. And now I've got nice gingerbread hands. And now I can go over to my smart faucet and wash them without getting my faucet or covered in gingerbread crumbs because it's motion activated. I was going to say you can wash your hands without

touching anything. Do you have like a temperature you use to wash your hands now? Like how crazy has this sink made you? I probably should have, shouldn't I? This is better to do it when you're, to do it with warm water. But I'm more about speed. Especially as it's just some butter. But it does have a hand washing feature. So I can say, hey, voice assistant start my hand washing preset. and then it would dispense the water at certain temperature. So yeah, maybe I'll try and do that. All right. I just, you know, sometimes there's only so much smart you need.

Okay, so I'm just rinsing out the thermomix bowl, I guess is what you call it. Now we're going to make the filling. So you can, as I mentioned before, it will self-clean. But for efficiency at this stage, it's just quicker to rinse it out. And it's not like I'm doing meat and then the pie. It's just got gingerbread crumbs in it, so a little contamination wouldn't be a problem. I'm definitely starting to see why people would buy several of the container thing to be able to just sort of hot swap them in and out as you're cooking. If I had my druthers, I would have at least two.

Okay, cream cheese, the best part of any pie or cake filling. So, again, have to cube it. It doesn't want me to put it in whole. So there is a little bit of manual labor. And then I'm going to pop the hued cream cheese. cheese into the bowl. It's not cooking this, obviously, because the oven will cook it. But like when I was, I did the mashed potato before, it cooked a mashed potato in the bowl for 30 minutes before we blended it. So it's nice to be able to have that function of doing both. Yeah. Although it's,

it's an interesting thing because like in doing that, you're in a good position because you're kind of doing everything in one place. That's very handy. But it's also kind of like you have a whole kitchen with only one bowl. And it's, you know what I mean? And that thing is now like monopolized for 30 minutes and it is like the main thing you're using to do your cooking. So it's yet another reason that it would be better if this stuff was like well integrated and everything sort of made sense together. It feels like we need like a universal standard for kitchen gadgets that you can just sort of drop new things into new places. And it's like you keep it in the bowl, but you move it between devices and that's how it works. That seems like it would be a much cleaner system than a lot of the

stuff we've been doing where it's just kind of one all in one system. Exactly. Yeah, that's the biggest issue I have with this device. And it was entirely designed as a self-contained system other than, you know, using your oven. But yeah, it doesn't integrate with anything else in my house, although it wasn't sort of designed to be a smart device, which generally is when you find gadgets become actually useful when, you know, someone didn't think, oh, I can make this smart, what can I then make it do? They thought, oh, I have this function I need and actually adding connectivity would make this function work better, you know? And I like that approach.

Totally. Because there's too much. Let's add Wi-Fi to this and then figure out why that might be useful later. And that happens in the kitchen a lot. Yeah. And by the time you're building a whole Android tablet into your device, like you kind of have no excuse but to make some of this stuff work. Exactly. And, you know, obviously the connectivity, the best feature of connectivity, I would say in the kitchen at the moment, is software updates.

You know, this has had, like, new recipes appear every week with a new software update. And my fridge gets new functions with software updates. So, you know, from that perspective, I think adding the connectivity does, you know, add usefulness. But now I've put sour cream and cream cheese in here. So this is going to be very decadent, which I suppose that's just the way cheesecakes are. Okay, so three and a half ounces sugar again, going to add the eggs. you have to do this manually. It's not going to crack the egg for you. So this is one of the things I've been thinking as you've been doing this is like in the kitchen world,

there is like an infinite selection of super random little gadgets, right? Like are we going to get the equivalent of that but with Bluetooth next? And this is just going to be the whole new world that we live in. I both hope so and hope not simultaneously. I just can't see what value there would be, but someone will come up with it. And one of the things that we really aren't showcasing here because, you know, when you cook your thanks to dinner, you're in the kitchen all day. But one of the biggest benefits, I would say, of the smart kitchen to date is remote control and remote monitoring.

So if you're out, you know, you can put your turkey in the oven and go out for the day and check in on your thermometer from a distance to make sure that everything's going well. You know, having that kind of remote control or insight into what's happening at home. If you're in the garden or had to go do some shopping, that's a benefit. in. Unfortunately, I had to get out the teaspoons because I know. Technology has failed us. Using a teaspoon. So there's one thing I'm going to have to wash. I'm assuming you also have like a smart dishwasher lying around. I do have a smart dishwasher. Of course you do. I didn't even know that was a thing. And I just said that and was like if this exists, Jen has it. So like the oven though, it's just smart in that I can monitor it. I can like change the program.

It does tell me how much rinse aid I have and that kind of stuff. It doesn't do anything special in terms of cleaning. It just cleans like a regular dishwasher. But a dishwasher is a pretty smart gadget to begin with. That's true. It's a robot that is washing your dishes for you. You don't need to mess with that too much. Okay, we're going to mix our filling for 10 seconds.

There's the noise. We want a little bit of scraping. And you could hear the little robot arms coming off there because it won't let you in. Sometimes you have to sort of stand here for a few seconds. to wait for it to let you in, which can be a little frustrating. Okay, and we're going to mix again, and then we're almost at the end. I'm officially out on this noise. Just in the time we've been standing here doing this, I'm out on the noise.

I know. It's quite loud, but it's not too jarring. And it is definitely true. At least we've moved past the just like loud truck reversing beeping noises. Yes. So that's something. It's progress. Okay, so it asked me to pour two-thirds of the mix.

over the pie base and now we get to the exciting bit, which is the pumpkin. And no, I did not go hand scrape a pumpkin for you guys. I went and bought some canned stuff and some brown sugar. So this one is definitely the messiest part of the meal. And then we need to add some pumpkin spice. That should be it. Okay. And every single part of this has happened in the meal.

this one thermomix? Yep. Other than, obviously, the pie crust is now in the pie pan. Are there other devices like this? Like, is the thermomix one of, like, a whole genre? Or is it just kind of the one thing? It's just the one thing as far as I'm aware. I have not come across another gadget like it.

As I said, it's pretty popular in Europe, but I haven't seen it much in the States yet. Like I said, there are so many gadgets for the kitchen that I think a lot of people are like, oh, do I need another one? You know, I've already got the cuisine. Sorry. It's just a nice noise. It's just a nice noise. It just sounds like cooking. I appreciate that. Are you getting hungry?

Yes. This is the absolute worst part. I feel bad for everyone listening to this, but I especially feel bad for me because I'm just starving now. If you're listening to this in your car on the way to Thanksgiving, just know that I'm sorry and I feel your pain. All right. And so now we're done. So I'm just going to pour that onto the top of the pie and then it'll go in the oven for two hours in total, 10 minutes to start and then an hour and 50 minutes to finish it off. then you have to let it sit for a long time. Cheesecakes take a long time to chill. So the connectivity piece of this, if you were to just buy all Samsung everything, would all of this be even easier? Because all these companies now are trying to build out whole ecosystems, right?

Like is it, if you went all in on one company, would it work? So in terms of what you were asking about this device, like if it talked to anyone else, the thermomics, would it be more useful? So what Samsung's sort of angle is for the smart. fridge and the smart oven right now is, you know, you order your groceries on your fridge, you choose your recipes on your fridge, you can follow along on the recipes on the fridge, although that's not that useful unless, because your fridge is not right in front of you when you're cooking. But then it would know what you're cooking, so the fridge would know I was

cooking a pumpkin pie, a pumpkin cheesecake, and it would send the correct settings to the oven. And, you know, if this device could communicate with the oven, I think that would be an extra useful step because right now it's saying turn the temperature of your oven to 250 degrees for 20 minutes and then reduce the temperature to 225 and bake for another hour and a half so that means i'm going to have to come back in 20 minutes and adjust it but if it could send that to the oven and automatically adjust the oven in 20 minutes down to 225 and to continue cooking at one for an hour and a half then I wouldn't have to worry about it so that would be a useful you know if there was some connectivity in the background here between these appliances, which could happen if I was using

Samsung oven. It could have, and the Samsung fridge to do the recipe. It could have talked to each other. But it's a small thing at this stage. You know, changing the temperature isn't that hard. True. And I can do it from my app on the oven. But, you know, if we're trying to make the smart kitchen a more viable and appealing solution to people, those kind of small but sort of simple, steps, taking that out of our brains and having to worry about when we're cooking other things would help, I think. That's where it goes back to the question of like having your family cook with you, right? This is part of the problem with smart homes in general is you have to learn so many specific things about exactly how it works and what the name of that lamp is and how to

refer to your faucet. And it's like, you know what's great about a light switch is they look pretty much the same everywhere. And right? And it's like the thing on the oven that you turn to the right to turn the oven on is like pretty self-explanatory most of the time. And I feel like with a lot of this stuff, it's so handy but so non-obvious how it works that it's like you have to like build a manual for how to use your kitchen. Little things like the thermomix seem like they push in the right direction where it's just like here is a screen. Touch the screen. We'll figure this out together. But so much of this stuff is also like behind the scenes and opaque and just impossible to figure out. So if I like walked into your kitchen, I would not know how to do anything. Yeah, you would not know how to

turn the tap on. Which is a pretty important thing. My husband, when I was away a few weeks ago, was making something in the kitchen and I said, oh, we'll use a thermomix. And he's like, I have no idea how to use that. And it is a bit, as you mentioned, a bit more user-friendly than some devices. But yes, it's foreign, it's different. It's not what he's used to. That's a problem with too many of the gadgets. Like, Suvied is a big thing in the smart kitchen. I have not actually tried it myself, but there are, you know, when you try and sort of break the mold and come out with really new ways of doing things in the kitchen, or at least new for the residential kitchen, because it was obviously a big thing for commercial kitchens, that when it gets a little bit harder for

the average consumer to say, hey, yes, I definitely want this. The connectivity of devices in the kitchen right now still is a big question mark, like, why do I need to do that? I remember talking to some appliance manufacturers and they say, you know, 90% of their smart appliances never get connected to the internet, so no one's really using that. That might be slight overestimate, but it was like they rarely do, or if they do get connected, and then one day someone changes their Wi-Fi router, no one ever bothers to reconnect it, because they just haven't found the value. I think the most useful thing I have found out of connectivity was my LG dishwasher, about five years ago, stopped working, and I was able to hold up the phone to the device,

and it played a sound to the LG app which told the app what was wrong with the dishwasher and how I could fix it because it wasn't working. And that saved me a lot of money. That I like. That has got better.

This was a while ago. So now you can actually, you know, the app will do proper diagnosis for you. My fridge will diagnose itself. Actually, it did once when it wasn't working properly. And so when the repairman, because it did need to be repaired, when the repairman came here,

he knew exactly what he needed to bring, didn't have to come out twice. So that sort of support for appliances, that connectivity is a bonus because, you know, you save money, especially if you don't have to have a repairman come out. And I think that's the most compelling use case right now for regular consumers is if you connect it to the internet, we can tell you why it broke. That's pretty good. So here's the real question.

This is what it all boils down to. Does matter fix everything? Is matter going to solve everything for us? I'll tell you what matter will fix in my kitchen as the lights. Oh, okay. So we didn't go into this, but in terms of my family using my kitchen, the one sort of smart thing they have got used to is the lights, because I have a motion sensor that when you walk into the kitchen,

it'll turn the lights on. And if no one's been moving in the kitchen for a certain amount of time, they'll turn off, which is useful because it's an open plan kitchen and we have our living room right here. So when you're watching TV, you don't really want the kitchen lights on. But I also wanted nice lights. I did a big kitchen remodel a couple years ago. It was kind of my midlife crisis thing.

I didn't buy a corvette. I got a really fancy kitchen. That works. I didn't want like screwing light bulb. I wanted nice light fixtures. So I have like pendant lights and I have a few other kind of fancy light fixtures that aren't smart. So I needed to use smart switches from different brands. And getting them all to work with one motion sensor has been difficult.

I have done it, but it's been a bit of a work around. and it's not ideal and it often breaks. So this is the whole point of matter is a common language for all your devices. So I should have much and much faster responsiveness too. So occasionally you'll walk into the kitchen and it takes a couple beats before the lights turn on, which is very frustrating. You want it to be as fast, if not faster, than flipping the lights switch. I've been here too.

You know, everyone's very excited in this space about matter and kind of hyped up for it. But ultimately, it's a very simple solution to start with. And I think the easiest way to sum it up is that matter is going to make smart lights work as well as dumb lights do now. Okay. I mean, even that is a pretty high bar given kind of where we're coming from with a lot of this stuff. Yes. Like, you have to be better than light switches before any of this matters. And I think like it sounds very small, but I think that's like the real bar.

So if matter can get there, that feels like good news. That's the hope. My kitchen will be a good test for it once it finally gets here. Okay, we have tortured people enough. I'm starving. I'm going to go eat. Everyone else, I hope you have made it to wherever you're going for Thanksgiving by the time you have finished this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you have an awesome, awesome Thanksgiving, awesome Thanksgiving, awesome Thanksgiving, awesome Thanksgiving, everything on Theverge.com. You can also follow us on Twitter. Jen is JP2.com. and I'm Pierce. Who knows if Twitter will be here by the time Thanksgiving is over, but for now it's still around. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Norie Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Mentors is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, recipes, a long ride home. You can always email Vergecast at the verge.com. We'd love to hear from you.

And if you have questions, call the hotline. 866, Verge 11. Send us all your big thoughts. questions about all things tech. We're going to do a bunch of hotline stuff between now and the end of the year. So get your questions in now. We'll be off for the next week, but we'll be back Friday, December 2nd, to see whether Twitter still exists. Plus, cover some of the biggest news in tech. Have a great week. Rock and roll.