Co-founder/CTO here with a little backstory. Cinder (YC W’15) is like a countertop grill that controls temperature precisely to 2F across the entire cooking surface. I’m hoping this is exciting to HN because it’s not just a connected cooker— it means you can hack your food. With this accuracy, you can target specific kinds of chemical reactions, fine tune your preferences and when you come up with something amazing, send the cooking recipe and your friends can replicate it anywhere. I put a quick summary of some of these things at http://blog.cindercooks.com/cinder/2015/3/4/hot-tips.
Feel free to ask me any questions here about Cinder or the magic of cooking more generally.
Do you feel like you are competing with sous vide products like anova?
If so how do you justify the price difference?
I love the idea, but I just got an anova for ~200 and felt like that was just at the edge of a reasonable price for me. Not having to bring water up to temperature/have a giant pot sitting around would be nice, but just not sure if it is worth the extra 300.
EDIT: a tiny amount of reading later: I see that another advantage is that you can do both the low tempature 'sous vide' style work and then sear with the same machine. That is a nice value add.
I personally got an anova largely because of chefsteps. I would highly recommend sending them one if they will take it.
We are big fans of chefsteps. Imagine having sous vide precision up to 550 degrees F. Then you can set onions to brown and walk away. It's game changing. We built Cinder to be your go to daily cooker, both Jim and myself experienced decreasing use of sous vide over time.
My understanding is that they also have fine grained sensors/heating elements on the surfaces, kind of like "heat pixels." So you could potentially cook half the steak rare and half well done. OP can you comment? What is the resolution/configuration of your heating grid?
We will have one cooking temperature, but there are tricks to getting one steak rare and one medium. Other tricks to throwing in onions and mushrooms on the same device, for our advanced users.
Sounds like an interesting product (I am pretty fond of induction - but it lacks the smarts, so I could be swayed). I am curious about branding: to me, the connotations of 'cinder' are not positive when it comes to cooking, i.e. 'burnt to a cinder'. Did the name test well?
Thus far, it's been a lot easier to make people think of the positive connotation and ignore the negative than is generally thought. The name is intended to evoke low heat-- blow on a coal and it glows softly red, gently warming your food.
Induction is the best kind of burner for traditional cooking, but it's not capable of either the evenness or the accuracy required. Even a copper pan can have as much as a 30-50 degree differential across the surface, regardless of how you heat it. And medium rare is a 5 degree range, caramelization is just 8 degrees for that nice sweetness, and eggs change with literally every degree. So those degrees count.
> The name is intended to evoke low heat-- blow on a coal and it glows softly red, gently warming your food.
Hmm. Then I think I would've gone with "ember." Though I still like "cinder" well enough, despite its burnt connotations (and this: http://libcinder.org).
In any event, it looks like a really interesting product -- makes me think of a sous-vide-like approach, only brought to the surface of a pan. (Which, of course, is much more challenging, since you need to do more than simply hold a vat of water at a constant temperature.)
Naming is a balance of traits including availability, look, emotion, implication. And they change over time. Examples of names that are common now that seemed funny: Virgin, iPad, Gap. We really like cinder and the round logo built out of it, hope you will to.
As another datapoint from someone in your target market: cinder evokes burnt for me. Glowing coals aren't typically "gently" warm, for that matter (if I'm thinking charcoal or wood fire, I'm thinking awesome for cooking but high heat).
It could be cultural, I'm coming from an Australian perspective.
You guys mentioned having a test chef. Have you thought about reaching out to Kenji Alt? He writes a popular column for SeriousEats called FoodLab and evaluating a product like this would seem right up his alley.
I just did. He didn't try everything. For chicken breasts (or, better, duck breasts) you can brine with soy sauce, then slow cook, then sear, and the results are amazing.
And if you use a tenderizer before brining, it's even better. (Tenderizer: best $20 I ever spent).
No, not using induction, just traditional resistive heating plus materials, shape and heater design to get even heating.
Preventing overshoot is a matter of the control method. We have a model of the system and use a predictive control algorithm to cut off heating just when we need to in order to hit the target without overshoot.
So is that to say if you introduce something to the cooking element, like water, the temperature will be wrong because the water unexpectedly cooled the surface?
We raise the temperature back up as quickly as possible without overshooting in thst case. During low temp cooking, you really only care about the maximum temperature, so you don't care much, it just takes a little longer to finish. But during sear of a protein, you just drive the temperature high enough that any loss from adding food or water to the plate is acceptable.
Our sensor elements are accurate out of the box, so in theory we shouldn't have to. But I'll admit, for our beta units, we still are calibrating each unit, largely for our readout electronics. We'll either fix this in the production model, or we'll have a highly automated calibrator.
I try to eat as little solder as possible, even RoHS stuff :-) more seriously, getting a whole 10x10 plate to the same temp is trickier than just controlling a single point...
it would be good to get more technical specifics on the operation of your device
(1) how is contact between the grill and the food set? is it a single hinge? is the height adjustable?
(2) is air free to circulate on the sides of the food--is it a closed or open compartment?
(3) how does the power draw of your device compare to a sous vide machine at moderate to low temperatures, e.g. 135f for eight hours?
(4) what is the usable volume of the compartment?
I'm the mechanical engineer of the team, and thought I'd share some of the details of what we're working on.
Our current specification for the cooking volume is 10" x 10" x 2.5", enough space to comfortably fit two sizable steaks. Our cooker will have a single hinge, but the mechanism will keep the plates aligned in the XY plane at any distance within the cooking volume.
As far as contact with the grill and the food, the upper half will have an optimal amount of counter-balance. The key is to offset the weight of the upper half to prevent food from getting crushed/squeezed dry, but still have enough weight to ensure the upper plate still makes enough contact for heat to conduct into the food. We are also planning to have 2-axis tilt on our upper cook plate, which should allow for better contact with foods that aren't sliced parallel to the cook plates (such as chicken breast, fish, etc).
Our cooking volume has [removable] side walls surrounding the plates. While it does not form an air-tight seal, it does reduce the amount of convection from the surrounding environment that would normally reach the cook plates, thus greatly reducing heat leakage and also allowing our sensors to get a much more accurate picture of what's going on. (our CTO/control systems engineer @InternetofJim can speak more on that). From our tests so far, cooking at low temperatures (135F) uses relatively low levels of power, well below 100W.
Hope that answers some of your questions, and we welcome any thoughts/comments on our design!
Absolutely, it works beautifully from frozen. Incidentally, it's also great at rewarming, since many of the bad effects of reheating are from local overheating in a microwave or oven.
When it comes to searing a cooked steak, how fast will the heating element go from low even heating to searing temperature?
Also, please consider making all measures defaultable to standard metric measures. I have some appliances (e.g., the Polyscience Sous Vide Professional) that support metric measures, but where I have to choose it every time. Very annoying and seems to be not uncommon in stuff form the US.
We're shooting for around 4 minutes, but depends on our production heating plates, which will have better heat transfer than the beta units. Also a question of whether/how we take advantage of 20A kitchen circuits.
Internally, it's all metric, and we'll have that choice in the app.
trademarks are filed for specific classes of use, like "software" or "cooking appliances" and yes, they are harder to enforce than a created name such as Exxon or Accenture, but those take millions in marketing to create associations in peoples mind. Cinder already evokes a low, gentle heat, so you kind of get that we're a precision cooking appliance.
If anybody from the company is reading this, why an app? This seems like a new trend in cooking equipment and I fucking hate it. I don't want to have to flip between a half dozen apps just to make dinner. How hard is it really to put a small display and a handful of buttons on the appliance in question and make it usable without having to use my phone? Maybe I'm just strange but as much as I love the idea and really want one, the lack of a UI on the device itself is currently holding me back from ordering one. Call it the "Old Luddite retro model" and charge me $50 bucks extra if you have to, but give me an interface right on the device and I'll give you my credit card details.
There's only one version, and it has both an app and a an onboard UI based on a knob-button with an embedded dot matrix display. We're very conscious of the tradeoff between onboard and app controls.
The knob lets you have full manual control of temperature, but is not a good way to share recipes or learn how to cook something you don't do every day. So you want to make a quick panini or egg, the knob is great. On the other hand, we don't want to be like your microwave, with tons of features hidden behind scrolling text prompts and a keypad.
On the other hand, an app interface lets you have a different UI for each food type, so you can ask for a medium rare steak or light brown caramelized onions.
Once you've used the app to set things up, you'll be hands-on in the kitchen, so the next few steps can be controlled from the knob or the app.
Basically the same concept as the sous-vide (precision cooking) without the water bath, right? I like it a lot in theory because I cook several meals a week with sous vide and bet that Cinder will produce a slightly different cook with for the same time/temperature.
$500 is a tough sell though if you can get roughly the same thing with a sous vide for <$200.
Precision cooking is the same, but this goes way beyond sous vide, because we can go above boiling, which is where all the fun reactions happen.
Caramelization, browning, and similar reactions are what produce the really great, complex, flavors in the best food. It's not just about searing steak -- we can take apples and convert them into apple pie filling with no added sugar. We can make butternut squash sweet and eggplant creamy. We can perfectly brown cheese without burning it, so you can have a grilled cheese where the cheese inside is browned, like the stuff that sticks to the grill.
We have a test chef who is coming up with new ways to use this all the time, and we're going to share them through the app so everyone can play.
This definitely seems complementary to rather than a replacement for sous vide cooking (especially in terms of e.g. gelatinizing collagen in rare meat, since you'd get oxidative off-flavors over the duration necessary using your device).
I'd be very interested in hearing more comparisons between your device's caramelization abilities and e.g. pressure-cooker caramelization with or without added alkaline agents. My experiments doing temp-controlled caramelization in ambient air (rather than the hydrating environment of a pressure cooker) have had mixed results.
We really haven't noticed any significant oxidation over cook times of up to 4 hours; We have not yet tested something like a 72 hour recipe.
We do plan to have public demos from time to time (we've already done a few at various meetups and other events -- we're based here in SoMa). If you'd like, email info >>at<< cindercooks.com, and we can add you to our mailing list so you could be notified of these events.
Yes! The sooner you can upload some recipe ideas the quicker you'll pick up a pre-order from someone like me. Sous vide is a pretty popular concept right now- I'd hitch your product to "enhancing" its use (eg. Post and Pre sears). I'm incredibly curious in seeing the applications of this product.
Good suggestion. We plan to do that. There are already two early examples in our blog at blog.cindercooks.com: The grilled cheese grilled sandwich (the cheese is browned inside the sandwich) and an example of testing salmon recipes 4 different ways. But lots more to come...
Check out my blog post, which covers a bunch of this at http://blog.cindercooks.com/cinder/2015/3/4/hot-tips. We'll keep talking there about what we can do and soliciting ideas on new creative ways to use it.
Question on food safety:
What is the longest available cook time? I ask because in an aerobic environment an extended cook time is necessary at 135 degrees to achieve pasteurization. Even in sous vide, it is necessary to extend cook times to achieve sufficient pasteurization. With oxygen present I expect you could grow some very interesting cultures. Specifically in foods like ground beef, where there is no inhibiting the movement of bacteria from surface to center of the cut.
We've focused on your daily gourmet of 30 minutes or less, and we make sure to cook to safe temperature. Above 131F is considered outside of the bacterial growth zone (basically between fridge to 131F, bacteria multiplies like crazy); if you hold it, it will eventually pasteurize. A more insurmountable problem comes from anaerobic bacteria that can exist in a true vacuum, and the spores will survive high temperatures; we avoided that problem by not requiring a vacuum.
> Above 131F is considered outside of the bacterial growth zone (basically between fridge to 131F, bacteria multiplies like crazy); if you hold it, it will eventually pasteurize.
Most food safety sources I've seen cite 40-140 degrees Fahrenheit (or 5-60 degrees Celsius) as the "Danger Zone" in which foods should not be held.
It's a combination of temp & time -- 131F for four hours will pasteurize (and, conveniently, is below the coagulation temperature for both the white & yolk of eggs, so you can home-pasteurize eggs for mayo/etc with a water bath). Contrariwise, 140F wouldn't be safe if it only reached it for a few seconds.
yeah, the difference being the time...hence my original question. At 135 degrees you need at least 35 minutes of hold time once you have reached the target temperature.
correct. that's why it's beautiful to control the entire process with software -- we know your time/temp curve. And why the USDA still gives one temperature which assumes an instantaneous point of contact, but higher than you need if you can simply hold the temp. (As a heuristic, staying lower gives you better quality food.)
This looks great, and I'm willing to pay the $500, but there's no release date. If I'm am being charged immediately, you have to have a release date - or otherwise communicate how the pre-order period works.
You are correct, and to thank you for point this out I'd like to give you a Cappuccino Card (email me or hello@cindercooks.com with your Transaction ID and we'll give you $5 off). If you don't scroll the bottom of the page, you don't see "Shipping early 2016." So I have now updated the pre-order page with the expected shipping date.
We plan to ship in early 2016. We're doing everything we can to stay on schedule -- we have a pretty experienced team who's shipped products before, and are working with PCH, a company who specializes in manufacturing and logistics (they do all of Apples accessories and Beats, for example).
If you change your mind during the pre-order period, we will give you a refund if desired.
Nifty idea, but how durable will this thing be? At $500, it'd need to be able to cook several hundred meals before needing any expensive repair/replacement, else its market will likely be limited to those affluent enough to not care about the cost.
It's pretty, but there's nothing delicate about this cooker, and we plan to do a fairly extensive test program. We intend for this to be a real workhorse for cooks, usable several times per day for years.
In time they get scratched by forks, while putting in the washing mashine, by anything and when they are scratched the inner aluminum comes into the open and that's no good. Contacting with food while cooking might transfer the scratched aluminum into the food. Aluminum is outright dangerous for any living body.
Sure, but this is why I dont use metal in those pans, why they always get hand washed, etc. Care for and respect your tools and they last practically forever.
Well it's not me, the other households handle those parts carelessly and the aluminum is easly dented, scratched. But the point is, such parts should be made of anything else, such as copper, suitable type of iron, anything but aluminum. Also, considered in terms of value a $20 toast machine does have aluminum pressing plates, too.
Additional source: I know a lawyer that worked for DuPont. Their job was ensuring that DuPont would never be held accountable for problems caused by Teflon. That was enough evidence for me to throw away all of my teflon pans.
It mentions a connected app - will this need an internet connection, or can the app communicate locally, directly with the grill?
(If you are still deciding how to do it, then if it helps, I can tell you I absolutely never buy any device that requires an internet connection to perform functions that should be local.)
The article doesn't give a good indication of scale. Is this simmilar in size to a Forman grille? Also where do the juices and fats run off? Do they just collect on the cook surface?
Our device will have 10"x10" cook plates. perhaps our video will give a better sense for scale? https://vimeo.com/120412550
And as far as grease management goes, we will have drainage and trays that collect the run-off (similar to products on the market now). Happy to hear any suggestions or insights
Also worth mentioning is that there isn't a lot of juice running out of the food, because it generally stays inside. When you see a lot of liquid running out of meat, that's the taste running down the drain. Since I've started cooking on this, I've found that I do a lot less saucing, because the food itself is so much juicier and tastier.
I tasted a toast from a smart toaster a few weeks ago and it was the best toast I have ever tasted. Looking forward to taste more products from smart cooking tools.
So I am gonna say to the average person this looks like a george foreman grill with an app connected. Are we going to see a smart toaster? How about an app for the vitamix blender?
It cooks with heated plates, but it's an entirely different cooking process than something like Foreman-- more versatile, and with dramatically better results and enables new cooking techniques which can't be done reliably on any other device.
Feel free to ask me any questions here about Cinder or the magic of cooking more generally.