9 ms·
Mellow, the robotic sous-chef
- utopkara 12y agoGreat looking web site. Perfectly in tune with the product; at least that was my impression. I wish I could eat it.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoThank you! We have a great web designer, I'll pass it along.
- mapt 12y agoThe timed refrigerator -> cooking -> {refrigerator / warm} cycle alone makes this a really, really nice idea. The thin clear container and large volume of water is going to be a bit rough on power consumption for that use-case though.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- lupin_sansei 12y agoI don't think it can go back to refrigerator once it's cooked as it's too hard to recool that volume of warm water.
- mattmaroon 12y agoYou also have to do it very quickly due to anaerobic pathogens like Clostridium botulinum and Listeria monocytogenes. I don't think it's possible for something that fits comfortably in a kitchen and runs on a 120v line.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoToo true! The most we can do is auto-retrograde starches and cool baths that are cooking at 60C upwards down to 54C to a sort of "holding temperature". Very fun to play with.
- mattmaroon 12y agoThat's kind of neat that you can drop it down to a lower holding temp. I hadn't thought of that. I'd be curious to hear how different foods hold up in that case.
- anologwintermut 12y agoWhat if you flushed the container with cold water? Seems easy enough to rig it to a cold water line and have a hose going into the sink to dump the hot water.
- mattmaroon 12y agoI don't think cold water out of a tap is cold enough. I don't know the exact times, but it's generally recommended to use enough ice in ice water that it won't totally melt before the food gets below 40F. But you could do some sort of chilled reservoir. Then you're doubling the size though.
- anologwintermut 12y agoI figured it wasn't cold enough. The idea would be to dump the latent heat in the water. So at least you start from room temperature water and chill it from there. I'm guessing this still wouldn't get cold fast enough, but I don't know how fast "fast enough" is.
- mattmaroon 12y agoYeah, I wouldn't risk it. It's hard to get much cooling power within home kitchen constraints. Really kinda sucks. Douglas Baldwin has a little on it at http://www.douglasbaldwin.com/sous-vide.html http://www.douglasbaldwin.com/sous-vide.html You could probably find it from one of his sources if you cared enough. It made my brain hurt.
- DanBC 12y agoThis is really easy to experiment with. Hard boil a few eggs (using convetional boiling water in a pan) and then see how quickly you can cool that egg. They hold onto heat for a surprisingly long time.
- mapt 12y agoThat may be the case for some theoretical level of foodborne pathogen... but in reality we're all leaving our chinese food / pizza out until it gets cold on the counter, then putting it into the fridge and eating it a few days later for lunch. We're dumping hot soups into containers and putting them in the fridge. We're eating anything that doesn't have mold on it regardless of the sell-by-date. Cooking, I think I've managed to genuinely give myself food poisoning only once, trying to refrigerate a gallon and a half of chicken noodle soup. This happens far more often with takeout, an accepted cultural institution. If the water can be rapidly adjusted in temperature (through a cold water hookup or otherwise), this represents a major safety improvement in the production of the 'leftovers' genre of our cuisine over the status quo, as well as the few dishes we have that are cooked and eaten cold.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoHey mapt, The water bath's double-walled, so that power consumption isn't heinous. We're looking at nonofficial steady-state heat losses/gains of 15-30 Watt at the most common temperatures.
- mapt 12y agoFantastic. I do have a suggestion on the thermodynamically disfavored process of changing the water temperature rapidly though. Could you simply hook up one or two other reservoirs? Drain the 'cold' tank to one of those, preheat the other, then pump the other in and suddenly you're cooking. Or just accept hot/cold faucets with a once-through system for rapid changeovers, followed by precision temp control on recirculation.
- cylinder 12y agoLooks like a great improvement on the sous vide. Is there a prototype?
- timdiggerm 12y agoDid you watch the video?
- zemvpferreira 12y agoYes.
- alexnking 12y agoThis is exciting - I think the fact that it has cooling built in easily puts it apart from crock pots for convenience - allowing you to go from the fridge to the stove is really cool. Now I just have to resist getting a peltier module and making one of these before 2015...
- zemvpferreira 12y agoHey Alex, I'd encourage you to! Can I help in any way? (Mellow's designer)
- alexnking 12y agoThanks! I'll just try to be patient though :) Good luck with the product :D
- zemvpferreira 12y agoThank you. I'm already lucky, look at this page :D
- tptacek 12y ago$400 is relatively expensive. You can get a 1100 watt Polyscience circulator for that much. No circulator or water bath I know of requires vacuum sealers; all of them work fine with zips. Also, not to nitpick, but duck confit only takes 8 hours or so; it's one of the easiest things to do with a water bath. It looks neat, though. It'll be interesting to see if the cooling feature is useful, or more of a gimmick. That cooling system doesn't look powerful enough to chill down a low-temp cook (you're supposed to ice down anything you don't serve immediately); I assume you use it to delay the start of cooking?
- mattmaroon 12y agoIt specifically says in the FAQ that it can't do cook-chill. I was debating trying to work on one that could awhile back but man is it hard to get that kinda cooling power economically, at least given my cursory exploration. Also, I've never done duck confit sous vide. Maybe I'll try that next. I made some the good old fashioned way a couple months ago and wow.
- mattmaroon 12y agoMust have run into the guy who made it. Three innocuous comments downvoted at once :)
- zemvpferreira 12y agoNope, I'm up voting these, they're helpful. Yours, too.
- tptacek 12y agoLow-temp water baths are like duck confit dispensing machines. In particular, you can get by with much, much less fat. I'm not sure I understand the utility of being able to throw all the ingredients for my dishes into a water bath days ahead of time, since I need to bag the ingredients anyways; why not just keep them in the fridge and dunk them the morning of the cook? Also: it's a little misleading? to suggest that you'll be able to cook lots of different ingredients in a single bath, since the veg will need much higher cooking temps than the proteins. edit to tone down slightly
- andrewljohnson 12y agoFor some definition of robotic... I guess networked crockpot doesn't have the same ring.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoHey andrew, It fits! I think defining robot as an anthropomorphic thing that moves around is too constricting. Mellow is an electromechanical machine that performs complex actions, based on natural language requests, taking into account its environment and context. I think that's pretty robotic, but I welcome the debate. Didn't mean to be at all misleading, sorry if it seemed so.
- WiseWeasel 12y agoI expect a "robotic sous-chef" to clean and chop ingredients for me, then prepare the food. This is much better described as a smart sous-vide cooker.
- hanley 12y agoI clicked the link imaging a moving robot that chopped/prepped food. It was the sous-chef part that made me think that. I don't think I would have interpreted robotic sous-vide cooker the same way. That being said, I definitely think 'smart sous-vide cooker' is a better description and more useful tag-line.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoI understand that, and I'll admit I didn't mind the ambiguity when I was choosing headlines. Ultimately,what made me choose the "robotic" one was that we're not trying to build a smart sous-vide device, sous-vide is just technology. We're trying to build a quiet servant. And that won out.
- robotresearcher 12y agoI think people expect a robot to be able to move at least part of its body. South Africans excepted [1] [1] http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2378730 http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2378730
- GregorStocks 12y agoWhat's this cost? The pre-order button doesn't actually bring up a pre-order screen for me.
- smitec 12y ago$400 is what pops up in mine.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoCrap, that's happened for some people and we can't find out why. Could I ask you to try out the direct link? Sorry about that: https://www.trycelery.com/shop/mellow https://www.trycelery.com/shop/mellow
- pcl 12y agoHappened to me too, on Chrome 35.0.1916.47 beta. I've seen the same issue with other sites using Celery as well.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoSorry about that, I'm on Celery's case about it. hopefully they'll fix it soon enough.
- daffee 12y agoThis bug is not really one. At least not in my situation. I'm using Disconnect chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disconnect/jeoacafpbcihiomhlakheieifhpjdfeo https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disconnect/jeoacaf...) to block all sorts of tracking. When the website is whitelisted the pre-order screen works. Not tested, but I assume this could also happen with other ad-blockers.
- mattmaroon 12y agoI've been debating trying to make a sous vide machine that can chill and uses a smartphone/tablet for control for two years. I ultimately decided it just wasn't worth it because the only application I could think of for the chilling was egg poaching, and even sous vide I prefer to gradient poach rather than equilibrium. (75C for 12 mins gets a firmer white with a runny yolk than I could at equilibrium). But I can't wait to see what they and their community come up with. The UI on a smartphone at least has to be better than the current state of the art. And I'd love to hear how they're cooling the water.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoHey matt, I knew other smart people out there had the same idea, great to meet you. Mellow comes out of the frustrations of having the knowledge and equipment to cook great food, and never using it because of lack of energy. We started with the problem and ended up with this technology. Feel free to reach out to ze@fnvlabs.com, or even preorder a unit and join the gang. (shameless)
- mattmaroon 12y agoI will reach out! I really can't wait to see what sort of uses you come up with. Every now and then I get annoyed by a 36 hour cook, because I'm rarely awake 12 hours before dinner time. But I'm sure you guys will come up with better uses for the cooling than that even.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoI'm excited to ship units and what more creative cooks come up with, I'm boring, I only think about products these days.
- mattmaroon 12y agoYou might want to talk to professional chefs about a pro version. They'd love to not have to have someone come in at 6 a.m. to start a 12 hour cook for that night's service, at least the ones I talked to.
- jack-r-abbit 12y agoAlready posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622369 Edit: I always love when people get offended by facts.
- dang 12y agoWhen a story hasn't yet gotten significant attention, a small number of reposts (2 or 3) is ok. Otherwise, many more good stories would get lost to randomness and churn.
- jack-r-abbit 12y agoYes. And some times you guys merge them and the original submitter gets the credit. And some times you just kill the dupes. I was just pointing out that previous thread like so many people do every day here. I wasn't being a dick about it. No need to flog me for it. But what ever. HN has its finicky moments.
- dang 12y agoI certainly didn't mean to flog you! Was just trying to clarify what sorts of reposts we allow vs. kill as dupes. Merging wasn't an option in this case because the prior submission was too old to make the front page.
- jack-r-abbit 12y agoThnx. You were not the flogger. I was referring to the handfull of people that were so pissed about my post they needed to downvote it to nothingness.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoFounder/designer/actor here, glad to see HN pick Mellow up! I tried to post it myself to little success earlier. Let me know if I can clarify anything.
- Theodores 12y agoA small detail: Centigrade!!! Only old people and Americans use whatever that other temperature unit is, for the rest of us '195 F' means absolutely nothing. Is it what a warm day feels like in 1957? Or boiling water? Or just below the boil, a simmer? In your web page just put what the temperature is in normal Centigrade units underneath. We will then be able to relate to what it does properly - temperature is a huge thing in cooking as I am sure you know. I know you aren't selling to The Rest Of The World yet, but a lot of people from The Rest Of The World go to the United States and it is only a small amount of text that is asked for.
- jzig 12y agoI am curious since I have never cooked sous-vide. I see pieces of meat being cooked in the video, so does that mean I would have to come home and prepare the side dishes?
- tptacek 12y agoFor the most part, yes. Vegetable cookery tends to happen at temps north of 175, and protein cookery tends to happen at temps south of 140 or so, so you can't really use the same unattended water bath for both.
- zorpner 12y agoI typically do the veg in bulk for the week and ice bath->fridge them, then reheat in the water bath while I'm finishing the meat, but yeah, it wouldn't work to do simultaneously (unless you e.g. wanted traditional-texture braised meat, which works quite well in a veg-temp water bath).
- bsilvereagle 12y agoRelevant reddit discussion on r/hwstartups: http://www.reddit.com/23mshg/ http://www.reddit.com/23mshg/ tl;dr - Uses the Electric Imp platform for wireless communication - cannot be used without smartphone/tablet/computer/internet connection - heats in about 10 minutes - not to be used for cook -> chill
- zemvpferreira 12y agoWe also have a thread full of great questions on PH: http://www.producthunt.co/posts/mellow http://www.producthunt.co/posts/mellow
- rrhoover 12y agoBest Product Hunt AMA yet.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoThank you! Happy to field questions wherever I find a smart audience.
- joezydeco 12y ago10 years ago Whirlpool introduced the Polara, a range that could also refrigerate the oven cavity until a timer expired or it was commanded to cook over the internet. It was a huge flop. http://insights-2-ignite.com/2013/05/06/3-appliance-flops/ http://insights-2-ignite.com/2013/05/06/3-appliance-flops/ Obviously a refrigerated oven is a pretty complicated device - more than a cooled/heated water bath. The Polara had it's share of technical problems, but Whirlpool thought they were on to a new trend with this "smart" oven. I'm a sous-vide enthusiast myself (Dorkfood DSV FTW), but by no means do I consider SV cooking a time saver. It's not going to make my day any more easy by kicking off a cook cycle from the office before I head home. In fact, part of the point of SV prep is that you can hold the cooked food for hours before finishing. Why do I need to precisely time the start if the end doesn't matter? Okay, perhaps eggs ready when I wake would be nice. But I could also kick it off before I go to bed and they would still be at a creamy 144F when morning comes. The other problem is that you still need to prep ahead of time. Is a busy family going to handle breakfast and dinner prep before going off to work and school? American families barely make it through breakfast as it is. It's a nice looking product and I wish them well. But the use cases escape me a little.
- tptacek 12y agoBeing able to come home from work with a protein ready to sear (Polyscience and hopefully soon Searzall represent) is definitely helpful. Also, have you held an egg overnight at 144f? That works well?
- joezydeco 12y agoYeah, bad example. Eggs may not work that well at that duration. (and the Searzall is pretty damn sexy)
- zemvpferreira 12y agoProteins aside, auto retrograding potatoes is really nice. It's one of those techniques that makes a huge difference, but you'd never use on a regular day.
- chadwickthebold 12y agoIs it just me or are a lot of the comments on this post getting greyed out? I thought that was only for flagged/sufficiently downvoted comments? What the heck is going on here..
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jadence 12y agoWhat temperature-safe bags are out there? I did some digging into this a few months ago and couldn't find anything conclusive. All I found were blogs, quotes, etc by wannabe scientists. Of note: • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222987/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222987/ Nearly all plastics (even the BPA-free ones) leach estrogenic activity chemicals • http://pprc.org/index.php/2013/networking/p2-rapid/do-plastic-chemicals-leach-into-food-from-sous-vide-sv-cooking/ http://pprc.org/index.php/2013/networking/p2-rapid/do-plasti... Basically said that there is little evidence in either direction • http://www.codlo.com/faq.html#.Ux5Ly-ddWlg http://www.codlo.com/faq.html#.Ux5Ly-ddWlg and http://www.chow.com/food-news/107898/cooking-sous-vide-in-plasticis-it-safe/ http://www.chow.com/food-news/107898/cooking-sous-vide-in-pl... and http://www.sfgate.com/food/article/Author-says-use-of-plastic-for-sous-vide-is-safe-2371038.php http://www.sfgate.com/food/article/Author-says-use-of-plasti... Says that bags made from polyethylene (PE) are safe while bags made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) are not. • http://www.beyondsalmon.com/2010/08/cooking-in-plastic-how-safe-is-it.html http://www.beyondsalmon.com/2010/08/cooking-in-plastic-how-s... SC Johnson (Ziplock manufacturer) themselves do not recommend cooking w/ their bags. Note their bags are made w/ the supposedly safe (per the links in the previous bullet) polyethylene (PE) Right now I'm very intrigued by sous-vide but am too paranoid about the plastics to make the jump.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoHey jadence, The bottom line: No one knows how safe HDPE sous-vide is in the long run. There's nothing conclusive out there, though what little evidence there is points to it being safe. Nathan seems so think so, too: http://modernistcuisine.com/2013/01/why-cook-sous-vide/ http://modernistcuisine.com/2013/01/why-cook-sous-vide/ In the end you have to make a personal call. For me, the risk of undiscovered effects is vastly outweighed by the awesome food I serve. I respect your concern, even if I don't share it, and I'm hoping to solve it soon enough, too. Be on the look out for a new product from us in the coming year.
- timtadh 12y agoI don't know a lot about sous-vide, I am more of a wood fire and smoking kinda person, but what would prevent you from using a stainless steel canister? That would eliminate the risks from plastic. Perhaps, a ceramic would also work?
- softbuilder 12y agoThis is basically a Mr. Coffee.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoPretty much. The video was a trip to walmart + a quick 3-d printed cover.
- dftf 12y agoSurprised not to see any positive comments here – this is exciting stuff. The IoT should be changing the kitchen faster than any other room in the house (it's the room with the most gadgets to begin with, with the potential for the most time savings / life improvements). There's not a lot of serious projects in the kitchen yet, and there should be so many more!
- zemvpferreira 12y agoThank you dftf. I blame twitter-fridge and the stupidity of most kitchen gadgets for numbing people to the power of well-designed products in the kitchen. Most of the groundbreaking stuff has been with us so long that it's become invisible. Who really appreciates have access to cold storage these days?
- johnurbanik 12y agoAdmittedly, I don't know much about state of the art sous-vide, but I'd be really interested to see a device with two reservoirs that can be held at different temperatures and fill/drain the main water bath. Hypothetically, this would allow for cook->chill methods, though the overhead may not be worth it except for a small niche of customers.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoWe actually played around with that idea a year ago at the insistence of a local VC. Result: wasted a week.
- bullfight 12y agoI think this is the first internet connected kitchen device that I have seen actually make it's use case for having an app or being connected. I'm really impressed and while not having any prior experience with sous-vide I can really see making it part of my cooking process.
- dang 12y agoAll: For some reason, more than one user went through this thread downvoting everything. Abuses like that cause accounts to lose voting privileges. When you notice substantive and civil comments which have been unfairly faded out by downvotes, please give them a corrective upvote. This doesn't mean you agree with the comment, only that it didn't deserve to be faded. Usually, one or two upvotes is all it takes to get back to par, so each user can make a big difference here. For example, all of the abusively downvoted comments in this thread have now been restored by corrective upvotes. (I just contributed a few, but most were already there.) HN has long had this self-correcting mechanism, but it's more important since we recently made some downvotes more powerful (cf. sama's recent post about this), so we're asking everyone to do it consciously when they see a need.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoI'm sorry to hear that, dang. If you think my presence here is harming more than helping, I'd be happy to stop posting.
- dang 12y agoBy no means! You're doing great.
- brianbreslin 12y agoShouldn't the title be renamed a bit. I was expecting a rosie the robot type sous-chef robot. This is a smart sous-vide appliance, not a "robot" in the traditional sense.
- nirnira 12y agoThis is pretty much the anti-Soylent. Nice to see thinking on efficiency gains happening at both ends of the spectrum.
- alexhutcheson 12y agoThis looks really cool! I've been interested in getting into sous-vide for a while, but I'm not sure where to start. Could anyone point me to some introductory resources? (websites, maybe cookbooks?) I'm interested in learning the difference between different equipment setups, and also understanding what works well for sous-vide and what doesn't.
- Tyr42 12y agoI enjoyed the sous-vide section of Cooking for Geeks, (and the rest of the book is great too!) That's enough to get started.
- alexhutcheson 12y agoThanks! I'll check it out.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoI'd start by trying it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYGYyZcm6kE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYGYyZcm6kE
- ebiester 12y agoSo, I notice that it's quite possible to set on autopilot, but is there an option to have more control, in the case of recipes we find separately? Is there some sort of way to know if the power went off? If so, does it check the temperature to see if it was just a surge or if it went into the danger zone? I'm trying to reduce the amount of meat in my diet, personally, and most applications seem to be for meats. Are there significant advantages to getting one for anything short of slow carmelized onions and a few soups?
- zemvpferreira 12y agoYes, yes, and yes. It's worth it for what it does to fish and seafood alone. You're right though, meats have traditionally been the main focus in sous-vide, but it's by no means limited to them. Pears are amazing, eggs too. Risotto, potatoes, and carrots are insane.
- eric_the_read 12y agoI have to say, this product sounds pretty cool, but for myself, I got really excited about sous vide, even made my own immersion circulator from Scott Heimendinger's plans a few months ago, but when I fried two aquarium pumps due to long times at high temps, I knew I had to get a commercial model. I ended up ordering an Anova, and at $200, it's just at the high end of what I feel I can afford. A $400 machine could easily be twice as good, and I'm still not sure I could convince myself to part with that much. In addition, the new crop of immersion circulators (Anova, Sansaire, etc.) don't need very much space- they just clamp to an existing pot or whatever. It seems to me the Mellow has a very hard fight for precious counter space on top of the price.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoWe're designing Mellow to be used every single day, and optimising for that means a constant presence on your countertop. Our idea is that instead of making sous-vide as cheap and simple as possible, we want to make it as useful and effortless as possible. I hope there's room for both types of product.
- eric_the_read 12y agoI hope you're right. Good luck!
- satiani 12y agoYour payment form is not secure, even though it makes a submission over SSL, the fact that it is hosted on a non-SSL page exposes it to Man in the Middle attacks. An attacker may, for example, change the iframe URL to something controlled by the attacker but looks like the payment form on your site, and trick users into giving them their credit card details. The fix is simple, make your whole site https and redirect all http traffic over to https. There are cheap SSL certificates out there (as low as $99 a year) and its pretty easy to setup.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoForwarding this to our web guy right now, thank you.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoHappy to say we should be fully secure now, all the traffic is going through SSL-hosted pages. I can't thank you enough for bringing this to our attention. Could I ask you one more favor? Would you check to see if we're as safe as possible now?
- shalmanese 12y agoAny plans to open the device up to API access? I know a lot of cheese makers who need a specific series of heating steps and it's currently a major pain in the ass with available SV setups as it all has to be done manually. A way to program it in would be awesome.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoIt's a definite possibility, but we're 100% focused on delivering the feature-set we promised before.
- prawn 12y agoAs an owner of a $2k+ Thermomix (which can do sous-vide in a very confined and limited fashion) this interests me and $400 doesn't seem outrageous if it can become a regular tool in the kitchen. I do wonder how much is covered by a slow-cooker though. Going on the TM, my concerns would be cleaning (doesn't seem like a big issue) and how much of a meal it can actually do. With the Thermomix, we found it went from gimmick to regularly used device quickly enough - marinades, sauces, pureed baby food, mashed potato, etc. Besides weigh, heat, blend, etc it can also work to a set temperature (though with broader increments) and I eventually tried some steak sous-vide. Vacuum sealed bag, into the basket (to prevent the blades from rupturing the bag) and away it went. It worked OK though the steak obviously needed to be seared at the end. That left me rinsing the TM and still having to wash the pan/griddle, etc. If you still need to prepare/cook your sides, I wonder how much time has truly been saved? I've had reasonable success with the slow-cooker too: one-pot dish so cleaning is easy, sides aren't much of an issue, etc. I imagine that the value in Mellow will come once the community strengthens and people work out a set of go-to recipes that minimise other mess and prep.
- zemvpferreira 12y agoWe've learned a lot from using TM ourselves. I'd encourage to try cooking proper sous-vide somehow; the TM version doesn't do it much justice. The temperature control just isn't there. You're right that a lot of the value in Mellow is going to come from the community, but it's already massively nice to have a device cook your ingredients to their peak before you step in and finish the process. You're going to have to cook, and we wouldn't have it any other way.
- roeme 12y agoThe first thing that sprung into my mind: That thing will be a bloody mess to clean. There's a reason why most kitchen appliances aren't rectangular and don't sport a lot of grilles, if any. And it will have to be cleaned at some point, like anything in a kitchen (or closed rooms, for that matter). Rectangular fluid containers are the worst. (Other than that, seems to be a fine idea).
- zemvpferreira 12y agoWe're expecting cleanup to be very easy; mostly a wipe-down every once in a while. But you're right of course, kitchens are messy places and we certainly took that into consideration. The grille is entirely necessary for Mellow to function.